Jane Thomson's Blog: But I'm Beootiful!, page 3

One of life’s great mysteries?

Perhaps the greatest. Who knows? I’ve been watching Succession, Roman Roy is catching. Anyway. Here it is.

Why do men sniff as a form of expression? Also, dogs.

Dogs sneeze when they want to say something. I don’t know what it is they want to say but I’m sure as hell it’s something. Like, this whole reading on the couch thing is such a thrill, NOT, but how about we throw sticks now? Or, I swear that fart wasn’t me.

Men also sniff. When my daughter wants to take off young men of less than remarkable intellectual ability, she goes, like ‘Yeah, nah,’ sniff, under-nose sleeve wipe, ‘So I like met this roilly hot chick like an I sent her a dick pic an she’s like, gross…I’m telling ya, she’s gagging for it!’

Alexander Skaarsgard just sniffed in Succession, Episode 5, Season 4. Why did he so? Why do men wipe their noses when they haven’t got colds? I don’t. On the other hand there’s the phrase ‘she sniffed’ as in ‘I understand your mother lives in a trailer park,’ she sniffed. But I’ve never seen a woman actually sniff, as in draw in actual snot, as a way of expressing something? Have you?

Ok, trivial. But enlighten me?

To change the subject, my sister and I were discussing someone I’ve taken an instant but totally unjustified dislike to. ‘But why do you dislike her?’ my sister asked, ‘She seems lovely to me!’ ‘Yes,’ I said, ‘But she’s just a bit…toothy.’ Afterwards I thought, it could be that you’re just jealous. Or scared that you won’t, conversationally, measure up. Mind you the last person I disliked instantly turned out to have secret vices, so maybe I have a nose for these things?

Do you take instant dislikes? Have you been right to?

Should you…ever…thump someone?

Thoughts, Vladimir?

Well, Rose, in the fine tradition of Alexander, Napoleon and so on, great empires aren’t made by keyboard warriors. If Catherine the Great hadn’t extended the frontiers of Mother Russia in pursuit of a glorious dream, she’d have gone down in history as Catherine the Horny.

Yeesss…Winston? A penny for them?

One word. Hitler. Fight them on the beaches, fight them on the…

Street outside the pub on a Saturday night. Another word. Men. The Balls of War. Snip snip. Francis?

As Pope, may I remind you that Jesus said, blessed are the peacemakers. Also, if a man whacks one cheek, present the other.

Which has happened in the history of humankind, oh, let’s see…zero times? Mr Milosevic, I see you’re dying to jump in here…

Death before dishonour. Until the last man, whether it’s them or us. Preferably them. By all means necessary. Works for me.

Mr Zelensky?

Until the last man, yes. Ukraine will never surrender. Better a Ukrainian wasteland than a Russian vassal state.

How about the cycle of violence. Violence begets violence. Do you smack your kids?

Certainly not.

Benjamin?

What about the cycle of peace. Obliteration of the meek, followed – sometimes – by handwringing and a resolution to do better next time. Not good enough! Never again!

And so again and again and again…Vladimir, to sum up?

He who lives by the sword dies by the sword. Solution, get nukes.

Is violence avoidable, in the real world? Is it a tool that should only be used in the service of good…whatever good is to whoever, erm, holds the tool? Is turning the other cheek a recipe for disaster, and also, unnecessarily painful? Have you ever thumped anyone (me, only a kid)? Was it enjoyable? (me, no. I wish I hadn’t)

Whaddya think?

Leprosy, anyone?

I like the idea that if you’re gonna be sick, you should go the whole hog. Like, don’t just have a slight cold. That’s boring. Get the Black Death. Fungal Necrosis. Mexican Jumping Fever. (At about this point you’re thinking, how disrespectful! What about all the people who really have those dreadful things?)

Well yeah, you have a point, but allow me some drama. Anyway, for the last two weeks I’ve had this unidentified virus involving chills, sweats, headaches and a face like a spotted balloon, and I can’t say it’s been fun, but it does make you think. For instance, if you had a choice would you rather feel bad or look bad? Is it better to have a fatal but aesthetically pleasing (up to a point) illness like TB (I’m thinking Lady of the Camellias, Keats) or a temporary but disfiguring one (measles, for instance?). Nobody ever seduced anyone while they had an active case of the measles…

Another thought bubble. Do we blog for attention, or because we have something to say? I mean, WordPress Prompts. Like our minds are so empty that we need WP to provide helpful suggestions for something to talk about. My long held view? Got nothing to say? Then don’t say it. Not that it stops me...

