Everybody Hurts Sometimes

Imagine the suffering Alexei Navalny went through because he dared to challenge Putin’s corruption. He didn’t have to return to Russia where he knew the regime would kill him, but he did because he had the courage of his convictions.

REM’s song, quoted in the headline, is a lifeline to anyone who suffers but some suffer more than others. And as a novelist, I’ve always tried to feel the pain of the protagonists and characters in my novels, but I barely qualify.

I could never do what Navalny did.

But courage and pain will always be a theme in the historicals I write because they are set in times of extreme cruelty and heartlessness (nothing new there).

I didn’t set out to make suffering and backs-to-the-wall heroics a central theme of my novels, but I couldn’t stop it happening. Protagonists who are beaten down by people who think they are better. Or tortured, maimed, persecuted, murdered.

Like Navalny.

However, these novels have happy endings, or at least a sigh of relief. But Navalny didn’t have that luxury.

Epona, courageous priestess of Ritona, who features in The Britannia Conspiracy series scheduled for publication in 2025. Image by Lynda Adlington/MidJourney AI

I fell into these themes with my first novel, Libertas, which started out on the subject of bullying. A teenage Spaniard who along with his girlfriend was abused and all but destroyed and his family sold into slavery, before nature-loving country folk taught him how to survive and rebuild friendships strong enough to change the course of a war.

The habit stuck. In Line in the Sand, a young shepherd whose mother was reviled as a whore and whose brothers swore to kill him, who went on to become a king (yes, a well-known story with many an added twist).

In Viper, a veteran damaged by civil war who returns home to find his family has been wronged in the worst possible way.

In Sea of Flames, first in the queue to be republished this Spring by Sapere Books, the captain of a Greek ship seeks revenge against Mark Anthony for the murder of his father, aided and abetted by the courage of the cabin boy – named Ratboy because he looks like a rat and can’t remember his real name anyway – and the astonishing struggles the crew must go through out of conviction that right will prevail.

Don’t be deceived, these stories are not mere cut-and-thrust military heroics. All of them, now and in the future, feature women who suffer more than men. A priestess who found herself in the path of the Roman invasion of Gaul and Britannia, a Philistine princess and her Hebrew servant in the time preceding the Davidic monarchy of Israel, a handmaiden to Queen Cleopatra at make-or-break time for Rome, a poised young woman who will rule a city-port in southern Spain.

Middle East and Mediterranean powers did not want women like this and will do unspeakable things to those who think differently. Again, not just an ancient attitude.

None of these novels are available to buy. Yet.

My eensy teensy moment of suffering is nothing more than a spat with a publisher who took all of my books off the market. My family and friends have suffered far worse and I bet so have all the readers of this newsletter.

And, lucky me, at the risk of tempting fate I get a happy ending. Five novels trickling back onto the market, starting this Spring.

Before you say, sod off Forrest, you know nothing about suffering, remember there’s stuff you don’t know about me. Please take a spin around my website and sign up below for more really interesting newsletters.

Meanwhile, take REM’s words to heart:

When the day is long, hold on.

Everybody hurts, take comfort in your friends, everybody hurts

Don’t throw your hand when you feel like you’re alone

When you think you’ve had too much of this life to hang on

Everybody hurts, sometimes everybody cries

Everybody hurts sometimes.

Hold on…”