 My friend and fellow writer, Liz Harris whose book The Road Back is out later this year, has recently started blogging Welcome to my World
In her last post, she asked for help from fellow authors. It’s such a good question, I’d like to ask something similar. She’d introduced some well-researched period vocabulary in her new novel, but some critique group members had suggested they were too obscure and she should substitute something more generic. So she asked her blog readers for their opinion.
I and thirty-thousand others urged her to leave them in.
These words, such as cuirasse, buckler, poke bonnet, castrum, stanchion, frigidarium, photon torpedo, palla, goose grease, etc. are what give our books their unique flavour.
As a reader, do unknown words put you off or intrigue you? Would you rather have an easy, grey novel or do you enjoy learning as you read?
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 Since I published my first book, a non-fiction title called Military or Civilians? The curious anomaly of the German Women’s Auxiliary Services during the Second World War on Amazon last Wednesday quite a few people have asked me why I did it.
Comments have included:
“I thought you wrote alternate history thrillers with a Roman theme.”
“Aren’t you looking for agent representation and the trad publishing route?”
“What’s German women’s history got to do with the Romans?”
All good questions. Here are the answers:
Yes, I do.
Yes, I am.
They’re both history.
OK, that’s a bit glib. Here’s some history, or maybe it’s archaeology…
Picture me at fifteen, making O-level choices. I had to chose two out of three of Latin, History and Geography. As a budding linguist, Latin was easily chosen. But the other two? Both deep loves. Geography won as I needed it if I wanted to do A level (which I did). But History – I felt I was abandoning a child in an Arctic wind. My History teacher was ‘disappointed’.
But I knew history would stay with me. It coloured my entire thought process. It was licenced nosiness. Why did people do that? What were the circumstances? How did they achieve it? What did this object mean? Why was this so important to them? What do they tell us with their “messages across time”?
On every holiday/business trip/family outing I couldn’t and can’t help it: buildings shriek out at me, monuments beg for attention and the latest news always has a historical context. I’ve been lucky enough to see Roman palaces, roads, art, to marvel at the Bayeux Tapestry and the sadness of Oradour, and see Berlin before and after the fall of the Wall. I’ve handled Commynes’ commentaries and my own great-great grandfather’s medals from the Boer War.
But where were the women in these stories? In the small universe of my family, I discovered although my mother was in a reserved occupation as a student then a teacher in 1939, her two sisters had joined the WRNS and my father’s sister the WRAF. All survived the Second World War.
When I was choosing my MA History dissertation topic, I remembered a German friend mentioning her late grandmother had worn a Wehrmacht uniform during the Second World War. A woman wearing a Wehrmacht uniform? I’d never heard of such a thing. But my friend pulled out an old photo of a young girl in a size-too-big greatcoat, dark tie around her neck, a side cap with badge; she looked straight to camera, at once serious and so young. The result was my dissertation and a few years later, with the digital revolution making it possible, the book I published last Wednesday.
The Romans? Now my German women’s history book is in the world, I’m back in my Roman-themed thriller world again.
Now where did I put my stylus?
Military or Civilians? The curious anomaly of the German Women’s Auxiliary Services during the Second World War is available as an ebook on amazon.co.uk amazon.com, amazon.de
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 If you were young, German and female in 1939 you were at the poorer end of the gender scale. Unable to hold professional posts, ill-educated, your role was defined politically, ideologically and socially as a servant, assistant, mother. You’d taken part in political youth activities, but had no outlet for personal develop and no chance of a career.
By early 1945, you were very likely manning an anti-aircraft gun in a cold field all night, wearing a thick serge Luftwaffe uniform, or working a signals link in a military unit under bombardment, and serving alongside male soldiers, praying it would all end soon.
So how did the ideological and gender norms change so radically in Nazi Germany? Why were young women, the future mothers of the nation, in uniform, under fire and playing a crucial role in their nation’s war efforts. And why have they had to bury such experience, fearing to be seen as part of a criminal regime? Now in their 80s and 90s, many former Helferinnen are speaking out.
500,000 young women worked in the German armed forces by the end of the Second World War. Uniformed, under military discipline, posted to every corner of the German Reich and occupied territories, could they still be regarded as civilians or were they truly military?
Military or Civilians? The curious anomaly of the German Women’s Auxiliary Services during the Second World War is available as an ebook on amazon.co.uk (link below in box), amazon.com, amazon.de
Alison Morton is also the author of Roma Nova thrillers, INCEPTIO, and PERFIDITAS. Third in series, SUCCESSIO, is out early summer 2014.
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 I stood on the rounded road stones, warmed by spring sunshine under a deep blue sky, and gazed up the road as it rose to the horizon. Red-tiled and grey stone shop fronts each side of the road. I steadied my breath, shut my eyes and heard the noises of nineteen hundred years ago.
This was Pompeii for me a week ago. Maybe I’m fanciful, but when I get to a location and I stand quietly, closing off the visual and aural senses, I try to draw on those other hidden intuitive senses to feel the place I’m in. I imagine the crowds, the smells, the rattling carts, the cheeky kids, pickpockets, shopkeepers, the noise of humans shouting, pack-animals braying, dogs barking.
Then I can start writing…
More pictures of my Roman tour here.
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 Writing a romance, thriller, historical, whodunit, sci-fi adventure? Whichever it is, it’s a depressing thought, but all the stories have been done before. There are only supposed to be seven plots:
man vs. nature
man and woman/man
man vs. society
man vs. machines/technology
man vs. the supernatural
man vs. self
man vs. God
(‘man’ obviously taken as including ‘woman’!)
But basically it boils down to a series of conflicts, often summarised into the rather clinical GMC – goal, motivation, conflict – and their resolution.
So what’s left for you to write about?
You should write the story you want to, the one you’re passionate about, the one with the characters you love, hate or are fascinated by. But you have a secret weapon: your own memory. Nobody else feels about things the way you do. Nobody else gets wound up about things the way you do. Nobody else’s memories are triggered by tiny things the way yours is.
I blogged before about the power of memory unlocked and double memories. Another one was triggered this morning when I took a suitcase to the tip. Memories of trips over the past twenty-five years flooded back as it went in the skip: queues at airports, hugs on platforms, arm-ache as I tugged it along, crushing it closed with new purchases. But most of all, times with friends overseas, holidays, new scents and sights and that time it fell into the harbour in Malta…
And these memories are mine, uniquely, to do with as I choose.
How have you used your memories in your writing?
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My friend and fellow writer, Liz Harris whose book The Road Back is out later this year, has recently started blogging Welcome to my World 
