"City of Jade" Release Day Post!

In 2011, I had a short story accepted for the June Daily Dose by Dreamspinner Press. The theme was 'A First Time for Everything,' and my story was called "City of Gold." It was my first historical as a professional author, set in mid-12th century Constantinople, the capital of the Byzantine Empire. It told the story of Gallienus of Constantinople, a former soldier who, because of an injury, had been assigned to the gates of the city, working as a gate guard, and how he met and fell in love with Misahuen of Gyeongju, a refugee from war-torn Korea, who had taken work with a merchant caravan.

Incidentally, all images in this post are clickable—they're the thumbnails, to see the fantastic full size images, click 'em and ta-da!


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That story stayed with me long after I'd finished writing it. Long after the Daily Dose, long after reviews, wonderful critiques and awards. The characters had taken up residence in my head and didn't want to leave. So I thought, well, seeing as I left the end of the story with the pair of them riding out of Constantinople into the great unknown, why, I could write a novel about that great unknown! And thus, the first seeds of "City of Jade," the sequel, were born.

However, the voices of a group of colourful Archangels and their friends were louder (and more numerous!), and so I wrote the first three Archangel novels first. I made a start on "City of Jade," in that I plotted out what I was going to write and decided that hey! Wouldn't it be fun to set it on the Silk Road, and write a romance on a medieval road trip? Why yes! It would be loads of fun! Good thing I love research, because boy howdy, I did a lot of that for this book.

I finished the first three Archangel books and got to work in earnest on "City of Jade." I have always loved the history of the Byzantine Empire. It's a common misconception that the Byzantine Empire is completely different and removed from the Roman Empire—nothing could be further from the truth. Byzantine was the name of a tiny fishing village on the coast of the Bospherous in the province of Thrace, most popularly known as the home province of Spartacus. Essentially, one day in 330A.D., Constantine the Great came along, took a look around this fishing village and liked it so much that he decided to build his capital—the new Rome—on that very spot. And so the dream of Byzantium was born.


Storks nest in one of the towers of a building in Samarkand. Photo: 1911, Sergei Mikhailovich Prokudin-Gorskii. License free.

The Roman Empire was split into the Western Empire (capital in Rome) and the Eastern Empire (capital in Constantinople.) To quote from Wikipedia (yes, I know, but this is actually a good succinct summary), the decline of the Western Empire was because of the following:

The decline, seen in retrospect, occurred over a period of four centuries, culminating in the final dissolution of the Western Roman Empire on September 4, 476, when Romulus Augustus, the last Emperor of the Western Roman Empire, was deposed by Odoacer, a Germanic chieftain. Some modern historians question the significance of this date. One reason was that Julius Nepos, the emperor recognized by the East Roman Empire, continued to live in Dalmatia, until he was assassinated in 480. The Ostrogoths who succeeded considered themselves upholders of the direct line of Roman traditions. (The Eastern Roman Empire was going through a different trajectory as it declined steadily after 1000 AD to 1453 with the Fall of Constantinople to the Turks.) Many events after 378 worsened the Western empire's situation. The Battle of Adrianople in 378, the death of Theodosius I in 395 (the last time the Roman Empire was politically unified), the crossing of the Rhine in 406 by Germanic tribes, the execution of Stilicho in 408, the sack of Rome in 410, the death of Constantius III in 421, the death of Aetius in 454, the second sack of Rome in 455, and the death of Majorian in 461 are emphasized by various historians.

Another common misconception is that the predominant language of the Byzantine Empire was Latin. It wasn't—it was Greek. But this isn't so unusual as Greek was the secondary language in Rome, before there was a Western and Eastern Empire. It was seen as the height of culture to speak, read and write Greek, and many Roman writers did, in fact, write solely in Greek. The Roman Empire wasn't shy about assimilating the deities of the nations that were conquered and adding them to the Roman pantheon, and the same for the regional stories of heroes and monsters. Stories like "Jason and the Argonauts" were also known as "Iason and the Argonauts," or Heracles instead of Hercules, for instance. In Constantinople, Latin was used in church and in ceremonies only, when in the seventh century, the Emperor Heraclius removed it from common usage in favour of medieval Greek. But every language in Europe could be heard in Byzantium, particularly in Constantinople, even medieval Chinese.


People of the Silk Road, painting from the 9th century in Dunhuang, China. License: public domain.

"City of Jade" is set in 1131. This is during the Komnenos Dynasty, a period considered to be one of the greats in Byzantine history. It's a period that I'm familiar with too, from my own personal interest in medieval history, and so I read (and reread!) a great many books and websites to get a sense of the political environment fresh in my mind. Too, I also read a lot of information about sexuality and relationships in the period, the merchant class, history of the Silk Road, life in China and the various dynasties that ruled over that large area in the period. I also consulted a lot of maps. And I mean a LOT. One very clever individual had created a Google Earth overlay that had every single route the Silk Road had taken on it, and that was absolutely invaluable. To get an eyeful of my sources, my bibliography, also in the end matter of "City of Jade," is on my website, here.

So I had my characters, I had their route, I had the secondary characters, I had the information about the land, the lives and religion of regular people along the way, the names of cities long dead and lost to myth and history. I had the picture of it all in my head. So I began to write.

And write. And write some more. And when I hit the 100K word mark, I realized that this book was going to be pretty damn long. At first, I was a little concerned, but after some thought and some conversation with my mother, some friends and some historians of my acquaintance, I realized that it didn't matter. I loved writing this book and I loved researching it. I felt quite bereft when it was finished and quite sad that the characters had ended their journey—I wanted to spend more time with them, but they were ready to rest, and so I closed their story. (For now.)

This book has been nothing but a labour of love for me. Even as it has frustrated me at times and vexed me at others, made me a little teary or made me laugh at myself, this story means a lot to me because it is written with love. I love the history of this period, the history of the different nations and dynasties, the clothing, the food, the nuances between trade markets. I love the characters as they came to me and the incredible photos I looked at of the sites they travelled through, photos captured in recent years by travelers in the regions and shared for all on the internet.

It is my great hope that readers enjoy this book as much as I enjoyed writing it. You can get "City of Jade" here: >Buy: ebook & Buy: paperback.


Mural of Ban Chao and King Zhong in Kashgar. License: Cc3.0, John Hill.