In 2014, while I was residing in a small garage with my husband in Silicon Valley, a friend recommended a historical novel to me. This book was Quo Vadis, written by Henryk Sienkiewicz in 1896. Despite needing a dictionary to read it, as English was not my first language, I fell in love with it right away. The story captivated me so much that I decided to base a webcomic on it.

I devoted a significant amount of time to preparing for this webcomic, even teaching myself to draw from scratch. However, while drafting the script for the webcomic, a conundrum soon presented itself.

You see, I was attempting to write it from the heroine’s point of view, while the original story had mostly been told from the hero’s. But here was a snag: this all meant that I couldn’t tell the story the way I wanted to, not without drastically changing most of the plot. Regardless, not one to be defeated, my writing continued.

As time passed, I noticed that the more I wrote, the more my characters seemed to come to life. Now, it felt as if they were choosing their own paths, resulting in a new story in which the main characters had different qualities than the original ones, although the original novel’s influence remained discernible throughout.

This was the point at which I decided to turn my script into a novel, the one you are reading now. Initially, I was hesitant because my writing skills were nowhere near as advanced as those of Henryk Sienkiewicz, a Nobel Prize winner. But over time, I realized that even though my writing may be rough, my story would still possess its own unique qualities. Because every book I read, every song I heard, every struggle and dream I experienced, were all so overwhelmingly different from those of Henryk Sienkiewicz, not to mention the not-so-small matter of a time gap of more than a century between us!

This is why I believe that someone, somewhere in the world, will resonate with my story when they read it.