A Botetourt author concludes her trilogy set in ancient Rome.
Botetourt-based author and elementary school music teacher Margaret Courtney, who goes by the pen name Brook Allen, will release the final book in her trilogy set in ancient Rome on October 16, 2020.
Courtesy of Brook Allen
Brook Allen is the penname of Margaret Courtney.
“Antonius: Soldier of Fate” starts right after the Battle of Philippi when Marcus Antonius is faced with having to keep the peace. He has a grand vision of continuing east the way that Alexander the Great did. Additionally, when he encounters Cleopatra again, their relationship truly starts to take off.
“He’s faced with a lot of troubles because he winds up going to what is now Iraq and Iran and was then the Parthian Empire,” Allen says. “I don’t want to give too much of the plot away, but it changes his life drastically.”
Allen explains that the book features a lot of battle scenes, which she had to grow used to writing. Antonius’ last battle, which was a sea battle, was the most difficult for her to write. “Boy, I had to really try to research and figure that out. I wanted it to be as realistic as possible,” she says.
The most challenging part of writing the entire trilogy for Allen was staying inside the mindset of Antonius. “I had to constantly question what he would have been thinking at a specific moment. All of his history was written by his enemies. Even historians have to admit that because of that, some of the history was extremely skewed,” she explains. “I had to come up with reasons why he did things. I had to make them as historically accurate as possible.”
Courtesy of Brook Allen
Brook Allen’s final book in her trilogy set in ancient Rome will be released on October 16.
The entire book was written during the first five months of the COVID-19 pandemic when students were not allowed at school due to health concerns and Allen was cooped up at home.
“I had some time while I was at home and I was able to do it. It made getting into the character’s lives so much easier than having to pick up where I had left off after a long day of working,” she says. “Being able to stay in the realm of ancient Rome day after day was a dream. It was just wonderful. It was a time I’m extremely grateful for because I was able to finish the trilogy.”
The first two books in the trilogy, “Antonius: Son of Rome” and “Antonius: Second in Command,” were both released in 2019. Recently, Allen found out that the latter had been selected as the 2020 silver medal recipient of the International Readers Favorite Book Reviewer’s Competition for Historical Fiction. It also won the Coffee Pot Book Club Book of the Year Award in 2019.
The first book follows Marcus Antonius who is desperate to redeem his name and carve out a legacy for himself after his father dies in disgrace.
The second book continues when “amid the crisis of the Ides of March, Marcus must don the mantle of ruthlessness to carve his own legacy in Rome’s history.”
Research for the three books took Allen to Italy, Egypt, Greece and Turkey. She says she went to those places because she wanted to see for herself what the places where Antonius lived, fought and died look like.
“I was able to rehash the thoughts of what it was like over there and what I had reimagined,” she explains. “I was able to go back and research some things that I was a little uncertain about. I made notes for my author’s notes. I immersed myself.”
Courtesy of Brook Allen
Brook Allen poses beside a bust of Antonia Minora, Marcus Antonius’ daughter, while in Rome.
While in Rome, she was able to pinpoint the exact location of events that were in her novels that had troubled her such as whether a character could have made it from one point to another in a specific amount of time.
“Details like that do make a difference because you want to make the book as factual as you can even though it’s historical fiction,” she says.
Writing the trilogy set in ancient Rome has been a dream come true for Allen. Ever since her sophomore year of high school when she read William Shakespeare’s “Julius Caesar” in an English class, the ancient world has intrigued her.
“The teacher made it really intriguing and challenging for us,” she says. “I fell in love with that play and I ended up falling in love with the history of Rome.”
In the years since, she has devoured countless articles, books and television programs about ancient Rome.
It wasn’t until after reading Margaret George’s “The Memoirs of Cleopatra” that she decided to take the plunge into writing herself. She eventually wrote to George thanking her for inspiring her, which ended up leading to an author-mentor relationship. “She has been a huge driving force in my work,” Allen says. “She has been a mentor and has given me golden opportunities that many authors of my caliber at this point and time don’t get.” George even ended up providing a blurb for Allen’s first book.
“It is hard to believe, but I’ve been an author for nearly a year and a half and it’s been the most incredible experience. Researching, traveling while researching, meeting new people, teaching workshops, brushing up on public speaking, seeing things from unique perspectives, and learning how to be an author,” Allen wrote on her blog back in August.
Courtesy of Brook Allen
Margaret George, left, and Brook Allen are pictured at the Historical Novel Society Conference in Maryland in 2019.
Allen says that it’s bittersweet to finally be finished with the trilogy. She describes the characters she devoted much of her free time over the past few years to as “near and dear” to her.
Although her newest book hasn’t even been released yet, Allen has already started research for her next project.
“I will miss working on ancient Rome, but I’m going to take a retreat from it and will be working on something set closer to home. I will be writing about Fincastle. I will be telling the story of Santillane and Julia Hancock and William Clark,” she says. Her target release date for the new book is sometime before 2022.
She adds that she has no doubt that she will eventually return to ancient Rome.
In anticipation of the release of the book, Book No Further will be hosting a Zoom book launch on October 15 from 6:00-7:30 p.m.
Additional information about Allen can be found at: https://www.brookallenauthor.com.
About the Author:
Aila Boyd is an educator and journalist who resides in Roanoke. She holds an MFA in Writing from Lindenwood University.