Why did I choose a recreation of The Odyssey as my first book, instead of something easy, say, summarizing the Encyclopaedia Britannica?  I've asked myself the same thing quite a few times.  I started with the Odyssey because it's a great story, but one that hardly anyone ever reads any more, except in university.  I wanted to create a version of this ancient classic that people would actually like to read.

I don't mean to trash Homer, or his many excellent translators.  It's wonderful lyric poetry.  It's just that lyric poetry (that is, poetry meant to be sung or chanted to a Greek harp or lyre, from which we get the word lyrics, incidentally) doesn't turn most people's cranks any more.  So I thought I'd take the Odyssey and turn it into an adventure novel for teenagers, especially boys, something that they would read just because they wanted to.

Girls are likely to enjoy it too.  From my own experience, girls are way more willing to read books where a boy is the main character than boys are books written around a girl.  Go figure.  I seriously considered making Alexi, the narrator (and a slave of the Greeks, if you who haven't read it yet), a girl, which would certainly give her a dangerous secret to hide from a boatload of sailors!  I wanted this to be realistic, though, or at least as realistic as a story with one-eyed giants and whatnot can be, and there's no way that a girl could hide her gender on board a small ship packed with men.

The other reason I chose the Odyssey was because I was really, really naive.  I looked at the translations of the Odyssey, and figured, hey, they're one book, I guess I'll create one book as well.  I won't make that mistake again!  The Odyssey is mostly written in narrative mode, without much true dialog, backstory, subplots, character development, etc.  For example, the episode with the lotos-eaters only gets about ten lines in the Odyssey; it's a whole chapter in Torn from Troy.

When you turn it into a novel and add in all these things, it's a bit like unfolding one those origami cranes.  The original  sits nicely in your palm; unfold it and you've got a piece of paper a foot square.  I was maybe a third of the way into the book when I realized that there was no way it was going to fit into one book.  Or at least,  not a book that any publisher would touch unless my last name was Rowling.

So do I regret starting with something this ambitious?  No way.  Writing Torn from Troy has been a blast.  And the second book, The Sea God's Curse, has been just as much fun.