Saying Goodbye to Titus Pullus

November 30, 2013 by 5 Comments

Now that I’ve just released the last installment of Titus Pullus’ story, Marching With Caesar®-Final Campaign, I can talk about what turned out to be a very difficult process that I know other authors have gone through, saying goodbye to a beloved character.

Titus Pullus, Main Character of The Marching With Caesar Book SeriesIn my case, whenever I would read accounts by other authors about how difficult it proved to write the words that created the final scenes of a character with whom they had become attached, I would give a dismissive snort.

“There’s no way that would happen to me; I know they’re figments of my imagination that I created. I brought ’em to life, I can take ’em out just as easily.”

All I can say in my defense is that I honestly believed that at the time. And I told myself that the only reason I hadn’t actually finished Titus’ story, back in early 2012, was because I had decided to go ahead and self-publish what is now Marching With Caesar®-Conquest of Gaul. And since I had actually written Titus’ story all the way to the walls of Siscia, on the campaign led my Marcus Primus, I knew I had quite a bit of time before I had to finish it.

I continued to tell myself that, all the way through 2012 and into 2013. Once I realized that what I had originally planned as just the third volume would become the third and the fourth, it gave me the perfect excuse to put it off even longer. Marching With Caesar®-Antony and Cleopatra: Part I-Antony and Marching With Caesar®-Antony and Cleopatra: Part II-Cleopatra came out before I finally decided that it was time to finish Titus’ story.

And a funny thing happened; at first, there wasn’t any problem, the words flowing from my mind to my fingers as quickly and easily as they always have. Now that I’ve become a semi-successful author, one of the aspects of life that come with that is one that I still am struggling with, and that’s the fact that there are people who are actually interested in my “writing process”. While I find it flattering that people are interested, I find it very difficult to explain and on those rare occasions when I do talk about it, usually to other aspiring authors, all I can say is, “I have no idea how it happens.” Most of the “writing” occurs in my head, before I ever sit down, so that when I do grab my laptop it’s more a matter of taking dictation than creation. The hardest part is in having my fingers keep up with the words flowing from my brain, and that was the case as I began the final part of Titus’ story.

But then I began slowing down, and it seemed my fingers and brain had entered into some sort of conspiracy against their owner. I knew what I wanted to write; I could see the words strung together just like always, but I would find myself, computer in my lap, staring off into space. I had begun thinking, not about Titus’ story, but all that Titus had meant to my life.

When I started Titus’ story I was still gainfully employed; now, I am once more gainfully employed, but the difference in my circumstances is so vastly different it’s hard for me to fathom. I hated not just my job, but my life in general, because I had, stealing a phrase from back in the day “clawed my way to middle management”, where I was a VP of a small software company. To an outside observer, I had absolutely nothing to complain about; a six-figure income and lifestyle to match it, something that I was, and am acutely aware many people would kill to have. But what they didn’t see was the cost associated with that job; the 70 hour weeks, the fact that I literally slept with my Blackberry under my pillow because as is so common in the software industry, a lot of our development process was farmed out to India, which meant that I had several midnight (and later) conference calls a week. Even so, to me personally that wasn’t the highest price this “dream job” charged me, since I’ve always been something of a workaholic. No, it was the frustration that came from watching the leadership of this company make one bad decision after another, putting this company on a flight path that only had one ending, the crash and burn that was so common in the closing years of the first decade of this century for so many companies of all sizes.

So when the inevitable did happen, and my boss interrupted my post-Christmas celebration by flying down from New York, first class of course, just for the express purpose to let me know that in their last-ditch attempt to stave off the inevitable and buy themselves more time, while he looked for a miracle, that I was expendable, I was not happy. However, it wasn’t about losing my job, it was the fact that he had insisted that I cancel my plans for a last lunch with my daughter and son-in-law before they returned to their home in London, just so he could fire me.

And while I didn’t know it at the time, Titus would save me from a repeat performance of a scene like that at some point in my future. Because of Titus, I have embarked on a fourth career, and have experienced a kind of success that, again, the vast majority of people who have chosen this path of the indie author would love to have. I will never again be subject to the whims of an armchair expert whose ability to schmooze and the fact that he read a book on how to run a software company put him in charge of not just my future, but all the other unfortunates chained to that particular company. That’s a kind of freedom for which there is no price tag.

