Various Ideas About Historical Fictions
I just had a thought about a book I'd like to write. So the Ides of March having just passed I'm seeing a lot of mention of it on Twitter (I probably follow a disproportionate amount of history nerds ...... who, incidentally, tend to unfortunately skew towards toxic opinions, though that might be an all-twitter thing now (though there's a funny rule of thumb I've heard about people with classical marble statues as their profile pics as generally being toxic)). And to go off immediately on another tangent today I learned Caeser's actual last words as reported by Suetonius were "Kai su teknon" which is Greek for "and you child?" and _could_ be translated into "Et tu [pueri?]" in Latin or with a bit more literary license the famous "Et tu Brute" to refer specifically to Brutus, but is most probably actually a reference to the "kai su" that often appeared in curse tablets at the time, ie what he was actually saying was more like "see you in hell, punk!"
But anyway anyway, this all got me thinking about how I've often thought here should be a whole series of historical fiction books set right at the fall of the Republic, civil war and rise of the Roman Empire, not least of which because I think there could be some eerie parallels to today. I imagine it being a bitttt like the Richard Sharpe series about the Napoleonic wars, but I think would definitely need at least two POV characters, who start out as best friends but find themselves on different sides of the civil war. Except what I didn't like about the Sharpe and other series' by Bernard Cornwell is that his protagonists always are the real heroes and the known heroes are always bad people who took credit -- in his telling he'd probably have Caeser as an incompetent or something (like he did to, I don't know, King Alfred, King Arthur, Paul Revere, etc etc) -- I much prefer the Flashman series that totally reverse that with the protagonist being a scoundrel who gets pulled into things and given undue credit, though obviously only one character could probably be like that.
Anyway, here's where we catch up with the most recent thought I was excited about -- one of Caeser's first adventures was fighting pirates on the coast of what is now Turkey, I was contemplating how I might write about that and suddenly I realized, for this one would simply use as a model my other favorite genre: this would be very much Master & Commander / Horatio Hornblower etc etc etc but in triremes (galleys) in the Adriatic! (And this being like 20-30 years before the main parts of the story perhaps the father of one of the future main characters would be a POV sailor on Caeser's trireme or something).
So yeah add that to the list of future books I'd like to write. It occurs to me, I've got no shortage of ideas, if there was any way to guarantee at least a modicum of success with at least one I could probably justify spending enough time to start getting them written but....
And unrelated to the above, but another literary idea I was very excited about the other other day. I was thinking about the Master-and-Commander-in-Space genre (a la like the Honor Harrington series), and I had this sudden idea I felt was amazing. So there's always always artificial gravity right, which is just hand waved into existing, though I note in both the "Honorverse" and The Expanse it doesn't work when the ship isn't under power. But otherwise it generally works fine. My thought was this. What if it DOESN'T ever work fine. What IF just, the best the technology can accomplish is artificial gravity that's just a bit ... wavy. As in like.. it feels a bit like being in a ship at sea. People get sea (space) sick, professional spacers walk with the rolling gate sailors are known for.
In other other other news I've been working on an entry that is essentially reviews of all the major Napoleonic Wars naval series. I might post that presently.