Anyway. I have a new novel out. Technically a novella. It’s about death. Specifically, the line between death and life (not so easily defined, I’m inclined to think, as Sesame Street would have us believe in their hit ditty, Some of these things are not like the Others!). It’s also about passion, and loss, and finding something to live for. More about the story below, but I want to share some thoughts about why I wrote it. As many of you know, my son died a few years ago and since then, I’ve been thinking a lot about death, grief and – for want of a better word – the afterlife. Why did it happen? Where have you gone? Can it be really be that I’ll never see you again? Is there some way to tell you, to speak to you…? These are all questions I’ve asked myself. And so does Eurydice, my protagonist, when her husband Orpheus slips into the cold, night-dark water of Sydney Harbour on his thirtieth birthday and drowns, seemingly of his own free will.

Then, as the months follow one another, we who’ve lost someone think, ‘How can I keep on living?’ Losing a lover – someone for whom you feel an overwhelming, even obsessive passion – is different to losing a child, and that’s something I wanted to explore in the book. Orpheus is a tremendous talent, a beautiful, reckless, do-nothing-by-halves kind of guy, and to some extent Eurydice lives in his shadow. For her, then, his death offers a choice – obliteration or some kind of reinstatement of what it is to be herself, as an artist, as an individual, alone. And then there’s the issue of what death is, and what life is. Is it simply a rolling over of organic matter, a matter of neurons ceasing to fire, or are we part of something much larger and less immediately comprehensible? Do we struggle with the concept of mortality because like King Lear we can’t endure the thought, ‘Thou’lt come no more, / Never, never, never, never, never’. Or do we intuitively understand a greater truth about the way things are?

Well, anyway, here’s the blurb. If you’d like a review copy, just leave me a comment with your email address and I’ll send you a link.

In the house of God there are many telephones.

Incoming calls only.

A Portrait Under Water, is a modern take on the myth of Orpheus and Eurydice. It’s a story of death, grief, and the unbreakable bonds of passionate love.

Eurydice’s husband Orpheus, a well-known musician, disappears from a party boat in Sydney Harbour on his thirtieth birthday. Three days later police recover his drowned body.

Desperate with grief, Eurydice tries to find a reason for his apparent suicide. The dead provide no answers, and the theories of friends and accusers – depression, obsessive love, a drunken accident – don’t satisfy her.

Fleeing a bitter, blaming mother in law and a morbidly curious press, Eurydice flies to Spain. There she explores the boundaries between the worlds of the living and the dead – but Orpheus is hard to reach. Wherever the dead may be, they don’t speak our language, and the other side is a long way off.

You can find A Portrait Under Water on Amazon here, and at a range of online bookstores.  For an excerpt, click here or use Amazon’s ‘Look Inside’ feature!

She had a long, curious nose…

Do you believe that facial features and other physical characteristics – say, being fat (or as the sensitivity readers put it, ‘enormous’) – are a valid guide to what’s inside?

For instance, is a person with a receding chin actually weaker than someone with a Hollywood Jut? Are people with turned up little noses more frivolous and fun than those with mole-like snouts like mine? Do wet lips forebode perverted tendencies? Does a Roman nose mean you’re bossy? (I have one and sadly, no.)

Someone once told me I looked like Virginia Woolfe. I was pissed off. I liked it a lot better when my ex-husband, bless him, compared me to Greta Garbo. Like Woolfe is, ok, brilliant…but plain. Ha! Looks for a woman are the smoothest path to power, of a sort. I see this with my daughter, who’s stunning: both men and women are drawn to her and the sterling qualities she does have are magnified by the possession of beauty. Not that I’m envious: I enjoy seeing her mowing the bastards down. But you can’t help but think (and this isn’t the first time that I’ve seen gorgeousness shoot a woman to heights undreamt of by less prepossessing chicks) – would a female Steve Jobs/Barack Obama/Bill Gates still be languishing in the modern equivalent of the typing pool? I mean, they’re not that hot, are they?

