I had one of those rare weeks where I didn’t write.
We spent the week in Rome. Not a writing trip. No laptop, no word counts, no “I’ll just make a few notes” that quietly turns into a chapter by accident. But when you write fantasy for a living, you can’t really switch that part of your brain off.
And Rome is ridiculous for story fuel.
Every corner gives you another ruin, statue, inscription, archway, or impossible piece of engineering, and every one of them is whispering something about power, empire, spectacle, faith, or the strange lengths people will go to make themselves permanent.
So yes. I came home with ideas.
The Colosseum is one of those places that feels unreal even while you’re standing in it. I kept trying to imagine sitting there two thousand years ago, packed in with tens of thousands of other people, watching gladiators kill each other for the afternoon’s entertainment.
As a fantasy writer, you can’t help thinking about the machinery behind that spectacle. Not the combat itself — the systems around it. Who pays. Who benefits. Who gets sacrificed. What it does to a culture when public violence becomes the default civic entertainment.
Cheery holiday thoughts, obviously.
The Forum gave me the same feeling. Walking through the bones of power. Temples, law courts, political spaces, monuments — all of it ruined, all of it still heavy with what it used to mean.
I’m always drawn to that gap. The distance between what something once claimed to be and what’s left of it.
The Vatican Museum was a mixed experience. As most of you know, I’m legally blind, and the Sistine Chapel’s lighting did me no favours. I couldn’t make out much of the imagery, and a lot of the detailed paintings were lost on me.
But I got a different kind of useful from it.
The scale. The wealth. The careful performance of sacred authority. The contrast between the Gospels (poverty, humility, washing other people’s feet) and the centuries of accumulated gold, marble, and gilded ceiling above your head. That gap again. What an institution claims to be versus what it actually became.
The Egyptian collection was a highlight, especially a magnificent Anubis statue.
My favourite part of the Vatican Museum wasn’t the Sistine Chapel.
It was the Popemobiles.
I genuinely loved them. There’s a whole section showing papal transport through the ages, from golden carriages to modern vehicles with raised bulletproof platforms. A golden carriage tells you one thing about power. A bulletproof glass box tells you something else entirely. Both are theatre. Both are how a ruler manages the distance between himself and the people watching.
I can already feel that feeding into the Ravenglass Universe somewhere. Not Popemobiles, unfortunately, but the question of how rulers present themselves to the public. What they sit in. What they wear. How high above the crowd they stand. How close they let anyone get. How much danger they’re willing to admit exists.
The kind of detail that makes a fantasy culture feel real.
My favourite place on the whole trip was Ostia Antica, the old Roman port at the mouth of the Tiber.
I’d been to Pompeii before. Astonishing, but heaving. Ostia Antica was quieter. Space to slow down and actually be there. We walked through streets, bathhouses, courtyards, old living spaces. The amphitheatre felt almost modern in its layout, which is a strange thing to say about something two thousand years old, but you could immediately understand how people gathered there.
That’s the thing that gets me. The past feels distant until you’re standing somewhere and realise people haven’t changed as much as we like to think. They still wanted entertainment, comfort, status, food, gossip, religion, beauty. Somewhere to sit. Somewhere to wash. Somewhere to be seen.
The museum at Ostia Antica was wonderful (and well-lit) so I could actually enjoy the exhibits. As some of you know, I studied history of art to PhD level, and worked at the Henry Moore Institute in Leeds for a while, so the focus on sculptures meant I was in my element.
A good sculpture shows you what someone looked like.
A great sculpture shows you who they were.
There were portraits, reliefs, sarcophagi, mythological figures. A statue of Minerva I keep thinking about a week later.
There’s something about sculpture that feels especially useful for fantasy. It carries memory. It turns people into symbols. It can flatter, distort, preserve, threaten, or haunt. Statues in fantasy worlds shouldn’t just stand in courtyards looking decorative. They should tell you what a culture values, what it fears, and what lies it tells about itself.
A rare week off writing, but not really a week off stories. I came home with ideas for scenes, settings, power structures, rituals, public spectacles, imperial symbols, and the ways empires try to make themselves look eternal.
Some of it will end up in the Ravenglass Universe.
That’s one of the great joys of writing fantasy. You look at our own history, with all its beauty and brutality, and ask what happens if you tilt the mirror slightly.
Rome tilted the mirror plenty.
And now, back to the writing.
