Romulus and Juliet

This is the author’s comment for the first story I’m posting on my story blog and for good reason too. Its one of the first stories I wrote on the book AND it was well-liked by the people I let read it.

The idea for this story came to me while I was poking around wikipedia. I was trying to find connections between myths, legends and stories of different cultures. [That’s something I do out of interest. =P] As I looked around, I came across Romeo and Juliet; a well-known literary masterpiece. As I read up no the characters, I noticed a rather interesting [pointless and purely coincidental] similarity between “ROME-o” and “ROM-ulus” who was the founder of the city of “ROME.”

That was the spark. After that, I fervently looked through the histories of both the character Romeo and the king Romulus and tried to find parallels. Hell, you can find the parallels between literally anything if you look hard enough. ^^

Anyway, I took the Romeo and Juliet story and decided to give it a right good twist. The rest is research and stuff… ._.

The thing about this story, as pointed out to me, was that it was a bit similar to the kind of stories you’d find in the Sandman series by Neil Gaiman. [Think the cast of A Midsummer Night’s Dream show up to watch the same play…] That maybe true. That was a highly Sandman-fan phase of my life. ^^ I’m not saying it’s inspired by it or anything. It’s just a story idea I had and I went with it.

If I were to criticise the story, I’d first point out what I like about it. The character Tatia was one I enjoyed writing. I wanted to show differences between the 1900s woman and the Sabine girl way back then. But I also wanted a strong female lead. I am accustomed to writing from the male POV so this proved to be a bit different. I hope I did it reasonably well…

What I don’t like about the story are the transitions between the 1900s and ancient Rome. Sure, it would look EXCELLENT in comic, movie or cartoon form. But it takes a fair amount of writing to pull off as just a story. I’ve tried to ignore it as to not make it so prominent. I’m hoping that the imagination of the reader can fill in the blanks. Or something…

Either way, over-all I am very satisfied with this story. It’s a good start and I hope to carry on writing. Maybe one day I will revisit Tatia’s story. I have a feeling that she hasn’t said all she has to say just yet… =)