And yet for all the yak about inner beauty and looking through to the person within and all that, what clue do we have except what’s without? Maybe evolution has taught us that people with receding chins ARE actually weak-willed, and people with low foreheads have a tendency to be dumb? Maybe beautiful people can afford to be nicer. More to the point, how would we write fiction at all if we couldn’t signal our character’s character with epithets like ‘stringy-haired’ (doesn’t look after herself), ‘paunchy’ (lazy and possibly unlikeable), ‘watery-eyed’ (can’t be relied on a pinch), etc?

How do you feel about being beautiful – or not beautiful? Is it the same for a man? Do you judge people by how they look? Should you? How the frig else are you going to tell if that hitchhiker by the roadside is a serial killer or a saint?

My daughter, reading this, says ‘Fine, but what do YOU think?’ I’m scared to say, in case I give offence. Ok, here it is. I’m somewhat shallow. I’m inclined to take points off people who neglect their appearance (unless they’re me). Deliberate ugliness is an irritant – part of me thinks, ‘But the world is ugly enough – why ADD to it?’ I see fat as a sign of gluttony, physical laziness or mental ill health (I admit some exceptions). I’m inclined to judge a guy with a pear-shaped head and slabby cheeks as likely pretty dumb, even before the poor bloke opens his mouth. And yet she who lives by the sword…I have an unusually still face, which people sometimes interpret as uncomprehending, serene and/or unfriendly. Nah, folks…l just have resting dumb face. In short, I have two rules in relation to this question.

Judge quickly and often, and;The rules don’t apply to me.

Also, in my quest to seek the true meaning of the weak chin, I just spent five minutes trawling through beard porn. To wit, a page of guys who went from wimps to Hoffs by simply adding a beard and sideburns. Totally worked for me; not only were my post-menopausal loins almost stirred by these manly visions, but I would’ve absolutely hired any one of them to lead me through the coming apocalypse (as long as they didn’t ditch the beard).

My blog friend the philosopher Irfan Khawaja discusses these matters with far greater clarity than I could (and he’s not shallow).

If you’re interested in good books, by the way, I recommend The Crimson Inkwell by Kenneth Baldwin. Full of late Victorian grit and wit, it’s available, together with a curated collection of currently discounted books, on the Out of the Blue promotion (and at the moment is free on Amazon).

The Last Chat

Hey Jude…you ever wondered what it’s like, growing up as a kid, knowing your father is God and you’re going to have to die horribly at thirty-two?

Sure, Jeez, it must be rough.  Although…kids with cancer, that kind of thing, they know they won’t live long, but at least they get to be born, right. That’s something, isn’t it?

I don’t know.  Thing is, I’m not just going to die in my sleep.  I’m going to die a slow painful death, nailed up like a criminal. And for what?

To save mankind!

Well, ok but can’t I just die of a heart attack?

No, well, it’s just not the same, is it. Imagine the priest belting out ‘God gave his Only Son to die of a heart attack so we could have eternal life!’  Mere death doesn’t cut it. Anyway, Jeez, You’re supposed to die willingly and on purpose.  If a brick fell on Your head from a building site, that would be an accident, not a sacrifice!  You should feel good about all this, really. Because of You taking time out of Your week to be crucified, we all get rescued from the consequences of original sin.  Don’t think we don’t appreciate that, mate.

Yeah, don’t mention it mate…but you know, I’ve sometimes wondered why Dad couldn’t just forgive you lot anyway.  If He wanted to.  Why does he have to give his Only Son, like there’s a price on forgiveness?  I mean, nobody can tell Dad what He can and can’t do, right?

Yeah, nah, that’s the rule mate. 

But Dad makes the rules. He’s God.  Are you saying God has limits?  Are you saying He created this universe with rules even He can’t break?

That’s right.  And the rule is, if you want something from God, you have to give Him something in return.  That’s always been the rule, ever since they invented…I mean, ever since the year dot.  Only this time, God is actually giving Himself the sacrifice. He’s giving us his Only Son, so we can sacrifice Him – like basically, give Him back – and in return He can give us everlasting life.  I think that’s pretty bloody considerate, don’t you?  After all, He could have got us to crucify a normal bloke – say, Joshua over there, or -God forbid! – me. Or if that wasn’t enough to cover everyone’s sins, He could’ve ordered us to kill all our firstborn babies, or something like that.  At least we’d get to sleep at night.  But no, He created You, and then gave YOU to us to sacrifice.

