Shocking to look up and see three hours have just passed unnoticed. All that time to make a simple list of character names, and I'd already come up with some of them!! I did spend some of the time in research, reading for example about Bayezid and Selim, both sons of Suleiman the Magnificent, or watching a Clairol hair colouring video on YouTube, (my Boudica look is perfectly captured by the hair model).


There was a certain amount of jiggling going on. Fortunately, this was confined to the ages of characters in relationship to one another.

I also read (again), the Wikipedia article on the Spanish Armada - shock confession here - back in the early days of the Internet, when making your own website was a thing, I wanted to learn about html. Rather than a very uninspiring "Hello World" website, I made one about Elizabeth I, and her life and especially the members of her court. It was quite popular, I think some were using it as a homework source. So, I am not unfamiliar with her life, or the Spanish Armada.

Remember me burbling about my objections when a bad guy suggested that the Spanish Armada be my climax for the novel? "Ahh! Yes, but."
The main thing is that the Armada did not happen at the beginning of Elizabeth I's reign, in fact it was 30 years later. My novel doesn't span that long a period, and I had made a decision that I was not going to slavishly follow real history in a work of fantasy.

So It's going to happen a lot sooner, and it's an Iberian Invasion force. I wanted Drake in, so he has had to be born a while before his real world birthdate in order to be old enough.

This morning I woke from a dream in which a massively powerful storm had appeared from nowhere, blown the person I was talking to, and the bench she and her friend were on clean away, and very nearly blown a bus away as well. Then there was the lightening strike, I saw some in the sky, but then it struck the ground right in front of me. The ground glowed bright blue, then - as this was a dream I didn't question this, there was part of a tree in front of me, that had evidentially been struck.

Why am I telling you all this? Well it gave me an idea to make the climax even more exciting, (I hope). A psychically produced lightening bolt will strike the main mast of the Iberian flagship, and blow the ship into splinters. The flagship is named The Sol Inviticus - which means unconquerable Sun. Its destruction will be a deadly blow to the moral of the rest of the fleet. So a big thanks to my muse.