Rome: The Coming of the King by MC Scott

Today May 12, 2011 Rome: The Coming of the King by M. C. Scott was released. We asked her to be a guest blogger to learn more about her work.

In a fair world, as a woman, I’d be writing the coming of the queen and it would be every bit as erotic as it sounds. But then, in an ideal world, I’d be able to keep my full name and not end up de-gendered on the altar of sales.

For those of you who don’t know me, I’m Manda Scott.  Under that name, I wrote a trilogy of contemporary crime thillers in the late 90s, the first of which, Hen’s Teeth, was shortlisted for the 97 Orange Prize. I was a full time veterinary anaesthetist at the time and had never heard of the Orange Prize before the long list was announced.  I find that hard to believe, looking back, but I was working a 7 day week and usually a 14 hour day in the clinical wards of Cambridge Vet School and if it didn’t have a blood pressure reading attached to it, I generally didn’t know it existed.

Except that I wanted not to be reading pulse outputs for the rest of my life and I had always wanted to write and I had this strange idea that I could do both together. And I did.  I can’t remember how because the workload was pretty much identical to any doctor in a human hospital, but Hen’s Teeth hit the markets and… no, I didn’t give the day job up over night, much to my surprise and, to an extent, dismay.

That took another 4 years and four more books; two more in the first series and a stand-alone that was short listed for the Edgar Award for best crime thriller in the US. I was working part time by then and a lot wiser to the ways of publishing and I got myself over to the US for the award ceremony and generally made the most of it.

That was supposed to be the breakout novel; the one that makes it big – and it certainly sold by the shed load here and abroad.  Everyone was hanging on for the sequel when I had a kind of inverse epiphany (long story, to do with a hare and a vision quest and details of shamanic practice that are beyond the scope of this article) and it was apparent to me if to nobody else that I needed instead, to write a series on the life of Boudica – the war leader of the Eceni who led her people in rebellion against the Roman occupation of 61 AD (and yes, I did spell all of that right. It’s the rest of the world who gets it wrong. Trust me, I spent 6 years in the guts of this and I can produce the references if it’s essential, tho’ I’d rather not; it was 10 years ago)

And so the entire Boudica: Dreaming series came out – still under the name Manda Scott although with a new publisher because changing genres is not considered possible in publishing, so you have to find someone with vision who doesn’t mind.  These days, when everyone’s doing a ‘rabbit in the headlights’ act at the sight of the oncoming e-world, life is more flexible, but back at the turn of the millennium when broadband was an group of girl singers from Australia, and e-books were things read by actuaries  – and printed on paper – life was more certain.  Still, we sold in 18 translations in 23 countries and I still get strange copies through the post  – the Chech versions of ‘Dreaming the Serpent Spear’ arrived yesterday. I have no idea what to do with them, but if anyone reads Czech, do let me know…

And then we move on to the new series (with a blip for The Crystal Skull, which is another topic for another day).  Rome: The Emperor’s Spy was going to be a book about a fire – the fire of Rome, to be exact.  Because the fire happened 2 years after the end of the Boudican revolt and I wanted to follow some of the surviving characters; you can’t live with people for 6 years and not want them to keep going.  I thought if I couldn’t write a thriller about a fire, I ought to give up, but then… it’s not just a fire, someone started that fire, and it seemed, after many months of research that the most likely person was the one we know of as Paul. Or St Paul to those who deal in saints. 
The details of why are on my website, or in the book and that’s way, way too long to go into here – but what we ended up with was a spy thriller; faster, sharper, harder than the Boudica books. The characters still live and breathe and feel and love – what else drives us to what we do but the twin pulls of fear and love? – and as a woman, the feel of a thing is always more important than the clashing swords and shouting and ready presence of easy sex that seems to permeate so many historical novels written today  But still, The Powers that Be are noticing that most of my sales are to women and they think we need more balance.

So over night, I go from being Manda Scott, to MC Scott.  Which I have to say, does feel very different.  Do I write differently? I doubt it – I don’t think Emperor’s Spy is significantly different in tone and feel to ‘Rome: The Coming of the King’ which launches today and was written after the Great DeGendering – I think the latter is a better book but if I didn’t think that, by and large, I write a better book each time, I’d have to give up and go back to the day job, where I was ‘Whatever-you-do-don’t-let-the-queen’s-horse-die’ or ‘The anaesthetist’ or anything else that came to hand and nobody looked much behind the theatre mask to see who was doing what as long as the patient lived to come off the table.

Truly, I love what I’m doing and don’t want to go back. So I’ll stay as MC Scott – because women don’t choose their books on the basis of the gender of the author – unless it’s women’s romance, where the few male writers take women’s names – and I’m not selling to men or women, I’m selling to people who read books that make their hearts sing and open the doors of their minds, and let light into places that nobody thought of illuminating before.  That’s the point of writing history.  What other could there be?

(For those who’ve got this far and are desperate to know what the new one’s about – it’s another spy thriller, this one centering on the assault on Masada that happened *before* the famous one in which the Romans took 3 years to take the rock and had to build a ramp up the side to get to it.  Before that, one of the most charismatic and gifted war leaders of all time found a way to get his army onto a defended, impregnable rock in the middle of nowhere, defeated the garrison on top of it, armed his followers and subsequently routed the Romans from his city.  His name was Menachem, grandson of Judas of the Sicarioi and he rode into Jerusalem on the back of an ass (rightly) proclaiming himself the first king of Israel in 3 centuries)

______________________________________

Find me on my own website at: www.mcscott.co.uk

on my blog at: wordpress.mcscott.co.uk, on Facebook and on Twitter

 

Tags: Women's Historical writing

Category: British Women Writers, Women Writing Fiction