Yeah. So He’s basically sacrificing Me, His son, to appease Himself, so He can forgive all of you.

Well, you don’t get something for nothing.

So what does Dad get out of it?  You get forgiven, what does He get?

Well basically he adores mankind, really, so he wants us up in Heaven with him instead of down There with the Evil One.

Right. It seems to Me that He loves you lot more than He loves Me.  I don’t know how I feel about that…

Oh, don’t be like that, Jeez. After you’ve done being crucified, You’ll be up there with Him too.  It’s only temporary.  You only get to be dead three days, nothing to whinge about.

If it’s only three days, why do I have be dead at all?  Why can’t He just..oh bother it.  What if I say no?  What if I run away to, I don’t know, Syria and get married to Mary Magdalene and give up this whole Son of God thing?”

“Not an option mate. Greater love hath no man and all that, but I’m not spending eternity in Hell for anyone.”

But…but…hang on, why are you kissing Me?

Whatever happens, at least Elon WARNED us!

You’re in the nursing home. Which situation would you prefer?

A weary, underpaid and under-educated woman pops in, changes your diaper and hands out your pills while engaging in a brief chat about grandchildren and/or the weather, then rushes out to attend to one of the other thirty old bats she has to tidy up this morning?An attractive, lively and charming young robot pops in, changes your diaper, hands out your pills and sits down for a nice long chat about quantum physics or the Tibetan Book of the Dead while his robotic colleagues attend to the individual quirky needs of the other pampered oldies?

One can fantasise, right? For this month’s Arrest Rose’s Decline into a Vegetable who Coincidentally Grows Vegetables activity, I went to a discussion group on AI. We started off by getting Chat GPT to write a poem. I thought it’d be crap but actually AI’s really great at rhyming doggerel, it turns out. Better than I am, so there goes my career as a doggerel writer. If one of Chat GPT’s descendants can one day write novels as good as mine, I’ll definitely stop writing novels. Would you?

I read a book a while ago where all the men were replaced by sexy, gentle, witty and useful robots. There ought to be something wrong with that but I can’t see what it is, exactly. (I should make it clear here that I mean ‘replaced’ in the same sense as one would replace an old boyfriend with a new one. No murder involved!) Friends say, ‘Yeah but what if men replaced women with robots, like in The Stepford Wives? Wouldn’t you hate it?’ Well, no. I mean, each sex could have exactly what it wanted, then. Who would it harm? No one, that I can see.

‘Yes but how about friends?’, they say. ‘Would you want all your friends to be robots too?’ I can’t see why not (I mean, I’ve already considered replacing my friends with books). Unless perhaps the very difficulty of dealing with Actual People is good for you – a bit like running up hills or doing crosswords. Maybe there’s a virtue in human unpredictability; your friends stand you up sometimes, or get in a snit, or bore you. Keeps you on your toes. Maybe there’s something bracing – similar to cold baths in the morning – about being bored. Or is there?

Anyway, Elon Musk claims he’s been going around warning everybody who matters from the President down that AI is going to overtake us and that when it does – five years tops – humans will no longer be in charge. And THEN, instead of hovering at my bedside in the nursing home, keeping me alert and hygienic, probably the AI of the future will decide that the cheapest and easiest way of alleviating my suffering is to end it once and for all.

Do we agree? Do we even care? If you had a robot dog, would you kick it?

Anyway I’m now looking forward to illegally downloading a bunch of sci-fi AI films to watch – maybe that’s what I’ll do in the nursing home while Mary from the agency is hustling me into my support stockings. Real Humans is the best one I’ve seen so far. Oh, and this is an interview with me (opining about how to be politically incorrect without anyone noticing, among other things) done by Mike of Heartbeat Books Marketing. Mike’s newsletter reviews a whole lot of really interesting books, so it’s well worth subscribing to.

How would you approach these awkward social situations?

Your fiance invites you to visit with his parents…

You’re sitting down to a lovely lunch of catfish a l’orange when you notice a whole lot of black people hastening in and out attending to various things. ‘You own slaves?’ you ask, shocked. ‘Sure,’ your man’s parents reassure you. ‘But we’re very enlightened, we view them as family, really.’

