Is this your first novel? What inspired you to write it? Have you find found it easy to write?
this post was submitted on 27 Jan 2024
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Hi, thanks so much for the questions.
Is this your first novel?
Nope. I think this is around my fifteenth? I'm not sure, I've lost count because I've been cranking these fuckers out for twenty years. I had to unpublish a bunch that I had written before my radicalization because they were too liberal / racist / sexist etc. You can find a communist SF series I wrote here.
What inspired you to write it?
I first found out about Byzantium when I was a teenager playing Medieval: Total War, and I was amazed that I had never heard of this vast empire before. I read the John Julius Norwich history books about it, and was always kind of interested and appreciative of Byzantium, while also being mindful of its mysterious, near total lack of presence in Western culture. Then, a couple of years ago, I finished that last series I just linked you to, and needed a new project to work on. I actually had a few ideas and asked hexbear which one they liked the most. Somebody said Byzantium (one of the ideas), and here I am. The series is a trilogy, and it's complete. The first two books are finished, the third book is in its second draft form and will be completely done in a couple of months. If I post three chapters a week, it will take two years to post everything, at which point I will publish the books in their complete form on amazon. I also really enjoyed researching the fuck out of Byzantium and learning a lot more about it, and wrote this series because I thought Byzantium deserves more attention (with a communist twist, of course). I also wanted to write a fantasy series in which anyone can have magical powers (rather than just the specials versus the poo people), and where you can't really do anything cool unless you work as a team with workers / peasants / slaves / women / colonized people etc. in the name of universal human liberation.
Have you find found it easy to write?
Writing is easy. Making money from writing? That's hard.
I'm not a fan of gaming systems in fiction, but I'll give it a try.
So, I've read the novel, and left a review. It's good, you should continue like that. The Rpg elements weren't too annoying for me, even if I don't think they really help the story at the moment.
Otherwise, like I said in the review, occasionally it's really obvious that you're speaking through your characters. You sometimes use extremely specific terms, like "worker's state" for example. Also, I feel like in the context of Byzantium, treating the uprising as peasant-based would be more appropriate, as workers would be mostly insignificant for an uprising in that time period. You could talk about a peasant republic, kinda like Dithmarschen irl. Explore communist thought using a different terminology to reflect the different situation, but with the same underlying mentality.
Also, I found it hilarious how you turned dialectical materialism into a superpower.
I’ve always liked the term “toiler” when talking about pre-industrial settings, like it’s broad enough to cover slaves, serfs, peasants, craftsmen, levied soldiers, etc