Now a Published Author

But at what cost?

BEFORE PROCEEDING

Please help aid my friend Deema and her family’s escape from Gaza to safety in Miṣr by supporting their GoFundMe. Whether you do so through donating to it yourself, or simply sharing the link to it.

They have a big family and are so close to their goal.

!الحرية لفلسطين

May 7th, 2024, is the day my debut novel, NON SERVIAM, is published, the first of a grimdark political mystery X dystopian gothic fantasy duology—The Hypostasis of Dissent.

Quite frankly, I didn’t know what to say in the time leading up to this. I still don’t, really. May is a dark and difficult month, with Pontian Genocide Remembrance Day, Nakba Remembrance Day, Circassian Day of Mourning, and Red Dress Day just to name a few dates. I can’t exactly say I’m in the greatest head space for anything especially cheery, but maybe I work with that. I suppose I always have.

The conception for NON SERVIAM came about when I was a teenager who had just immigrated from the police state I was born and raised in. I think what I both wanted and needed then, in my heart of hearts, was a revolution story. A story of resistance to authoritarianism where “violent” freedom fighting was granted the philosophical foundedness it deserved and “reform of a system from within” was idealistic naïveté.

Fun fact, I’d at first intended for NS to be a novella, only for it now to be a duology with a hefty second book!

I started reading philosophy and political theory far too early in my childhood, but I guess that comes with the territory of an intrinsically politicised identity. That’s ultimately why the story of NS expanded, I think—as you learn, truly learn, politics and sociology and philosophy and decolonial history and ethnic justice, you grasp just how dirty this work is. The biggest turning point certainly came about when I eventually took on the identification of an anarchist.

That ultimately reflects in NON SERVIAM. It’s a dark and gruesome story—I mean its primary genre is “grimdark”—about what is ultimately war. Because a fight for liberation from tyranny is war. But it’s a righteous one. Not between a pair of invading forces vying to exploit land for profit, not some settler-colonial project, not a pointless means to a fruitless end, but the purest form of love for humanity and earth.

I’m still extremely young (on pub day, I remain yet to turn 23); I’m very intrigued to see how this story reads when I’m in my 30s, 40s, 50s (i.e. when I actually have some semblance of a ripe brain).

This duology is not for everyone. Definitely not purely owing to its messaging, but also given how poetic and flowery its prose is, that the first ~10% of NS alternates between 2nd person every other chapter, the intense worldbuilding, and also that both books have a page-worth of trigger warnings (please check those before reading). However, it is for a niche readership somewhere out there, and I’m okay with that. I’ve always been quite scared of mass attention, anyway.

A reminder that all royalties earned from THoD duology will be donated to Doctors Without Borders, the Kurdish Red Crescent, and All for Armenia.

And with that, I’ll leave you the dedication for the second book in the duology, NON OMNIS MORIAR:

for those who search for hope,
 for a better world, against
all odds, against hope itself;
the fight is worth it

~Sfar~Ⓐ🧿֎⨳