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I need to know more about Voievod! How long have you been working on it? How do you find the balance between storytelling and providing historical information? I'm about to start reading it, and I'm so interested in the process! Bonus question: do you have any playlist or type of music you associate with it?

Oh my God, thank you so much for dropping this into my in box, loveliest! This really makes my entire day. 🥹❤️ Please, excuse my ramblings if this gets too long sksksk.

First of all, thank you so much for giving my fictional monolith a chance! I appreciate it more than words can say and hope you will find it enjoyable! ❤️ I also do think that it is important to mention that it tackles a lot of dark and gory themes so, please, always check the trigger warnings first — some works are not that heavy, but others might be more explicit and graphic in nature, so never hesitate to skip some of them if you find them uncomfortable.

Now on to your questions!

How long have you been working on it?

Voievod in its current form is actually my third attempt, but I have been playing around with Vlad’s story for nine years now. I started working on my first story in 2015, but that was a blend of Vlad the Voivode and Dracula the Vampire — basically, it focused on how he became a vampire. I eventually abandoned that project because I did not really have patience with it and kept rewriting and re-editing many parts of it, and maybe it was a good thing I did because I gradually came to realisation that his character as a mortal man is so much more interesting than the vampire thing.

I tried to give it another shot in early 2020, this time focusing fully on Vlad as the historical figure. The first wave of COVID granted me a lot of free time, so I tried to use that opportunity to work on the story, as well as catch up on any new information from historical research. I wrote a few drafts but abandoned it again after a few months because I sincerely felt like I did not have enough writing experience to pull it off in a way I would be satisfied with.

I started working on the third and current version in February 2023 — I randomly revisited the old drafts from 2020 and started playing around with them a little, expanding the ideas until I managed to write two pieces I was quite proud of. I approached this with a great deal of respect and fear, then realised that I felt confident enough in my writing to perhaps try again. I think it was a good decision to wait and get enough writing experience before getting back to it because, looking back at my previous attempts, my world-building and characterisation have improved. Still, I am taking this as an opportunity to push myself and let myself grow — and every new piece is quite the lesson as I am often plunging into places I thought I would never dare before.

How do you find the balance between storytelling and providing historical information?

I think the hardest part of working on such a project is the research itself. To depict the historical events as accurately as possible, you have to read anything you can get your hands on and absorb as much as possible. I have loads and loads of files filled with notes on figures, events, culture, etc. not only for one but four separate countries as all of them are crucial for the work. Vlad’s story is even more specific because you really have to separate facts from all the debris and junk of propaganda against him that shaped what was known about him for a long time.

Once you become intimately familiar with the research topic and can swim easily through that sea of information, it is not that hard to find that perfect blend. In fact, having that historical information at your disposal really speeds up the process because you do not have to agonise over the plot — all those events are already there, you just follow them. When it comes to many characters from Voievod, we know what their life was like and what their personalities were, so I follow their lead in that regard. And it is fascinating because real life sometimes writes the most compelling stories.

What balances this out is the freedom other aspects give me. We usually come to know historical figures as legends and larger-than-life beings, and they were undoubtedly extraordinary, but they were people first. I get to breathe that humanity into them by depicting what they think, feel, desire, and fear. I make them make mistakes and laugh. There are also people in their lives that we know little or nothing about, so that gives me a lot of space to create characters from scratch — Cătălina is a perfect example of that, and I love having the opportunity to create such a rich and wonderful character. Ultimately, personal relationships give a lot of space to create dynamics as I please, because we know so very little about the private lives of these people.

Do you have any playlist or type of music you associate with it?

Ahhh, I love this question so much! Here is my opportunity to share my beloved baby lmao. 🤭

I have a “soundtrack” playlist on Spotify, which you can find here. I love visualising scenes and playing them in my head like little video tapes, and the right music helps me grasp the mood and emotion of those moments when writing them. Almost all the tracks are actually tied to specific scenes or works. (One is already published and bears the same name. *wink wink*)

Also, as a bonus (let me brag there for a second), here is a Pinterest board for some of the characters from Voievod. ❤️

#ask reply #work: voievod #thank you so much for the ask! ❤️

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Today is a 37st anniversary of the Chornobyl Nuclear Plant disaster. It's hard to talk about one unprocessed national tragedy while living through another.

The Chornobyl disaster was totally preventable and it took away countless lives of people living in the region, especially in Ukraine and Belarus - both the liquidators and the civillians. Despite the very air and dust being literal poison, the soviets had not only hid this information from the people, but forced everybody to partake in the May the 1st parade - because god forbid we lose our face before the international community as a working class paradise! If not for the nuclear scientists in Sweden who raised the alarm about the dangerous levels of nuclear particles coming from northern Ukraine, who knows what would have happened. It definitely would have been swepped under the rug and forgotten by the international community, together with its victims - just like Semipalatinsk in Kazakhstan is barely known abroad.

With russia constantly threatening to turn Zaporhizhzha nuclear plant into second Chornobyl, the wound caused by this tragedy is cut open again.

We all love the HBO Chornobyl series, and I genuinely am grateful to Craig Mazin for the amount of empathy and respect he brought to the series; but for today I indulge you to watch something made by ukrainians, to try to understand what this tragedy means to us and how it influences our lives even today.

