The World of the Sword Saint Chronicles

If you asked me, right now, on Friday at 4pm, waiting for the domain name I reserved two years ago and only last week had the courage to figure out how to build a website around, what the point of my work is, I would probably have it tell you that I’m not entirely sure. I try to be an honest guy, and writing, for me at least, is slippery stuff that doesn’t like for me to look at it too closely most of the time.

I love storytelling. Family lore is packed with tales of me coercing siblings, and cousins, and anyone else who would listen, into nonsense ventures and role-playing games, and stunts. I was a bit of an outsider as a teenager; the world didn’t make much sense to me, and a lot of the time it still doesn’t. Complex things are hard and simple things are easy and I usually feel like if you just tilt your head a degree or two to either side the whole thing looks entirely different even at times when I can’t do it myself.

I like complex characters in tough situations with impossible decisions. I like mysteries that don’t make sense and don’t want to be explained. I like the way that little things stack on top of each other to make mountains, sometimes over eons and sometimes overnight. I like the way that time poisons memory and that no two people ever see a thing in exactly the same way. I like fantasy and science fiction because I think you can take readers to places where they can examine their own thoughts and feelings with a little less weight than the parallels they see in their own lives. I like how no two people will read a thing and think the same thing. I like how no one will ever get exactly what I was trying to communicate no matter how well I write it or how hard I try.

And monsters. And Dragons. And swords. And consequences. People who don’t want to be heroes. People who do but aren’t. All the other messy permutations that the universe serves up at the great banquet of life. If you spend time with me, I will probably take you to some dark places… but I also like the resilience of the human spirit. I like how people who have every reason to run away and save their own skin sometimes don’t. How ordinary people do extraordinary things with nothing to gain. How over time, things do seem to get better, even though they may look closer to the edge than ever before, often because of the decisions and actions of a tiny handful of stubborn people.

I was a teenager who dreamed of writing stories, and the only monster getting in the way of doing that was me.

So the Chronicles are about all these things, and a lot more things, and the whole point is for you to read them and not for me to tell you about them, which makes blogging about the book a difficult task before most of it gets into anybody’s hands.

If you do explore my work, and I hope you will, just remember, my first and foremost intention is simply to entertain you. If you do a little bit of thinking along the way, no matter where you start, I hope you will land on the more hopeful side of things, no matter how far we go in the other direction, and realize what we can accomplish together will always be more powerful than what we can accomplish alone.

Please join my mailing list to stay in touch. To read the occasional mad bit of rambling, get a little news about my journey towards (hopefully) an agent, and a publisher, and a spot on a bookstore, and figure out – one day – where you can buy my book(s).

Contact

Reach out for questions or collaborations.

Email: madhuvan@martincatania.com

Phone: +1-‪(872) 246-3288‬

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