Posted by The corporate job gets the best of me some weeks. Family life has its own complexities, and it gets the rest. Add a travel schedule that keeps me in airports and hotel rooms more than my own house, and you would think there is nothing left over. But somewhere in all of that, my mind wanders. On a plane at midnight, in a quiet room in a city that is not mine, I find myself dreaming of stories.
Stories need to be told. That is the whole reason this one exists.
A year and a half ago I read about Diomedes, and I could not let him go. Everyone knows Achilles. He gets the movies, the statues, the name you learn in school. Diomedes fought beside him at Troy and did something no other mortal managed. He wounded two gods in a single day and walked away. Homer gave him an entire book of the Iliad. And still, almost nobody speaks about him. I kept asking the same question. Why him, of all of them, did history set down and forget?
So I researched. I wrote. I dreamed about what his life was actually like, not the poem version, the man underneath it. The young king who was never supposed to be the story. The fighter who carried the weight anyway. I wrote in the margins of a life that does not have many. Early mornings. Red-eyes. Notes that became pages, and pages that became a world I was living in half the time.
In June, I wrote the final words on a beach in Crete. Greece, where the story started. There was something right about finishing it there, with the sea doing what it has always done and a tale three thousand years old finally coming to rest. It felt complete. And it felt like a goodbye. I had lived in Diomedes’ world for a year and a half, and I had to move on from it, the way you have to move on from anything you love that was never yours to keep.
People ask why this hero, and the truth is I see a lot of myself in him. Diomedes was never the loudest name in the room. He did not chase the glory, and the glory mostly went to other men. But when the day turned hard, he was the one still standing in it. He did the work nobody put in the songs. He fought above his weight, carried causes that were not entirely his own, and when the war was over he did not stop. He went and built things. Cities, by the old stories. A life after the battle.
I know that man. I know what it is to give everything to the work and watch the credit land somewhere else. I know what it is to be underestimated because you do not perform your own importance. And I know the stubborn part too, the part that keeps showing up, keeps building, keeps believing the work matters even when nobody is keeping score. Forgotten does not mean it did not matter. Sometimes it just means the wrong people wrote the summary.
For a while, the manuscript just sat there. Mine. Then I decided that was not enough. A story you keep to yourself is only half told. So I pushed it out into the world, and whatever happens to it now happens. It is called ICHOR, and it is his story the way it deserved to be told, at full scale.
It lives here: ICHOR on Let’s Noodle Studios, and it is available now on Amazon.
Stories need to be told. This one finally is.