That’s one reason I couldn’t seem to finish Titus’ story, why he lingered in this kind of space of indecision and reluctance, because I realized that no ending I crafted could ever do justice to him or express the gratitude I feel towards him. What Titus represents for me is so powerful and so meaningful that I would love to suspend all sense of reality and make him immortal, but I have resisted that urge. And contrary to my public statements about my reasons for doing so, the reason I now have a full-color recreation of Titus on my chest (which was extraordinarily painful I must say), taken from Marina Shipova’s stunning rendition that served as the first cover is because no matter what I do after this, no matter how many characters I create, Titus Pullus will always be the one who gave me my freedom to put in 70 hours a week at my job…and love every minute of it. And making even more than I did the last time I put in those kinds of hours ain’t bad either.

My hope is that the ending I finally did craft for Titus does justice to his character while staying faithful to what became a very important underlying theme, one from my own experiences, about the cost of ambition. Titus Pullus deserves no less from me.

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Reflections of Rome

October 27, 2013 by Leave a Comment
Mountains of Dalmatia

Mountains of Dalmatia

Now that I’ve been back a whole week (gasp) from my extended trip through the wild country of what the Romans called Pannonia, Dacia, Dalmatia, Thrace, and Illyricum, along with a week in Rome, I’m still sorting through the thousands of images I took of the land and the sights.

So I thought I would record some of my impressions, particularly as they pertain to what’s coming up, not only for Gaius Porcinus and the next generation of the Marching With Caesar® series, but for the last part of Titus’ story, coming in November.

That book, Marching With Caesar®-Final Campaign, opens in modern-day Sisak, or Siscia, which is just 60 kilometers south of Zagreb. I regret to say that, although I was on a bus that took the southern ring road around Zagreb, that’s as close as I got to Sisak. I investigated the possibility of making a side trip to the town, but distances in that part of the world are deceiving; what is only a distance of 50 kilometers could take more than an hour to cover, even today.

Aquincum, more commonly known as Budapest, were the first Roman ruins that I encountered on this trip, and the civilian town is the part that is preserved and is open to the public. They were a tasty appetizer, but for a Romanophile like me, they did little more than whet the taste buds for more!

I was on an organized, Rick Steves tour for part of the trip, so I didn’t have a whole lot of latitude to go off exploring. We spent a night in Eger, Hungary, which from my calculations and with the help of the Barrington Atlas, was just a bit north of the eastern limes (of which Aquincum was a part) out on the great Hungarian Plain. But we were moving west; from Budapest we drove into Croatia, crossing the border at Gorican, and with every kilometer the country grew more rugged.

Bombed Out Building-Karlovace

Bombed Out Building – Karlovace

Driving southwest, deeper into Croatia, in the direction of the Plitzvice National Park, which is a UNESCO World Heritage Site because it is the first national park in Europe, I started to appreciate the ground. Speaking from a purely military point of view, it’s easy to see why people have been rebelling in this part of the world until as recently as 1995. In fact, I was “lucky” enough to experience Croatian Independence Day, in the tiny town of Rab, Croatia, on the island of the same name. (Here’s a note: Rab Island is a charming, lovely place. But you do NOT want to get stuck there when everything, and I mean EVERYTHING is closed) The land itself is made for an insurgency, and that holds as true for the days when men like Gaius Porcinus fought for Rome as it does today. Pocket valleys, steeply sloped ridges covered with fir trees, blind draws, all of these are perfect for a poorly equipped but highly motivated force to bring a better-trained, better-equipped force to a grinding halt. One thing I noted with interest; although the slopes and valleys are heavily forested, there isn’t very much undergrowth and shrubbery. In contrast to where I’m from, the Big Thicket of Texas is almost impenetrable because of the heavy undergrowth, but that’s not the case in Croatia, or at least the part that I saw. That means that, aside from the challenges posed by the sloping terrain, a lightly armed and mobile force can move fairly quickly from one point to another, while a more heavily equipped combatant, slowed by impediments like baggage trains will struggle with the land.

