KARMA MARS
TRIVIA
"You’ve got that unhealthy preoccupation with the past."
Throughout the entire Karma trilogy, there's an abundance of references to the Romans. Most of them come from Darcy—for example, he compares himself to Cincinnatus, a consul during the Roman Republic and the namesake of one of America's finest cities—but even Reiko joins in on the outdated analogies, when she compares their group to a Carthage under Roman siege. Lucretia is a weird name, and my unhealthy preoccupation with the Romans can explain it—she was a Roman from the times before there was a Republic, even. Her rape and subsequent suicide led to a rebellion that destroyed the Etruscan monarchy, and made Rome Roman for the first time. The Karmas aren't the only books that suffer from such obsessions. The entirety of Bear Maze! was built around a series of Greek myths—and the Greeks aren't Romans, so I'll modify my accusation against myself: an unhealthy preoccupation with antiquity. The second full-length novel that I attempted to write was entirely about the life of Michelangelo, and the culture of Italy at the time. And one might say, "That's much later than antiquity, congratulations for expanding, Jude." But it's a book about people that were rediscovering their obsession with antiquity—the Renaissance. So I wasn't expanding at all, I was obsessing about a culture obsessed with the original obsession. Naturally, that got complicated very quickly and I wasn't able to finish. That, and I was trying to write the entire thing in two weeks, which has only worked once for me before. I spent four months researching, reading Italian history books instead of the engineering textbooks I was supposed to be reading for school, and for my sins I was punished with failing eyesight. Now I have to wear reading glasses anytime I want to write or spend too much time on Facebook. I'll never try that hard again, now that I know the cost. So for my other two books, the Car and Maligned, I attempted to leave the obsession behind entirely. New territory. And as anyone might notice, those books are substantially shorter than any of my other ones. It seems that without antiquity, I don't have that much to say. So for my next intended book, Mad Cow, I'm returning to old form. I've got the myth of Hercules in my hand, and hopefully I'll be able to write something that takes longer than two hours to read. We'll see. |