I was supposed to go in, interview Alexander the Great, grab my story, and leave. But Fate, that joker, intervened, and here I am - stranded in the past with Alexander the Great. Well, not really - my character got stuck. I was going to write a short story about a time-traveling journalist going into the past, and I ended up with a series of seven books.
When I started writing the Time for Alexander series, it became obvious I was going to have to do a lot of research in order to make the history believable. I'm not a historian. It would be ridiculous to pretend otherwise. This book is a work of fiction; did the time-travel element give it away? I started this saga never intending to take it so far. When I realized that the short story I'd planned to send to the sci-fi magazine was turning into a novel, I stopped writing and spent a year researching ancient Greece and Alexander the Great. A year is not enough. I could have spent ten years and not had enough information. I haunted my local library, I ordered books, I emailed ancient history professors and doctors and asked questions. I looked up toothpaste, measurements, and medical procedures. In the end, I had to walk a tightrope between what I'd learned and how I wanted the story to go.
I spent a year researching Alexander the Great, and then there was the time travel. Can you travel through time? Time travel flies in the face of physics because of the expanding universe theory. However, imagine time and space as a huge, elastic balloon that is slowly expanding- with the inside of the balloon consisting of exactly the same amount of matter as it started with - and imagine that all that matter is somehow connected and is vibrating in perfect synchronisation - and that the one thing on earth that vibrates along with it is quartz...and vibrations are waves, like radio waves or light waves - and those waves can reach back millions and millions of years without being altered in the slightest.
So back to the research - I thought (smugly) that I knew a lot about him, because I'd read some biographies, a few of Aristotle's quotes, skimmed over The Anabasis of Alexander by Arrian, and read several fiction books about him including the fantastic Mary Renault series. Plutarch wrote the most fascinating biography nearly four hundred years after the conqueror’s death, and his research seems to have been meticulous. But Plutarch was Greek, and for the Greeks, Alexander would forever be an upstart barbarian.
The biggest problem, for me, was that most accounts were written centuries after Alexander's death! I put aside my short story and started researching in earnest. Who was this person? Why did he go so far into India when he'd already captured the crown of Persia? And so I researched, and as I sifted through fact, myth, and fiction, it occured the me that the most concrete facts we have about Alexander are from the places he'd been - the actual route he travelled, which is, even now, scattered with his relics. A city here, a road there, an outpost, a fortress, a battleground, a temple built to honor his beloved horse... But why? Why go against his generals' wishes and drag (well, lead) his army across half the known world? It was as if he never really wanted to go back and rule, but go back to Babylon he did, where he died soon after.
His character came to me by reading between the lines. A warrior, yes, but a dreamer as well. An eternal student and tourist at heart, charismatic but short tempered. A brilliant tactician and energetic, but prone to ill health. His friends loved him, his enemies hated him, but no one was indifferent. He was superstitious and religious, yet he defied the gods. He was a conundrum, and he made a wonderful fictional character.
The character I needed was larger than life, (even Alexander's enemies admitted he was amazing). It wasn't hard, therefor, to create a sort of demigod. But Alexander's faults were important too. He was, according to Plutarch, 'choleric' and would drink excessively. The more I studied him, the more the idea occurred to me that my first idea of a male journalist would not work. For one thing, a man would not fall under Alexander's spell as easily as a woman would. Men, I discovered as I researched, were, well, a tiny bit jealous. It crept into Plutarch's work, it seeped out of Arrian's book - the only one who wasn't in awe of Alexander was Aristotle. Even modern historians and bloggers make the mistakes the ancients did - they either glorify him beyond reason, or they maligne him.
However, according to all the writings I found, Alexander respected women. He would be open to meeting and speaking to a woman who posed as an onirocrite, (someone who interpreted dreams) - therefore, I needed a woman time traveler. And I needed someone who wouldn't be cowed by him, and someone who would fascinate him. It wasn't hard to create the woman - what surprised me was how fast she fell into his arms. Well, it would be a romance book, then. But love isn't easy to write about, so they fell in lust first (that's more understandable). Love came slowly to this mismatched pair; the man from the past and the woman from the future had a lot to overcome before their relationship could be based on mutual trust and understanding. And for that, she has to tell him who she truly is - not Persephone, goddess of the dead, but a woman from another time. He's impressed - of course, and all the more so because he realizes that what he's doing will be in songs through the ages. Heady stuff, for a young man!
The book advanced, and as I wrote, I researched. The army, their route, their food, their weapons, his friends, his enemies, the weather, the horses...and toothpaste. "The devil is in the details", as they say. I spent an entire day researching toothpaste. Did you know that people brushed their teeth very carefully back then? Clean teeth and sweetness of breath was considered essential. They used soft twigs, chewed until they frayed, or little brushes, and they had homemade toothpaste. So, herewith for your tooth brushing pleasure is the recipe for toothpaste circa 500 BC (it didn't change much for a thousand years...): heat snail shells in the fire until they are white and grind them very fine. Add gypsum and honey, and grind into a paste. Add essential oils of mint or other herbs for taste. Other recipes included chalk mixed with wood ash and fresh urine (a virgin's urine or the urine of a young person is best), and one simple recipe is sea salt mixed with spices such as powdered cloves rubbed energetically over the teeth and gums – guaranteed white teeth, fresh breath, and sore gums!
This story had to be plotted out using existing people, historical events, the army’s movements, and take into account the seasons and weather, so it was vital to have a strong outline. Within that framework I took many liberties. One of the tricks of writing historical fiction is to keep real events pinned to their place and time. I had to move some of the characters around – I had one of Alexander’s generals interacting directly with Alexander when most historians agree he was back in Macedonia – but I needed him there, so thanks to the wonders of fiction, there he was!
Research was important to me because I wanted the reader to feel as if they were immersed in another time and culture. Ashley feels disconnected from reality, but it's the small details of everyday life: how bread was baked, how prayers were said, how the soldiers bathed (her favorite part of the day), that anchor her to her new surroundings. Hopefully, the reader will feel the same, not looking back across a chasm made of thousands of years but actually living, walking, and riding at Alexander's side.
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