Ruth Downie

…and thank you for visiting.

I’m the author of three mysteries featuring Roman Army medic and reluctant sleuth, Gaius Petreius Ruso. His third adventure was published by Penguin in April – there’s a shot of the cover on the right – whereupon the News of the World  announced that, ‘It looks set to complete a hat-trick of hits for Downie.’  Let’s hope they’re right.

To find out more about the books (including why they all have two titles), click here. Events are listed on this page, but if we can’t meet in person, you can always contact me here. This is where you can find out that an author’s life is not as exciting as that of her characters, and below are the latest musings on the blog:

…because the deadline for the initial draft of Ruso 4 is 31 December. I am too ashamed to say what it was before the nice people at the publishers agreed to extend it.

So, apologies for the dearth of posts over the last few weeks. It’s looking like a quiet Christmas here at Downie Towers – but hopefully a cheerful New Year.

The Large Print edition of Persona Non Grata has now been published with this fine chap on the cover:

Author’s aren’t consulted about Large Print covers (or at least, I’m not) so there was no chance to ask where this shot was taken. I’d love to know because the background is not unlike Corbridge, where I spent many happy hours researching the second of  Ruso’s  adventures.

If anyone knows who the tip of that nose belongs to, please pass on my thanks.

Finally got organised to register for Poisoned Pen’s Webcon. I’ll be donning my pinny to host the chat in the Virtual Coffee Shop at 4.30-5 pm UK time tomorrow (Saturday 24th). If anyone’s around and would care to drop by, you’ll be most welcome.

I’ll be taking over from the excellent Jane Finnis, who’s making the coffee for the previous half-hour, so hopefully there will be some crossover*.  If it’s quiet we can have a chat over the washing-up about some gloriously obscure aspect of Roman Britain and the  fiction we both weave around it .

As regards the technical aspects  – ‘fraid I haven’t a clue how this sort of thing works, nor what time 4.30 will be across the rest of the virtual community, but people who DO know have made it all clear on the Webcon site.

*LATER – no there won’t, not unless something goes seriously wrong, as the final schedule says there should be a half-hour gap between us.  I’ll be sharing the hosting with Jenny White – hopefully that’s the right link!

Currently typing through the fog of jetlag, in which it’s hard to identify familiar sounds as you wake (ah, let me think – yes, that alarming crash is somebody opening the bathroom door…)

We got home from Tokyo yesterday evening, which was really six this morning, and it’s now 7.30 am or halfway through the afternoon, depending which bit of my brain is operating. Possibly neither, after six flights, three countries and three increasingly baffling languages in a fortnight.

The original mission was to visit Vladivostok. For those who don’t know, as I didn’t, it’s at the far end of Trans Siberian Railway from Moscow, and locals can hop on a ferry for Japan or Korea, or catch the train to China. Youngest son has been studying there for the last nine months, and we planned to travel home with him and his huge quantity of amassed baggage and DVD’s. (Should the jetlag keep us awake again tonight, we can sit up and watch Daniel Craig being James Bond in fluent Russian.)

Naturally mission creep began to occur as soon as the trip was announced. Husband found himself explaining to Tokyo airport security that the mysterious objects on the x-ray were two tins of Lyons black treacle, being delivered to a friend in Japan with a hankering for a taste of home.

Another friend needed medicines delivered to Japan from her mother in Russia. Unfortunately there was also a pot of jam (?) which was not only technically a liquid but, by the time it reached Tokyo airport, leaky. (We had already, with regret, refused to take the plastic bag full of white powder. We were assured it was nothing sinister, but we didn’t know the Japanese for ‘this is only Bicarbonate of Soda,  officer.’)

More later. Hopefully some fascinating multicultural insights will float up through the haze. And I’ll remember to mention Korea. Or maybe I’ll just post a few photos.

The annual Whitehall Roman Villa dig started today. It’s good to see old friends, meet new people and get muddy together as we unearth more evidence of what it was like to live in Northamptonshire under Roman rule.

Jeremy Cooper’s doing a blog on the dig website. This enables people who aren’t there to see what’s going on and those of us who are to find out what it is we’re actually doing. When you’re head down in a trench, it’s sometimes hard to tell.

Click here to find out more about the Open Day on Sunday 12 July.

In the words of a card we’ve just received from Vladivostok -

‘Let there be festivity, a Christmas tree, presents and sweets, and may all good and kind omens come true. Let snowflakes twirl in their round dances, and may you have joy. Happy New Year!’

(I think it may have lost something in the translation, but the sentiment is there.)

…but this one made me laugh: http://www.aroundmd.com/whitechristmas/

There are celebrations at Downie Towers tonight as one of the editors has just OK’d the final changes to Book 3 and it won’t return here until next year, when the copy editors have spotted all the things the rest of us missed.

Tonight’s festivities will take the form of a glass of chilled white wine, followed by an assault on the mountain of ironing that we have been moving from room to room for the last three weeks in the vain hope of losing it.

I’ve just spent the last two days in bed surrounded by a chaos of medicines, tissues, drinks, phone and laptop wires and a happy cat who doesn’t usually have someone to sleep on during the day. All of which has led me to realise just how divorced from real life fiction is. When did you last read a story where a major character had the flu?

Admittedly it’s hard to get involved in exciting action when your legs are made of jelly and your brain has turned to blancmange…  It’s not easy to write blog posts either. Maybe flu’s absence from fiction indicates that it’s really not very interesting to anyone else.

Ah. Sorry about that, then. I’ll go back to bed now.