Hello readers!

Last week, I mentioned my unpublished pandemic project to reconstruct a lost bit of the Epic Cycle as a novel in verse, a niche project that publishers didn't know what to do with at the time. Upon rediscovering the book, with a renewed sense that it was needed more in 2025 than ever, I'd dusted off the manuscript with a plan to self-publish, likely in the next six to nine months.

That was last week.

My revised plan is still to self-publish the book, but in the meantime, to drop a web serial edition for you to read and enjoy starting on Monday, June 2nd. Keep the tab open or save a bookmark to check each Monday, Wednesday, and Friday for the next 30 weeks.

This story, which I had been calling the Amazonis (more on that in a bit), is my best reconstruction-with-a-twist of the opening rhapsody to the Aethiopis, which traditionally began where Homer's Iliad left off.

If you can imagine Homer running 24 laps around an Epic Cycle track, that's the Iliad. Then Homer would have passed the baton off to their teammate, Arctinus, for the next leg in the relay. A few legs later, the rhapsode of the Nostoi would have passed the baton back to a well-rested Homer for the 24 laps of the Odyssey.

But for the past 2000+ years, Homer has finished the final lap of their Iliad run and reached out the baton, only to discover that Arctinus had long-since left the track.

Today, a chasm of missing relay legs separate the two Homeric works. In one lost leg, Achilles would have gotten an arrow to the heel. In another, the Achaeans would have left a giant wooden horse at the gates of Troy. All we know about these and other lost stories are the fragments and speculation of later sources.

My restoration of the Amazons at Troy takes the baton from Homer and runs what would have been Artcinus's first lap. For me, as a former high school track runner who never got over the time our 220 relay team got disqualified at States for a botched handoff, that alone makes the project worth doing.

Also, it's a great story and much needed for the reasons I set out in my last newsletter; that some people claim the works Homer as a layer of bedrock underlying something they call Western Civilization, which they cite as a basis for enacting policies that affect millions of people.

In one gap in that bedrock, between the Iliad and the Odyssey, there were once women who were granted equal treatment and equal respect to men, up to and including the right to participate in frontline combat. Filling that gap restores something important that got lost along the way and, for those intent on building modern structures on a platform of Greek and Roman infrastructure, this story could provide a bit of civilizational integrity to keep half our population from falling into a catastrophic sinkhole.

Anyway, I had been calling it the Amazonis, because that's a term I've seen tossed around by scholars as something the story might have been called by ancient Greeks in the oral tradition that predated the Epic Cycle, where this story may have once existed on its own. But that title created an extra step of explanation in a hypothetical elevator pitch.

OLD ELEVATOR PITCH:

Me: I'm releasing an epic in verse. It's called the Amazonis.

Elevator Patron: Interesting. What's it about?

Me: After the Iliad, some Amazons show up and stuff gets thrashed! It's going to be a self-published book that you'll be able to buy in six to nine months or so.

By then, several floors of elevator travel have gone by, the momentum has been sidetracked, and even if the elevator rider has any interest at all, they're not going to remember this conversation by the book's release date.

The new title and web edition solves that problem.

NEW ELEVATOR PITCH:

Me: I'm releasing an epic in verse. It's called After the Iliad: Some Amazons Show Up and Stuff Gets Thrashed!

Elevator Patron: Interesting. The title, in English, tells me the what, when, where, and who of the book. Also, it no longer sounds like you're presenting yourself as a stuffy scholar regurgitating Ancient Greek and, if you go for a second lap around the Epic Cycle track, you could use After the Iliad as a series name. Tell me more!

Me: You can read a new part of the story every Monday, Wednesday, and Friday on my website. That way you'll already know whether you like the style and the story when it comes out as a book in six to nine months!

Are you excited? I'm excited. And while you're here, I'm going to give you a subscriber's only preview of what's coming up in the first week.

June 2nd: Monday's poem is "You Don't Call Anymore," centering Calliope, the Muse of Epic Poetry. This poem serves as a traditional invocation to the Muse like the ones that open the Iliad, the Odyssey, and would have once opened the Aethiopis.

June 4th: Wednesday's poem is "Ride, Amazons!" centering Penthesileia, Queen of the Amazons. In this poem, we meet the queen and her twelve Amazon warriors on their way to Troy, with Penthesileia attempting to outrun the literal demons nipping at her heels.

June 6th: Friday's poem is "The Life That's Been Erased," centering Achilles, Warrior Prince of Phthia. If you liked The Song of Achilles by Madeline Miller, you will enjoy this poem. Where Miller very briefly addresses the fight between Achilles and Penthesileia, Some Amazons will provide an alternate and more detailed version in the context of Achilles dealing with his grief over the death of Patroclus.

That's our setup. The book is not just about pitting Penthesileia against Achilles, but setting them both against internal struggles that will result in an inevitable collision. Things move fast; we only have 90 poems to tell an epic drama!

I hope you'll join me on this journey. I hope you like it. I'm looking forward to your feedback!