Work in progress

Heather leaves 'Leaving Eden' for Trent Bridge

I thought Leaving Eden would break new ground; few novels are set in ancient history and none, as far as I'd found, chose to portray life in Mesopotamia. I'd already read several books about Sumer. The culture fascinated me; I loved the idea of getting right back to the beginnings of civilisation. And there were promising sources of information on the internet. Remembering the quantity of detail the web provided when I was researching A God Facing Both Ways, I assumed it would be an equally good source now.

Well, it was and it wasn't. The biggest barrier to getting a handle on the period was language. Sumerian, Akkadian, Elamite, Amorite, Assyrian - these are all unused languages with unused notation systems. I found a few articles attempting to explain their structure, but I needed a degree in linguistics to understand them. The scholars themselves admitted the dialects were difficult to learn. I did learn some rudiments, a few words, but it wasn't enough. Barely started, and already I felt at arm's length from the society I wanted to bring to life.

The next problem was trying to get details of everyday life. Apparently, there have been about 100,000 cuneiform tablets excavated from Ur alone. Not all have been translated, and of those a few have been published. The rest are poured over in higher academic circles, and considering the work it must take to process and analyse them, maybe I should have expected some esoteric corralling of the knowledge. The details I felt I needed for credibility were bound up in special interest journals and books with three figure price tags. By contrast, most of the information I needed for Both Ways came free of charge.

So I had to decide. The facts I could glean cheaply would do for a high school essay, maybe an undergraduate paper, but not a serious novel. Unless I took time out to obtain my masters degree in Near East Studies, any fiction I'd produce about Sumer would be caricature, not portrait. A trained eye would call it dumbed down and full of poor guesses. On top of that there was writer's block. Without a clear picture of my characters and their circumstances, I drew a blank again and again, and couldn't move the story beyond its first chapter.

Switching to Vitae Lampada isn't the giant leap away that it might seem. As with Leaving Eden, I wanted to explore the theme of myth. The Sumer novel was going to be an educated guess about how the myths of a dead culture were preserved into our time. In Vitae Lampada, I explore sport as a 20th century mythic form, and show how a person might use principles of sportsmanship to guide his life as if it were religion. The main characters in both books are men who begin to doubt the usefulness of the myths they once accepted, who must forge something new to keep themselves going.

The big difference with Lampada is that it is set in the present, literally this summer, in places I know well. I'm hoping this gets the ideas flowing. See what you think....

• Read Vitae Lampada, chapter 1