My First Nanonovel

Blurb
Set in Ancient Rome, Fabia Maxima, Consul & General is an alternate timeline novel. Its female hero, modeled after Quintus Fabius Maximus Verrucosus, leads Rome and Rome’s armies during the Second Punic War. Like her namesake, Fabia Maxima not only has to fight Rome’s enemies, but also her many detractors in the military, in the Senate, and in the population, while the fate of the Roman Empire rests precariously in her hands.

Author’s Note
At one point, the general asks her lieutenant, or maybe herself, how they will go down in history. Of course we know that she won’t, and neither will her lieutenant, or most of the men and women from the rank and file. This is a fading timeline which forked from ours a long time ago (not mentioned in the novel, though, which focuses on the time and life of Fabia Maxima)—from the subtle, but noticeably different, alternative outcome of the clashes between the first Greek-speaking tribes that arrived in Greece and the presumably matriarchially organized natives, around 2000–1500 BCE. Yes, all their blood and pain, triumph and despair will never have been, and I like to think that, intuitively, on a subconscious level, she knows. But “never been” it has in more ways than one: it is also a metaphor for the vast and comprehensive erasure of women and their achievements from our records, an erasure that still plagues our history books in so many fields. This is a novel I have wanted to write for a very long time.