False Beginning

It's almost a requirement for a first novel: you will throw away at least twenty beginnings before finally arriving at the one you keep.

The beginning I wrote back at the beginning? I’m not sure I even remember that one now.

In the many iterations since then, there have been some first pages I’ve loved. Below is one I had to say goodbye to a few months ago. Not because I didn’t think it was “good,” or even because it doesn’t start at the right place. In fact, it starts at the only place. But it turns out there are other more pressing things readers need to know first. (Maybe especially more pressing things than me showing off my “writing skills.”)

Right now, I am approximately three beginnings on from this one. I don’t know if the one I currently have will be “the” one. It always seems like it is. It never has been yet.

I know the passages authors love are not always their best. Perhaps even the opposite. So although I liked what's below as a first page, I also wonder how wrong I might have been.

("Kill your darlings" is such a cliché that I'm not even going to mention it here -- except to reference this article about who actually said it first.)

The Fasti Antiates Maiores: a Roman calendar from before the Julian reform, c. 60 BC.

1. The Ides of March

Pay close attention, because where this story begins is also where it ends. Same day. Same place. Different only because of what happens in between.

How can this be? Easily enough. Even now time bends, although it’s more convenient to pretend it doesn’t. Back then, when the calendar was new, such things were harder to ignore. Fitting each day into its proper place on the grid wasn’t always as simple as it seemed.

And that day—well.

The Lady Atia had a calendar, of course. They were all the rage that year: Caesar’s latest invention, so scientific it was magical. All the best families were commissioning painted versions of them for their walls. Since the Lady Atia was Caesar’s niece, she had outdone the others. Her calendar was elaborately carved into one of the marble pillars that supported the atrium of her house in Rome, directly between two shrines to the ancestral gods. Not something you could simply slap a fresco over when the technology became outdated. That was as it should be. Caesar had boasted that he had the power to parcel out time until the end of history, and the least his niece could do was invest a little money in showing she believed him.

All the more so because it wasn’t true. The year before that one had lasted for 445 days, in spite of anything the calendar said. More and more now, the seasons were slipping from their appointed months, the lucky and unlucky days getting mixed up with each other, until no one could be sure which was which. Caesar’s calendar was simply an exercise in believing otherwise. In trusting that Rome was supreme and unchanging, that the barbarians wouldn’t beat down the gates, that the relentless erosion of the good old days could be stopped. That time could be captured in stone.

Ursus, whenever he passed through the atrium, liked to study the twelve neat columns of days, each one marked with a letter to show its character—propitious or ill-omened, a market day or a day for an assembly, a god’s day or a day of penance or something in between. Those, the in-between days, were the most interesting. The days on which anything at all could happen. The ides of March, when this story begins, was one.

Imperial Roman calendar. Calendar history is way too much fun for nerds like me. See cool websites on the Roman calendar here, and the history of the Western calendar here.