I started this novel late in 2021 after having travelled through Italy from Bolzano in the north to Rome in the centre and then across the Med to Sardinia. My official purpose in making the trip was to collect our effects from our recently sold apartment in the town of Castelsardo on the north coast of Sardinia. My personal purpose, the one that excited me more, was to visit as many of my Italian friends as possible. These were friends that I’d made entirely during the lockdowns of 2020 and 2021, and it was they who had encouraged me to think about taking up writing in my tender old age, having enjoyed the accounts and silly stories that I’d been writing in Italian. I owe each of them a debt, for otherwise, I cannot imagine I’d have ever begun writing. So, here I was in September of 2021 driving across France and into Northern Italy, and at a certain point, I started to imagine how the original pilgrims and crusaders would have experienced the same journey. And over long hours at the wheel, the idea formed in my mind to write of one such pilgrim, an English knight called William. I can’t recall the point at which Feydor the jester came to me, but figuring him out has been a joyous experience, having so many layers and hidden motivations. Then came Imelda, William’s love interest, Helena and much else besides. The name of the book came to me during a period in which authoritarians appeared to be taking over the world and drowning us all in their fake news. I got to thinking what fake news would have looked like in the middle ages and came up with false tidings as something Shakespeare might have invented. This led to the overall theme of the book, which is about truth, and then the central argument of whether truth is something we can derive through reason, or otherwise. William’s internal journey involves him discovering that reason doesn’t explain everything - at least it doesn’t in the context of this book. The books started as a comedic romp, but as I learned about how stories work, it gradually became a serious work with a serious message that is told, though only in part, through humour. I think this helps me create some literary distance between myself and the grandfather of the /fantasy genre, a certain T. Pratchett esq, whose inventiveness and output far exceed anything I could hope to achieve.
As part of researching this book, I’ve become passionate about medieval history and have read a lot of books and consumed a lot of podcasts. False Tidings is not a historical novel in the sense that it follows documented events. Rather, I like to think that it is inspired by history, which gives me the freedom to be quite accurate in my descriptions or not, depending on the context and my whims. You will find a lot of end notes that explain what’s based on reality or otherwise. It wasn’t originally my intention to include these, but it got requested a few times by early readers when I explained why I’d written things in particular ways. I had beta readers who said I was inventing ridiculous things that were actually based on the documented truth, so it actually started to make sense to point this out using the end notes. I went for endnotes rather than footnotes so as not to be obtrusive and not to copy the discworld novels. Later readers have said they found the notes interesting and informative. I had some debate with readers about describing medieval attitudes, particularly as they pertained to women and sexuality. It will come as no surprise to anyone that the times were egregiously misogynistic by modern standards, and some readers wanted me to write those out of the narrative. After all, if this is a fantasy, I can write whatever I want, so why mention misogynistic things? While I chose in the end to include such content, I was careful to have my characters say and do things that showcase my own opinions, which are that women deserve all the hard-won rights they have today, and many more besides. At the time of writing False Tidings. I haven’t yet depicted racial minorities in the series. I did have a joke in there at one point (the best joke in the book, as it happens) that highlighted certain modern (abhorrent) attitudes, but was advised to take it out by some of my beta readers. It’s just not worth risking being misunderstood. That said, non-Caucasians existed in the Middle Ages and reached even western Europe, so I plan to introduce merchants and mercenaries from other cultures later in the series. As to whether actors of Asian or African extraction should appear in historic dramas, I will sidestep the debate and say that having to decide whether to include them in my own screen version of the series would be a nice problem to have. Frankly, I would have no issues with casting Ridkin, for example, as an African-British character. Like this stuff is ever going to be making it onto a screen. I will say one other thing on this topic. The Middle-Ages is a catchall term for a very long period in history, during with human society changed in ways that we often overlook. I am indebted to Ian Mortimer for his fine book on Medieval Horizons for my understanding of this too often ignored aspect of history. If I had to pick a specific period in the (at least) 600 years or so that spanned the end of the dark ages through to the Tudors on which to think of the novel as being based, I would go for the late 15th Century, although I pillage other centuries where exigency requires it.