A Spartan Love

Ancient Greek Battle Prep

A Spartan Love is coming along nicely. As is the case with my stories, A Spartan Love has been growing as it goes through my editing/revision process. The original rough draft was about 86K. Now at about 25% through my second draft, it is up to 96K. I have no doubt that it will be 100K+ by the time I submit it.

Most of the growth is due to world building. I try to get as much of that in the rough draft as possible, but it's not until I get the story back from my betas that I find any holes in my descriptions and explanations. Their questions let me know what I need to clarify. Just because I know my world, doesn't mean others do.

So the story gets longer and more involved. With two tiers of betas, that can be quite a bit of additional material tucked in here and there as unobtrusively as possible.

A Spartan Love is as much an adventure as a romance. After all, I'm not going to expect my warriors to avoid battle and valor.

Andreas and Theron live in 5th century BC Sparta. I try to make the somewhat enigmatic city-state of Sparta as historically correct as possible. However, many aspects of their society and thought processes were mysterious even to their neighbors, many of whom hated them and portrayed the Spartans in as bad a light as possible when they actually wrote about them. So sources are hard to come by and often contradictory and/or suspect.

I have also decided to write about the world Andreas and Theron think they live in. So as in Homer, the gods and their lesser brethren are real. As are ghosts, known as shades or phatasma(ta). I'm hoping that the stories retain a feel not unlike Homer's works, although not as flowery and wordy. I'm not really a songsmith.

The goal is to submit A Spartan Love before Taming Theron comes out. That way there will be minimal time separating the stories.