Two Things to Read
...and a bit of writing news!
I'm still plugging away at my dreampunk novel, Residue of an Especially Poor Vintage. The progress bar on the website currently shows 82% based on 51,000 words drafted out of a projected 62,000 total. The fun part is sticking the landing.
In the meantime, I have two reading recommendations, one for now and one for the future, plus some important news about a "new" Greek mythology book project.
Dreck
For now, to get you in a dreampunk mood, I'd like to recommend Dreck by Cliff Jones, Jr.
Like many books in the dreampunk genre, Dreck rewards active readership, providing a strange trip through a familiar-but-unfamiliar world. But Dreck won't hold your hand or feed you easy waypoints. The tour guides you encounter in Dreck will be just as confused as you are. They will shift and change like the sand beneath your feet, and they might die, and they might encounter the ghosts of previous tour guides, and they might wake themselves up, and they might wake you up, and in the end, all will be made clear.
What I especially appreciated was the challenge to that trite cliche in many other books, movies, and an entire season of the TV show, Dallas, where a character "wakes up and it was all a dream...or was it?" Perhaps not, but if so, whose dream is it? From what pieces of reality and psyche was the dream constructed? What were its goals? And if a dream could be more than just one person's journey into their own personal subconscious, what larger purpose might it serve for a society of dreamers with access to such means? Dreck defies the cliche by daring to tackle these questions head on.
Partheneia
My second recommendation is a Kickstarter campaign by Kassandra Famouri. Partheneia: Greek Myths Reclaimed is a project that bills itself as "a shamelessly revisionist collection of Greek myths with an equally shameless feminist agenda."
The Partheneia project attempts to imagine what a collection of popular and obscure mythology told by the women of ancient times might have looked like, if such a collection had been written down and preserved. If fully funded, the project will release as an anthology of myths in two formats: one with illustrations for enjoyment and one with scholarly footnotes and citations for further research.
Many subscribers to my newsletter signed up when I was focused mostly on restoring social justice to Greek mythology, so Partheneia should be right in that wheelhouse.
In fact...
Amazonis
Partheneia reminded me of my finished but unpublished project to retell the story of Amazons at Troy as a novel in verse, based on the first book of the 3rd/4th-ish Century CE Posthomerica of Quintus of Smyrna. This was a pandemic project, but I couldn't find an agent or publisher for it in 2021 and sealed it up in a virtual drawer.
What's changed in 2025 that we suddenly have need for an ancient vision of women in frontline combat?
On January 20, 2025, a new administration took office in the United States of America, my home country, claiming a mandate to restore greatness and preserve Western Civilization, their idea of which includes strict and simplistic ideas about gender roles based on some nonsense about the West being the modern heirs to Ancient Greek and Roman culture.
On January 21, 2025, the administration relieved Admiral Linda Fagan of her duties as head of the Coast Guard with two years remaining in her four-year term. She had been the first woman ever to lead a branch of the U.S. armed forces.
In February 2025, the administration removed Admiral Lisa Franchetti from her role as chief of naval operations. She had been the first woman ever to lead the U.S. Navy and the first female military leader to be part of the Joint Chiefs of Staff.
In April 2025, Vice Admiral Shoshana Chatfield was dismissed from her position as the U.S. military representative to the NATO Military Committee. Among her previous service was a stint as the first woman president of the Naval War College. She’d also commanded a unit in Afghanistan, earning a Bronze Star and two Legion of Merit medals.
These high-profile firings were accompanied by additional purges of women and soldiers of color down the chain of command, policies to block aids to career advancement in the U.S. military, the erasure of biographies and past accomplishments from official government websites, the removal of books from the shelves at U.S. military libraries, and revised curricula at U.S. military academies.
In 2021, this project was a fun pandemic distraction, but in 2025, a restoration of Amazons to the Trojan War is imperative because justice is inherently served by restoring strong female characters to their traditional place in classical literature; because the bedrock underlying Western Civilization is full of holes that once included women warriors and soldiers of color as full participants on the battlefield; and because the bards of the Epic Cycle didn’t present Queen Penthesileia and Prince Memnon as equals to Achilles just to have their modern counterparts dismissed as "DEI hires."
The Amazonis is already written. It just needs editing, proofing, and layout before I can publish it myself.
Keep an eye out for future updates!
