I am trying something I’ve never tried before – to write a historical novel. It didn’t start that way. At first I was going to write a spy novel but ended up in Baltimore, 1805, and somehow that morphed into Scotland or, as it was called by the Romans at that time, Caledonia. It is unknown for certain what the people called themselves, but the term people use today is Picts. I KNOW the rumors about the origin of the name, but evidence is scarce, so I am not going to repeat it.
What intrigued me about the Picts is their art. They had no written language and they lived in the Highlands of Scotland and thereabouts which apparently has soil not conducive to well-preserved archeological finds, but they did leave behind hundreds of stones with very intriguing carvings of animals and items that people still don’t understand. After spending a couple of weeks trying to interpret what hundreds of others have spent years to do, I decided to get to work on my first draft and see what happens.
I’m trying to make the book as historically accurate as possible, but it’s going to be difficult because so little is known for certain. On the plus side, this leaves a lot of room for creativity. Every time I look up something I imagine explaining to someone why I chose to implement it in my story the way I did. I’m starting this blog both as a record for myself and in case someone else wants to learn about the Picts.
Related posts
Leave a Reply