Sendico - novel #4

 I've been digging into the archives. 

I knew I had something somewhere but, could I find it? No. I dug away all day, went though every file, every box. Nothing. I was sure I had seen something, found something, a week or two back. 

Why couldn't I find it now?

The whole day wasted, I thought. I felt depressed. 

Then I had a brainwave. It was an inspiration. 

Perhaps. 

There was something underneath that pile of stuff on the trolley in the corner of the Hut. Could it possibly be ...? I lifted the weight off the trolley and yanked out the papers trapped underneath. 

Yes! Here it is!

The date on the papers was 2009. 

I had written, or perhaps dreamed, the best part of a novel set in the last years of the western Roman Empire, that period known to those who know as the Late Antique, peopled by Jerome, Augustine, Ambrose, the usurper Magnus Maximus and the emperors Theodosius, Valentinian and Honorius and Ellen of the Armies, Justinia, Marcellena, Paula, to name just a few. 

It was the year AD 385. It was all happening. 

A young man, rejected at home, joins an expeditionary force, absconds and travels the Mediterranean world in the company of those we now call great. His journey takes him via London to Trier, Milan, Rome, Jerusalem and, finally, Bethlehem.

It is the year AD 415 and he wants to go home.

Paulinus Aurelius Sendico; it is his story I want to finish next. 

This will be novel #4.

These printouts from 2009 are the starting point. There is more somewhere. I am sure there is more. I will go on looking in old notebooks and old computer files, always assuming that MS Word now will read the files from MS Word then ... I will look and I will find what I can and I will summon up my dreams from all those years ago. 

And I will write Sendico, novel #4.

It will take a while, a year maybe, maybe less. I have novels #2 and #3 waiting to be published. 

There is work to be done