Loving the research
It’s amazing how getting your hands on some decent research material can transform and boost the ideas for a novel. Last year I’d been writing a children’s novel set in Ancient Egypt and as I’m no egyptologist I was having to do some reading. I found some books on Egypt but they were just incredibly dry, boring and didn’t go into enough detail, so when I got to about half way through the novel, even though I had it fully plotted out I was just not convinced in my writing to go any further as my background information was too sketchy and therefore the story just did not read ‘real’ enough. So I put the project away, festering on my hard disk. Then I came across details of a competition from a publisher looking for children’s books of a certain style and my half finished Egypt story seemed to fit the bill, so I decided to give it another go. Fresh visit to the Egyptology section at the book shop for some more research material and I found this fantastic book, The British Museum Book of Ancient Egypt, which has really helped answer some of my questions and given me the detail that I need. Only problem I’m still facing is that my characters spend a lot of the story getting in and out of prison and I’m not totally sure from my readings that prisons really existed but surely they must of put their captured bad guys somewhere? So if anyone is reading this and knows about prisons in the New Kingdom period, I’d be interested in what you know!
