One of the only good things about finishing my PhD way back when was that it ended the 3.5 years of friends and family asking "How's the PhD going?" like there is any answer to that beyond "oh yeah, it's good. good", which actually means PLEASE HELP ME I CRY EVERY DAY AND I AM NOT GOOD ENOUGH WHY AM I DOING THIS AND WHY DO I LOVE IT SO. It's unfortunate for me that my life plans ended up being writing a book and then writing this book, because now every time I see anyone that I've not spoken to in a while I discover that they've just changed the word "PhD" to "book" and the question and answer are still the broadly the same (except for a period at the end of the first book when I answered everyone honestly with "I hate it. I hate it so much. It is a tumour on my soul" but that's passed now. It was a temporary condition).
It's nice then that at the moment I can give a really excited answer to this question for probably the first time ever and say that I feel like the book is going brilliantly! I have been sticking to a rigourous regime of having nothing in my life apart from working for money and writing this book, which has been going great and I have now passed the half-way mark for writing. That's 45,000 words I have forced out of my brain and three whole chapters. Agrippina is coming to life very quickly!
The best bit is that those three chapters should be the hard ones. They cover the years of Agrippina's exile, the massive hole in the centre of the best source for the whole period, and her five year disappearance from all source material, and there has been a lot of cursing, swearing an impossible revenge upon long, long dead men and drawing endless variations of the Julio-Claudian family tree as I try to work out exactly how everyone is related to each other. They look like this and really highlight my lack of spatial awareness and laziness when making notes.
Thankfully, in Agrippina's timeline, almost everyone in those diagrams has now died quite horribly, and Agrippina is finally the empress she (thought she) deserved to be. The next few tens of thousands of words should be a breeze!
So that's how the book is going. I'll be giving copies of this post to all distant relatives and acquiantances who ask from now on.
Emma x