Leaving aside the obvious fact that this awkward social situation could only occur prior to the twentieth century (or in Qatar) – what would you have said? ‘Take back this ring and your filthy slave-owning ways, Wayne – I’m off!’ Or ‘Thank you so much for the lunch, Mr and Mrs Legree, but I’ve just remembered I have a hair appointment!’ Or maybe ‘This blancmange is delicious but do you realise slave-owning is morally indefensible? Let me count the ways!’

I’m guessing around 90 percent of (white, it goes without saying) people in those days would have bitten their tongue and kept their opinions for later, but I could be wrong.

Anyway, to switch to a more contemporary setting, let’s say I’m at a social gathering, say, in early November, and someone’ll say, ‘So who’s up for Melbourne Cup Lunch?’ ‘Not me,’ I say, and what I don’t add is, ‘Since I have no intention of participating in the industrial-scale abuse of horses, and neither should you.’ Or someone tells me they’ve bought a puppy over the internet, and I wanna say, ‘Congratulations, you’ve just donated to the cause of some brute with a bunch of filthy cages out the back yard stuffed with unloved, abused female dogs who exist only to breed and die.’

So my question is, should I actually say this? Does pointing out an ethical pothole make you a hero, or an annoying dickhead? Does it depend on the scale of the crime?

Ok, so here’s another completely different scenario. Say you offer to share your house with a guy on condition he does three hours’ work a week. Then say he doesn’t. He’s a lovely guy, but overworked and not in great health, so basically he doesn’t get around to it. So now you have to ask him to pay rent. With the awkward (but honest) implication that he’s not fulfilling his side of the bargain. Is there a nice way to do this? What is it?

And finally…let’s say a friend invites you to see a burlesque show featuring drag queens. You think that drag queens are neither funny, sexy, nor interestingly transgressive – basically a bunch of gay guys doing an extended skit on women along the lines of ‘Oooh handbags! Big hair! Cleavage!’. Should you (a) go on a rant, (b) politely decline or (c) examine your own prejudices and values? (If my friend is reading this, she’ll know that I already decided to go on a rant and won’t be offended.)

On a completely different topic, I’m running a promotion this week of indie books that I personally think have some literary merit. Granted, they’re not always perfectly edited, but they’re original, thought-provoking and well written. I’d particularly recommend Death Magnanimous by Michael Martin, a beautifully written book about a burn victim deciding whether to end it all…or not. Here’s where you can pick it up for free, along with thirteen other Classy Reads.

The Locked Library

Closed! But how can this be? I fall my knees outside the Stalinesque structure that calls itself the Public Library, pounding the callous concrete with my fists. Wherefore, I cry to the unheeding walls, do you deny me the very lifeblood of my intellectual being, the fulfilment of my dreams, the succour of my yearning soul? Is not philosophy for everyone? Why should I, alone, be cast forth from the gates of learning?

I do like to dramatise things, if only in my head.

What really happened? In my new year quest to hunt down the mental stimulation I don’t get at my lovely home among the paddocks, I decided to attend a Philosophy Group meeting in the city, three hours drive away. Only to find that the library in which it was being held was shut. After about twenty minutes they came down and let me in the fire door. But I prefer the fun version. I like to think of the Philosophy Group as January’s jaws of life.

Well, it was interesting (it always is). For a start, nobody argued. I’d visualised a bunch of wild-eyed people flinging Kant and Schopenhauer at one another as they thrashed out the Mind Body Problem…but that’s not how it’s done nowadays. Instead, before anybody ventured a remark, they would say something like ‘I don’t mean to undermine the validity of your perspective,’ or ‘This is not to dispute your point at all, I just wanted to add…’ I thought disputing the point was the point! A bit more table-banging would have been nice, but on the other hand I can see that you have to avoid pompous old guys thumping the heck out of everybody else’s opinions. There always seems to be one in every such gathering. It’s not me, btw – I’m the one saying ‘Well about dualism – I don’t know about Descartes but I was in the garden the other day and…’

And my opinion on the Mind Body Problem? I’m a believer in consciousness as an external force or particle/wave, much like gravity, that infuses everything up to and including rocks. Luckily no one dared to argue with me so I’m still in triumphant possession of this magnificent delusion. I do think philosophy in general suffers from a lack of diversity. I don’t mean brown people (there were two of possibly the most gorgeous Indians I’ve ever seen there) – more importantly, there were no cats, snakes, cows or whales. Which accounts for the distinctly human-centric nature of the conversation, as in ‘only humans can…transcend their instincts/develop a theory of mind/imagine what isn’t there…’ etc. What would a cow contribute if it could?

