2020 a year we will not forget, however hard we try.

While I love history and write about history, I have come to the conclusion that I don’t like living through history and, after this year, I am sure many would agree with me. Dominated by COVID-19 and Brexit, 2020 has been a difficult year.

Not that this year has been all bad and I have been fortunate enough not to have lost anyone to this horrible disease. With the schools shut, I enjoyed homeschooling my son, I managed a lovely holiday to Germany in the summer and we gained a new pet. Or kind of two new pets. During locked down we looked after a bearded dragon – Godzilla – for a school and got so attached to him he still comes home weekends and school holidays. And then we bought our own, my little baby Oggy. But however happy I could feel, the death toll reported each night on the news was a constant reminder of how fragile life is and how easily we could be plunged into tragedy. With vaccinations starting I still hardly dare hope my family can come through this unscathed.

But this is history. My grandchildren and great-grandchildren will one day study these days and so I have been keen to take photos documenting it, so I and my children will have sources to show them. And it will undoubtedly form the backdrop of historical novels of the future. Exhausted medical staff, drawn together through tragic nights, villains who exploit the virus to their own aims, young lovers forced to go months apart… the possibilities are endless.

Writing has been tricky this year. Partly because of having children at home with competition for time on the computer. But partly because of the subject matter of my next books – something I decided on back in the autumn of 2019 before we had heard of COVID.

It had long been a plan to write a Arthurian/histfic hybrid returning to the global disaster I first wrote about in The Girl from Brittia and this was the year I was going to do it. Tales of the Wasteland is going to be a series set in the decade after the great global cooling event of 536. And, yes, it includes a pandemic. Writing about a pandemic while living through one may have brought me closer to my characters, but it was also far too close to home with many parallels between the events I was writing and those unfolding on the news around me. It even changed the fate of a character as I just could not bear to write about losing a parent to the disease. Writing book one, Tyrant Whelp and the first draft of book two has at times been slow progress, but I hope to bring book one out very soon!

I admit to struggling to feel hope for 2021. COVID is still raging with the new cases and death toll as high as it has ever been in the UK. And with Brexit finally happening I remain desperately sad for the loss of my EU citizenship and my fears for what it will do to my country and my children’s future.

But it is always darkest just before dawn and are, perhaps, the first rays of a new post-COVID day peeping over the horizon? Vaccination is starting and in just a few weeks the USA will have a new president, maybe putting out of fashion the populist right wing government that has dominated both US and UK politics these last years.

A quote from Book Two of the Tales of the Wasteland sums up my own feelings.

Brioc half smiled. “Is there any hope?”

“There has to be,” Deryn replied. “Without hope we have nothing.”

So as we look to our own future, perhaps with hope, perhaps with trepidation, perhaps with a mixture of the two, all that remains now is to wish you:

A Happy New Year and every happiness for 2021!

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