Alison Morton's Blog

HEROICA has a strange origin. Revolution?, the first part, started as a little story I wanted to write for myself – an indulgence. Then it grew and grew. The heroine, Carina, goes off piste as usual (see the first four Roma Nova thrillers!) and her investigation became ever more complicated and the ‘short story’ became a much longer one, almost a novella. Then I thought up a twist in the tail. There’s always a price to pay and/or a secret to uncover in Roma Nova stories!

Throughout the series, t...

Armed Amazon, her shield decorates a Gorgon head; Tondo of Attic red-figure kylix, c. 500 BCE, Staatliche Antikensammlungen, Berlin (Public domain)

The Amazons stride through ancient myth with spears, bows, and a reputation that unsettled the ancient world. These warrior women, said to live beyond the edges of the known Greek world near the Black Sea, were described as superb horse-archers, fiercely independent, and stubbornly resistant to male control.

Whether they really existed as a distinct ...

‘The Monstrous Regiment of Women’

Wikipedia defines women’s history as follows, ‘Women’s history is the study of the role that women have played in history, together with the methods needed to study women. It includes the study of the history of the growth of woman’s rights throughout recorded history, the examination of individual women of historical significance, and the effect that historical events have had on women.

Inherent in the study of women’s history is the belief that more tradition...

International Women’s Day is a moment to celebrate women’s achievements, recognise the struggles that shaped them and look ahead to the work still to be done.

Across the world, some women have stepped into leadership, challenged expectations and reshaped societies.

Stories remain one of the most powerful ways to explore what courage, resilience and ambition could look like in practice.

This is one reason the world of the Roma Nova series resonates with readers. It imagines a society founded by R...

Caius Tellus

The morning after the power grab by Caius Tellus on the night of fires in INSURRECTIO, people woke to find the proclamation below.  The new regime had pinned it on noticeboards, on the doors of public buildings and in the forum in Roma Nova city.

By order of First Consul Caius Tellus
Due to the national crisis, the provisional government will apply the following emergency orders for the next 30 days.

Salvete!

Fear not, I’m not going to write this post all in Latin, but I thought I’d make a glossary of words used in the Roma Nova novels. Some are Latin, some derived from Roman customs or functions.

You’ll only find them sprinkled here and there in the books, something novelists do to add authenticity or atmosphere. But we must think about how to get the meaning across without a clumsy explanation. That’s part of the author’s job! It’s a fine line how much to include, though as writers can be...

Roaman road near Ambrussum, southern Gaul

Scientific journal Nature has just published a high-resolution dataset of roads of the Roman Empire by an international group of academics that suggests a much more extensive Road network than we could have imagined.

The new map – an online database called Itiner-e – has been compiled from a number of different sources, including earlier databases, satellite images and archaeological reports.

It reveals the full extent of the road network as it was in th...

Earlier in June, I waxed lyrical about Dresden in southeast Germany which was the scene for several chapters in my latest thriller Double Stakes. Never having been there, I had written heroine Mel and hero Jeff’s scenes using Google Maps.

What a shocking admission!

Moving a character through a place needs a lot of research and it’s a good thing I’m a map enthusiast (read: obsessive). So it worked. I suppose that at this stage I should also admit I did the same for INCEPTIO and New York City. Bu...

Summing up a 100,000 word book in a few words for a retailer page or the back of a book cover is a mammoth task – a labour of Hercules. But when somebody asks for six striking sentences, that’s on another level altogether. Here’s what I came up with for some of the Roma Nova stories:

Logline :
A 21st century young New Yorker hunted by a killer flees to the last province of the Roman Empire in Europe. But the killer follows…

Six striking sentences:

1. Above a smiling mouth and a straigh...

The Roman Empire in 395 at the death of Theodosius (Map:  Geuiwogbil at the English Wikipedia)

In 1984, a German academic, Alexander Demandt, published a book, Der Fall Roms, and he listed 210 reasons for the fall of Rome in the West.

Barbarians inside and outside the empire,  Christianity, loss of territory with resulting loss of revenue and resources, agricultural and social impoverishment, flagging military forces, new peoples rising and banding together, distancing from the centre and worst ...