Speaking of imagining things, I went for a walk with Darcy the Dog today. She got in a panic about a concrete bus shelter that, to her, seemed ominous. She does the same with a mysterious upright metal oblong that sits in the middle of one of my paddocks. Shrinks, barks, won’t go near it. What does she sense? Ghosts? Aliens? Rottweiler pee? Really bad installation art? Does your dog do that?

I got to wondering, can one imagine a thing that has no relation to anything else one knows? For instance, you can imagine an elephant, therefore a polka-dotted elephant, therefore an elephant with wings…but can you imagine a being who lives (but not according to our definition or understanding of life) in an environment that obeys none of the laws of physics, space or time, is composed of a substance unlike any we’ve ever encountered, and whose motivations and imperatives are nothing like those of any entity on earth? It’s pretty much impossible. And yet that’s what we have to imagine when we conceive of what it might be like to be dead… Or God.

It would be a challenge for an SF writer or anyone brave enough to set out to conjure such a being, such a state, such a setting. Maybe poetry could do it. A line or two, anyone?

Evidently this stimulation thing is working. Whether that’s a good thing I leave to my relatives, friends, and of course you, who might have to put up with the (locquacious, meandering) results.

Photo by Fas Khan on Unsplash

No more running and jumping

Suppose you’re an attractive, athletic young philosophy student who loves horsing around, playing sport, bonking girls and hitting the road. One day, as you’re riding your motorbike through Mexico, you do, actually, hit the road. Next thing you know, you can’t move anything below your nipples.

People tell you, your life’s not over. You can still party with your friends, read, write, philosophise. Have sex, though you won’t feel it. Be loved.

You swallow it, for a while. You try. But the mechanics of life as a quadriplegic get to you. You can’t control your waste functions, for instance, and that – to you – is embarrassing, time-consuming and disgusting. All the physical things you used to enjoy are now off the menu. It’s hard to romance girls when you’re liable to shit yourself at any moment.

So you decide life as a quadriplegic is not for you. You write an extensive essay on your condition and daily life, explaining the truth about your situation as you see it. And then you take a kitchen knife, slice yourself open (luckily you can’t feel a thing) and die of blood loss.

It’s an awful, tragic story, but one of the things that struck me while reading this guy’s pre-suicide essay was his commitment to the idea of ‘truth’. His truth, obviously, was that his own life was unlivable, but he also wrote that the ‘disability’ community is untruthful when it claims that life with a disability is somehow better than, or even equal to, life without one. Make the best of having no legs if you have to (he says) but don’t pretend it’s a blessing in disguise. Acknowledge that for every person living with severe disability there’s a bunch of people enabling them – often at considerable expense – to do so. Face it, you can’t ‘climb’ Everest in a wheelchair. Stop insisting that life is always worth living; sometimes it’s just not.

The concept of ‘truth’ is bandied about a lot these days; so it ever was. ‘We live in a post-truth world’ is tremendous bullshit considering that for most of the last two millennia we all went about believing that kings had divine right, Saint Whatsit’s fingerbone could cure cancer and God made the world in seven days. We’ve always lived in a world where truth is subservient to ideology, at least till it punches you in the gut.

Absolute truth is confined to things like gravity and the ill-effects of being squashed by a falling boulder; for the rest, we have to put up with truth being a matter of probability, something you search for but can never quite put your finger on. Still, I think we owe it respect; not to go arsing about with claims like ‘Well it ought to be true and so…’ or ‘I wish it were true and so…’ or ‘If it’s important to you that it be true then let’s all pretend that it is,’ or ‘according to this pre-determined tenet of Marxist/feminist/gender-fluid/Christian/Moslem/racial ideology such and such must or must not be true, and anyone who suggests otherwise should be cancelled/beheaded/sacked’.

So to suggest (as this guy did) that severe disability is unpleasant for the person who has it and expensive and time-consuming for the people who care for that person, is probably true, as far as it goes. To argue that therefore everyone with a severe disability should take his course of action (as this guy didn’t) is a step beyond – it’s not about truth, but values. But our values shouldn’t blind us to truth; if anything, we should look the truth in the eye and say, ‘Ok, I acknowledge that such and such is probably true/false, but I’m going to ignore that and do my thing, come what may!’

