This is a site for my friends and family to beta-read The Ides of August!
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After he officially came to power in 27 BCE, in the aftermath of the civil wars that tore Rome apart, Emperor Augustus set out to write his memoirs, detailing his achievements and processing the historic events that had unfolded around and because of him. His stories would go on to inspire countless Roman poets, including Virgil, fueling his positive propaganda effort and perpetuating the image that’s projected of him even today. His perspective would become an important resource for William Shakespeare as he crafted his Roman plays, even as other characters, like Cleopatra and Marc Antony, took center stage. To this day, the memoirs are picked apart, dissected, misunderstood and reinterpreted by historians around the world. Even though they don’t really exist.
The memoirs themselves have long since been lost to time, with our certainty of their existence only possible because of references other ancient texts make to them. They are forever sentenced to footnotes and auxiliary discussions, in the memories of the Bard and history textbooks, and while pieces of its ideas and words remain, any remnants of physical texts are gone forever.
The mind reels at what Augustus might have said of the time when he was just Gaius Octavius, a boy conquering illness and death to impress his great uncle, Julius Caesar. Crossing the sea in his teenage years to join his kin in battle, despite the adversity of piracy and shipwrecks. Rising the ranks of military training until the Ides of March, wherein the north star of Caesar is assassinated, and Octavius must take his place. What did he believe? Who did he trust? Augustus was a real man and leader, who lived a real life, and whose busts and statues stand in museums of antiquity and modernity. And yet his story is so full of imagination, of gaps in information, that it is simply demanding to be written about.
My first novel, The Ides of August, is structured as if it is Augustus’ lost memoir itself, and as such, aims to show the valiant, the terrifying, the hideous, all with the embellishment and flare that fiction lends to stories like this one. In my writing, I also realized the breadth and size of the story I was aiming to tell, so while this 80,000-word historical fiction novel could very well stand on its own, I am currently envisioning it as a duology, with a sequel in progress.