Karlovace Memorial

Homemade APC

As I sat on the bus, watching the landscape slide by, aside from the temperature and the vegetation, it reminded me a great deal of the terrain of another place where men are trying to root out an entrenched insurgency, valley by valley and ridge by ridge. Because of its climate and elevation, Afghanistan is more inhospitable in terms of an environment, but mountains are mountains. And the mountains of Croatia, or Dalmatia as it was called back in the day, make this part of the world extremely rugged, and a nightmare to take and hold. Along the way to Plitzvice, in Karlovac, there is a roadside memorial containing a number of relic weapons. Included are a T-55 tank, an old WWII Sherman, and a couple of very interesting homemade APC’s, one of them based on a tractor. Surrounding the memorial are buildings that have been left in their wartime state, bombed out hulks complete with bullet holes, and across the road is a simple memorial, with all the names of the men and women of Karlovace who lost their lives in what is widely acknowledged to be one of the nastiest wars of the 20th century, which is saying something. In fact, the countryside is dotted with structures that haven’t been rebuilt, and as far as I could tell, there doesn’t seem to be any real rhyme or reason to what got rebuilt and what didn’t. There would be a row of prosperous-looking homes and small farms, flashing by in a blur through the bus window. Then suddenly there would be a blackened, burned-out hulk sliding by my window seat, the roof caved in and rubble strewn about, only to be replaced just as quickly by buildings that have been repaired and renovated. Compounding the mood, we had left the brilliant blue skies behind in Budapest, and would be more or less in the wet for the rest of the trip, still another week.

Which brings me to the other realization that hit me on this trip. For some time I’ve been really curious as to why the Roman campaign season traditionally ended at the end of September (and yes, I know there were exceptions to this). Now I know why. Granted, this is supposed to be an early and cold winter, but very quickly what had been a pleasant climate; cool in the day, colder at night, but with a crispness to the air that I am still reveling in now that I live in a place with seasons, became a source of real misery. Tramping through Plitzvice Park, on  groomed trails, with the appropriate modern foul-weather gear, it was brought home to me just how unpleasant it would have been if all you were wearing was a woolen tunic, with a sagum thrown over. It would be a cold, wet and miserable experience, and when coupled with the terrain, it now makes sense to me why the Romans started to hunker down for the winter, particularly here.

This is a country made for warfare, a fact which has unfortunately been borne out over the centuries. And first Titus, then Gaius will be faced with that fact as they continue Marching With Caesar®.

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Marching With Caesar: Next Phase

September 9, 2013 by 3 Comments

Roman Provinces of Illyricum,_Macedonia,_Dacia, Moesia, Pannonia, and ThraciaHello and welcome to my first blog post launching the newly redesigned Marching With Caesar® website! Along with the redesign, I’m going to be making a departure from what I started last year on my blog, telling a story that ended up being the book Caesar Triumphant. Instead, I’m going to be talking about topics relating to the subject of my books; Rome, Caesar, the Legions, and the events that have had such an impact in shaping our modern world.

And I’m going to start by talking about the upcoming trip I’m taking later this month to Eastern Europe, to the countries formerly known as Illyria, Pannonia, Dacia, and parts of Thrace. My purpose is simple; because of my financial circumstances, when I was a struggling writer living off the proceeds of my Marine Corps pension, in my 37 foot travel trailer on the Olympic Peninsula, I was unable to physically walk the ground of the country that Titus Pullus, Vibius Domitius and the other members of their tent section covered, as part of the 10th Legion and the army led by Gaius Julius Caesar, on his epic conquest of Gaul. Back then in 2008-2011, I had to make do with using Google Earth, and while it was an extremely valuable tool, I am at heart still an old military man, and there is no substitute for eyeballing the terrain in person. And now, because of the success of the Marching With Caesar® book series, I am able to see the territory that will be an integral part of the next phase of the series, featuring the descendants of Titus Pullus.

Specifically, the next phase of the Marching With Caesar® book series will cover the beginning of the career of the man who would become the second Emperor of Rome., Tiberius Claudius Nero. But I will also be telling a story of the “other” Nero, Tiberius’ brother Drusus, who from the accounts of the day seemed at least as well, if not better, suited to be the real inheritor of Augustus’ mantle. Although this next chapter of the saga won’t be as speculative as Caesar Triumphant, which imagines a world where Caesar not only survives the Ides of March, but goes on to march across the world to invade Japan, if I leave readers wondering, “I wonder what might have happened if Drusus had lived?” I will be content with that.

But first, I have to walk the ground, and my hope and plan is, using the wonders of the Internet, which I’ve heard has made it all the way into the wilds of Thrace, posting about this part of the Roman Empire, complete with pictures! So I hope that you’re looking forward to this adventure as much as I am, and you’ll be checking back often!

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