Nhys Glover and one more tool for historical authors

Hi, all! I’m super excited to have author Nhys Glover here today, talking about Stanford University’s Orbis Project. For those writers obsessed with the Roman Empire this is for you! Since I love learning about all times, I love the Orbis Project too! Here’s some music to enjoy while you read through. And now here’s Nhys! 

 

BLOG POST: EXPLORING THE ANCIENT ROMAN EMPIRE WITH ORBIS

When I wrote my first historical romance set in Ancient Rome I spent an inordinate amount of time trying to calculate how long it would take to get from Point A to Point B, factoring in the average pace of horses over long distance, type of vehicles used, and geographical factors like mountains, swamps etc. Sometimes I’d get so frustrated that I’d just gloss over those little details with ‘a weeks or more later’, or something equally as vague. Then when I was researching my second Roman Historical some years later I came across Stanford University’s Orbis Project. (Note the vagueness in the timing there, too? That’s not from ignorance but because I wrote that first book, Liquid Fire, over about twenty years.)

Imagine if you wanted to take a holiday (vacation for you Americans) somewhere in the world, but you weren’t sure where or how best to get there. Imagine sticking a pin in the map and then entering your home address and then your hypothetical destination. Sure, you can do that on a Route Finder. But does it also give you different methods of travel and the different lengths of time they will take at different times of the year? And even more importantly, does it give you the cost for each different type of journey? None that I’ve been able to find does all that in one place.

But Orbis does it all and more. Over four novels I’ve used Orbis to plot journeys from Rome to Pompeii, (it was faster to do it by sea I discovered, though in my first novel my protagonists did it by carriage because I didn’t know any better,) and on to Carthage. From Northern Africanus my protagonists took ship for Gaul and onward to Britannia. Or they travelled from Rome to Magna Germania or Rhodus and Ephesus. Every journey I was able to lay out in detail, right down to the time between one port or town and the next on the trip.

Now obviously knowing all this information doesn’t mean using all this information, but it’s amazing how wonderfully useful it is when plotting a chase across the Empire when there are several different groups, some of whom depend on merchant ships for travel and others on much faster military vessels. I could create separate timelines for each group and work out how best they could intersect at strategic moments. I couldn’t have even contemplated that without Orbis.

So how do you get to access this miraculous tool? Does it cost you a fortune? Is it restricted to researchers or academics? You can access it here http://orbis.stanford.edu/orbis2012/ , (just click on the map to get started,) it costs you nothing to use, and any old Joe Bloggs can use it. All it takes is time to get your head around it, like any new app. That’s why, when the new Orbis version came in, (I’ve directed you to the older version,) I was relieved to see the old one was still available. I had enough time learning how to negotiate the first version, I had no desire to upgrade for the bells and whistles of the new version. (A bit like Windows and Word upgrades. Do we really need them? But that’s my pet peeve and irrelevant here.)

If you’ve ever imagined life back in Roman times, then take a cyber-journey there, courtesy of Orbis. To give it a bit of colour, Google some of the odd place names and see what comes up. And if you get really hooked, you might decide to try writing a novel about the period yourself. It is, in my opinion, a much underrated era for the romance genre.

And if you don’t want to do the work, you can always read one of my novels. ‘The Gladiator’s Bride’, my latest, is set just outside Rome and then in Ancient Britannia. I used Orbis to plot the mission to save the heroines in the latter part of the book. It’s available for pre-release order now. Or if I’ve whetted your appetite for all things Roman and you want to get started right now, and don’t mind a bit of sizzle in your romance, try ‘The Barbarian’s Mistress’ and see just how I used Orbis for yourself.

Thanks, so much, Nhys! Please click on the image below to find more about Gladiator’s Bride . . .