Tales of Fire and Sword

Have you invited Clint to this group? I'm sure he could give you plenty of help, as he is just as much of a history buff as you are.

One thing that gets me about my story about the rise of Catholicism, is that to portray someone like the Emperor Constantine or Alaric or Atilla as they would have been, would probably piss quite a few people off. All of them were nasty, mean sonso*****es by our standards. Another thing that would be interesting is that while this story mainly covers events in the West from the period of the Battle of the Milvan Bridge to the rise of the Carolignians, is how to approach the Muslims and the Byzantines.

At least part of the story will concern the efforts of the proto-Catholics to drive the Roman Empire out, and the rise of Al-Andalus, and considering how certain...other novels dealing with Muslims as a subject have worked, it will be interesting. I'm considering starting the novel with the fall of one kind of paganism, only to have another sort sack the Lindisfarne Monastery as the ending scene...

The Vikings. Namely, it would be showing that cycles such as that never end.

Whoa, I can't believe I missed this club. You've got some interesting ideas, KK, and I'd like to hear more

One historical fiction, well, actually three that I've had is to take two obscure battles and write a tale about them. The first is the Bar Kokhba revolt that scattered the Israelites to the seven winds, in all its ugly glory. The second is the Battle of Tallas that turned Afghanistan and surrounding regions from a purely Asian region to a Muslim region. The third, would be a tale of the fall of paganism from the time of Constantine through the Emperor Romulus Augustulus, and the rise of the Catholic Church as the successor state. The Manichees and the other rival movements of that era would get the same realistic treatment as the Christians, no side getting favored, every side showing its warts.

One of my ideas is a story based on your standard zombie apocalypse scenario (mass zombie outbreak and zombies rule the world)...only after WWII, at the time of the Berlin Airlift crisis. Basically, in much of the world, WWII dead arise and start spreading the zombie virus. One of the catches is that the virus has gotten mixed in with animals and plants, as well. The story takes place in the 1980s, when a select group of people are assigned to go to the place of the plague's beginning, Berlin.

Another idea is that of Earth, some 65 million years after an asteroid has all but eliminated life as we know it today. A bunch of aliens go to visit Earth, coming into contact with a world that is bustling with life, with savage critters waiting for them in the riverbeds and the grasslands (the descendants of today's humans, a tiny group of whom survive dino-killer, Part II.) The human descendants have been shaped into a bit of a more...innovative version of today's gorillas, bearing the warlike attitudes of today's humans, and unlike us, being semiarboreal. When the aliens come into contact with a band of especially clever and brutish posthumans, they end up having to fight for their lives in what is the 65 million years later version of what had been Atlanta, Georgia.