How Do I Start This?
Starting a newsletter when you don't have a professional platform and other ways to lose friends and die young
It’s best to have an idea of what you want before starting a newsletter, right?
When I was 9, after stuffing my face with maccas chips, my fingers greasing up the keyboard of my parents’ Pentium something with a great big CRT monitor that beeped to tell you when it was ok to turn off, I wrote my first story. It was about dinosaurs — I was learning about triceratops and dipolodon and tyrannosaurus in school — and the adventures a triceratops and their family would get up to when they became acutely aware that their lives were going to end in a great flash of fire and death. See, I’d just learned in school that the dinosaurs were wiped out by a huge meteor, and that stuck with me.
The triceratops were my favorite dinosaur because they were cute, and packed a big punch with their horns, able to go toe to toe with bigger carnivores and keep their young alive.
Anyway, I won’t go into details about the story itself — it was really bad, think swapping present and past tense within sentences like they were on sale, and I think there was a flashback in a flashback there! — but it came to define my late childhood and early teenage years, that yes, I can write a story and enjoy it. From what I hear, many people don’t even get that far.
Little did I know at the time, that my own life would be wiped out by a huge meteor — or if we’re going with the metaphor, a shadow of death that stalked the house we lived in. My father died about a year after first writing that story, of a heart attack. One day, just goes to bed, and doesn’t wake up.
Writing seemed secondary to the loss of my dad. Many things did. School, friends. My mum went into crisis mode and hasn’t come out of it for nearly 20 years.
when we learned in pity given shock and force
this man had died before time and course
in all the house not a trickling sound;
the household spirits gone to ground.
a clock frozen in mid-second; though
holding a gasp; a breath. There we remain.
I’ve never been much of a poet, but there I tried to put into words my feelings at the time.
In late 2019, in the midst of a breakdown about my future, gasping under the pressure of work, I realised that I needed to write again. It had been pulling at the edges of my mind for nearly 20 years, and although I tried at various times in my teenage years to pick it up again, those attempts bowed to constant nitpicking and perfectionism.
I sat down, and decided I was going to write a book. I made a deal with myself: write. Don’t edit, don’t look back until you write that first draft. I wrote 75,000 words in six months.
Mind you, it was terrible. Like, never-see-the-light-of-day-terrible. About a year later, writing and editing all this time (I realized that I had an addiction, then), I began to wonder — what stories do I never see? What stories would I have love to have read when I was younger, stories about people who are my coloring, my culture. I’m Greek, you see. Then I read City of Brass by S.A. Chakraborty, and I realized, if she can write One Thousand and One Nights fan-fiction, why can’t I write about fan-fiction about the Eastern Romans?
You see, before Greece as a nation state, before the Ottomans, the Eastern Roman Empire spanned Greece and the Balkans, as well as Asia Minor, Syria and Palestine, and down into Africa and Italy at their greatest extent under Justinian. While the kings of Europe and Britain were living in mudhuts, the Eastern Romans, slandered now as the ‘Byzantines’, lived in cities of millions of people, larger than London or Paris even at their largest extent, before industrialization and the modern period.
Rome didn’t fall, they just went East.
How did people live then? They must’ve lived in what we would consider relative comfort, even now. They had running freshwater from aqueducts, available to anybody; sewerage systems; enormous architectural works; complex economies of scale and finance; early industrialization, machines, and assembly lines; and they were extremely wealthy, able to hire foreign and local mercenaries more or less as a standing army, rather than fighting themselves. Their politics and bureaucracy were extremely complex — and is in fact where we get ‘Byzantine bureaucracy’ as something that is notoriously difficult to navigate.
But their stories. Backstabbing, scandal, poison, assassins, political maneuvering, you name it. The building blocks of great drama. I saw an endless supply of stories here, ripe for the taking, that no one had ever seen before. So I started Born in the Purple, a story set in an alternate Eastern Roman Empire, about an empress who is overthrown by political machinations, and a potter that is forced to help her restore her throne.
Expect lots of death and backstabbing and drama ahead, and maybe some writing, too.