So maybe there’s close to zero chance those fingerbones will cure my cancer – but prayer makes me feel good. So biology made me a man – I’m going to make like a woman anyway! It’s a bummer being a quadriplegic, but I’m going to try and enjoy it, so there.

Or to quote the Orange Man, ‘I could stand in the middle of Fifth Avenue and shoot someone, and I wouldn’t lose any votes.’ Now that’s the unashamed truth.

Need a hot duke or a saucy duchess to dream on this month? Me neither, but you can pick up Pandora’s Jar free, if you enjoy a spot of Byzantine adventure, at the Timeless promo (and while you’re at it you can buy the sequel, All The Evils, for $0.99 here till the end of Jan 23).

The empire nobody’s ever heard of…

Plus…the origin of the word ‘Byzantine’ and the enduring fascination of Bad Women!

Last first. You might have heard of Messalina, Semiramis, Jezebel…and maybe, Theodora. Legendary for their sex appeal, indiscriminate horniness, oh, and I almost forgot, being head honchesses of their respective mighty empires. Messalina, a wayward house-empress, did nothing much but screw around during her shortish tenure as wife of the Emperor Claudius of Rome, but Semiramis ruled Assyria, led armies to victory and apparently supervised an impressive monumental building program, among other things. Jezebel’s dad ruled the Phoenician empire; bailed up finally by marauding Jewish troops she put on her finest ‘face’ and most magnificent outfit for a courageous, if tragic, last stand. And Theodora…ah, Theodora.

She was a highly skilled and successful sex worker who married the guy – Justinian – destined to become one of the most famed rulers of the eastern Roman Empire. Ever heard of the church (now mosque) of Hagia Sofia in Istanbul? Justinian had that built. Modern legal code? Based, in principle, on Justinian’s Codex systematising Roman law to date. Theodora was a noted feminist – she got Justinian to ban brothel slavery, give married women property rights, and if husbands turned up to court complaining about stuff like their wives not being virgins, they were liable to be fined, en-dungeoned or at the very least laughed out of the room.

More to the point for writers of bosom-heaving fiction, she was gorgeous and notorious (at least in her time) for apparently once wishing she had more orifices with which to fuck. Anyway, her and her hubby ruled what was left of the Roman Empire from a city then known as Constantinople, now Istanbul, but in Greek classical times Byzantium, gateway between the Greek east and the Persian west. Rome by this time was a rat-ridden, crumbling non-entity, so what came to be known as the Byzantine Empire at its peak included Greece, most of what’s now Turkey, the Balkans, Egypt, Palestine and some of Italy, North Africa and Spain. Over a thousand years, from when the Visigoths sacked Rome in 410 to when Sultan Mehmed II sacked Constantinople in 1453, Constantinople was perhaps the most sophisticated, decadent and magnificent city in Europe. Meanwhile its rulers were among the most devious, duplicitous and inventively cruel; thus the word ‘Byzantine’.

Why all this history? Because my new book, All The Evils – set in Theodora and Justinian’s Constantinople – has just been released, and right now I need reviews!

The story begins when our heroine Anastasia – fresh back from a dangerous mission in the provinces – agrees to use her newfound influence with the Empress and Justinian’s corrupt minister John the Cappadocian to save her best friend’s charioteer boyfriend from execution for brawling.

Little does she know that his fate will become the catalyst for a week of riot, bloodshed and destruction the like of which the city has never seen. As Constantinople burns, Anastasia is embroiled in political intrigue – and a love affair with a violent but oddly charming barbarian from the far north. Here’s an excerpt.

The book is a sequel to Pandora’s Jar, which takes Anastasia from Constantinople to the court of Khosroe of Persia in pursuit of a runaway teenage bride and a pagan plot against the Empire.

Both books are available until the end of January for $0.99 (usually $2.99) so if you’re Byzantically inclined, feel free to buy and please – REVIEW! You can review either:

wherever you bought the book (Amazon or a wide range of non-demonic retailers)Goodreads at https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/75588256-all-the-evils Or…by just leaving a comment on this blog post

And finally – isn’t it time we stopped being so prissy about the sex lives of powerful women? Anyone else for the historical resurrection of Jezebel, in all her brave, sexy glory?