For the documentaries, my favourite series by this day remains the "Dragons live here" by Your Underground Humanitarian School Youtube channel, which, unfortunately, can only offer automated english subtitles - they should, however, be sufficient.

As for the feature films, I recommend "Gateway" (you can stream it online with english subtitles here). And here is the official english trailer:

#chornobyl

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You're a defiant act of creation. You're a whole solar system pretending to be a person. — Elisabeth Hewer, from World Inside Expanding

SULTAN MEHMED II CONQUEROR | VOIEVOD

#( oc: golden child; lion boy ) #mehmed ii #mehmed the conqueror #this actually slaps hard ngl #he IS the sun

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i highly recommend for women and girls to be intellectually curious and difficult to shame

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Something sudden, a windfall, a meteor shower. No – a flowering tree releasing all its blossoms at once, and the one standing beneath it unexpectedly robed in bloom, transformed into a stranger too beautiful to touch.

– Lisel Mueller, “How I Would Paint Happiness,” Alive Together (Louisiana State Univ Pr; First Edition, December 1, 1996) (via The Vale of Soul Making)

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Europeans on Vlad Tepes: he was clever for using psychological warfare..kept off so so many enemies with like a handful of soldiers

Americans on Vlad Tepes: VAMPIRE ISHZHSHDVVS

#vlad dracula #vlad the impaler #it's either this or the “psychopathic tyrant lusting for blood” bs that has already been debunked numerous times #like COME ON even the turks are trying to show him in a more positive light at this point and they have the right to hate on him

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What is a ghost? A tragedy condemned to repeat itself time and time again? An instant of pain perhaps. Something dead which still seems to be alive. An emotion suspended in time like a blurred photograph, like an insect trapped in amber. — Guillermo Del Toro, from The Devil's Backbone

DETECTIVE MILENA TEODORA ROSA | CRIMES OF PASSION

#( c: this ghost sitting year after year upon my heart ) #this one is quite vague but— eh #i am still lowkey getting to know her and keep playing around with her character #also trystan has quickly become the mc of my take on cop which is why his character is better crafted in my head

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Facing The Facts: Resources on the Armenian Genocide

Frequently Asked Questions About Armenian Genocide

Sample Archival Documents on the Armenian Genocide: U.S. Archives

Sample Archival Documents on the Armenian Genocide: British Archives

Map of the 1915 Armenian Genocide in the Turkish Empire

Talaat Pasha's Official Orders Regarding the Armenian Massacres, March 1915-January 1916

The Massacre of the Armenians (”Ambassador Morgenthau describes the forced evacuation of one group of Armenians from their homeland to the Syrian desert.”)

American Documents

British Documents

Russian Documents

French Documents

Austrian Documents

Public Lectures

Eye Witnesses

The Turkish Woman

That is all right, but who killed hundred of thousands Armenians?

Einar af Wirsen

The Story of Anna Hedwig Bull, an Estonian Missionary of the Armenian Genocide.

"That's How It Was"

ARAB EYEWITNESS FAYEZ ALGHUSSEIN ABOUT THE ARMENIAN GENOCIDE

Report by an Eye-Witness, Lieutenant Sayied Ahmed Moukhtar Baas

Letters of Turkish doctors addressed to the Ministry of Internal Affairs of Turkey

Martyred Armenia: Eyewitness account of the Armenian genocide by Faiz El-Ghusein a Turkish official

PHOTO COLLECTION OF ARMENIAN GENOCIDE

#armenia #armenian history #armenian genocide #this is very important #i encourage everyone to look at these

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i'm not interested in being easy on the eyes. i want them to flinch, think twice before they reach out their callous hands to bruise. i want to be a constant reminder to men that not everything is theirs for the taking. — for girls who aren't interested in being easy on the eyes | fabiola

CĂTĂLINA, DAUGHTER OF COSTEA | VOIEVOD

#( oc: sanctuary ) #the way this woman has me in a chokehold! #i am absolutely OBSESSED with her #like she has me going feral

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tell me about the things that have silenced your heart

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that little blonde girl laced that Espresso song with something I fear

#sabrina carpenter

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i know absence hurts, but it also makes room for wilderness. the space fills with what has always been

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I'm like if a girl had the urge to scream and break something all the time but stays quiet instead

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[...] she felt so old, so awfully old and worn, and so young all at once, raw as a wound. — Catherynne M. Valente, from Deathless

DETECTIVE KIMBERLEY CLAIRE CUNNINGHAM | THE WAYHAVEN CHRONICLES

#( c: i am the sea and nobody owns me ) #the wayhaven chronicles #twc #twc detective

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“to be a woman is to experience pain”“to be a woman is to perform”“to be a woman is to-” SHUT UP SHUT UP 💥💥💥💥

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hey so whats up with that thing in english where if a word is both a noun and a verb the emphasis changes respectively

noun: CONtrol. verb: conTROL

noun: REbel. verb: reBEL

what is that called

#linguistics #ahhh my moots are now giving me war flashbacks to first-year english phonetics and phonology course

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— Lilith, by Nikki Marmery

#lilith #nikki marmery #tw: r*pe #tw: religion #tw: religious themes