Nazime Page. Valerie Moore. Pepper Halloway. Alexander Phillips. Alex Amenn. Sam Amenn. They go by many names and personas.
They are an aro-ace, agender, autistic writer, podcast host, illustrator (but not a cartographer), sound mixer, producer, and marketer who loves all things anthropomorphic crocodiles, beyond questionable MCs, and Les Miserable references.
Say I Slew Them Not is the first entry in their Ferdarian Gazette series and they are currently
writing the second entry which will focus on Demons and corrupt religious organizations. When they are not working on their fantasy noir series, they are writing about disgruntled astronauts turned mercenaries for a mercurial alien queen. They also discuss asymmetrical warfare and colonialism on their history podcast: the Art of Asymmetrical Warfare.
Stay updated on their projects by following them on:
Instagram: @pepperdaphoenix and @ferdariangazette,
Tiktok: @pepperdaphoenix
and by checking out their website: http://www.theferdariangazette.com.
Operation Olive Branch: https://linktr.ee/opolivebranch
GoFundMe’s Highlighted by Authors for Palestine Event: https://afp.ju.mp/#info
For the AfP event we have selected the following 3 families to help boost their fundraisers. The details below were taken from the OOB spreadsheet.
Mohammed’s fundraiser: GoFundMe
Mohammed’s Instagram: @mohammedalbaredei
Ibrahim’s fundraiser: GoFundMe
Ibrahim’s Instagram: @ibrahimwithi
Rula’s fundraiser: GoFundMe
Rula’s Instagram: @rula_mohammed
You were one of the authors involved with the Authors for Palestine event – can you tell us why you chose to get involved with this, and which of your works you put up as raffle prizes?
I grew up believing that never again meant never again, and so I’ve been active in anti-genocide/pro-Palestinian organizing since Oct 7th. Organizing with others can be very energizing, but it can also be exhausting, especially when your own government handcuffs itself to Netanyahu’s genocidal regime. I was feeling pretty hopeless when I saw the call for indie authors to take part in this giveaway. Seeing so many amazing authors and friends come together and raise funds for Palestinian families was what I needed to recommit myself to the struggle.
Then I read Mohammed’s, Ibrahim’s, and Rula’s stories and I knew the giveaway was something I needed to be part of. I also really appreciated that the giveaway focused its efforts on three specific families. There is so much going on right now, so many families in need, and this endless amount of pain and loss, it becomes overwhelming. I appreciated that the organizers, I’m paraphrasing here, but basically they said, “yes, there is a lot of need, but let’s help who we can because we’re only human and we can’t save the world, but, basically, saving one person is like saving the world.” And I thought, “Yeah, they’re right. It’s better to do something than nothing.”
I’m proud so many of us offered a wide variety of gifts to those who donated, I’m proud we raised 1800+ for the families, and I’m proud so many of us involved are still fundraising and sharing the needs of Mohammed, Ibrahim, and Rula, even though the giveaway is officially over.
I offered two illustrated sci-fantasy e-zines. The first story is called Firebird and it’s about Grigori, a disgruntled and traumatized mercenary cyborg, helping Mara, a wrathful energy spirit, get revenge on her colonizers and abusers.
The second story is called Yusupov and Marinov: Merchants of Death and it’s about Ruslan Yusupov and Anatoli Marinov, two astronauts turned mercenaries for an alien queen, protecting a weapon’s manufacturing cockroach inspired alien from several assassins hired to kill him. Their mission, of course, goes horribly wrong.
Right now, the illustrated versions of these two stories are only available through the giveaway. If you want to read the non-illustrated version of Firebird, you can find it in Ezra Arndt’s pro-bodily autonomy anthology: My Say in the Matter.
Do you find your sense of social justice and activism informs the philosophy of your writing, in terms of narrative and character arcs? If so, how?
Yes, absolutely. I don’t think I can write a story that doesn’t deal with social justice and/or activism. My biggest author dream is for my work to be included in the growing canon of decolonial literature. At the same time, I’ve been struggling with that desire because can I, a white writer, ever truly write decolonial literature? What do I, a white person, know of social justice anyway?
My instinct, of course, is to set up an evil, all white empire and then create a group of minorities to overthrow said empire. At first glance that might seem like a good decolonial premise, but it also runs the risk of telling a story that is not mine to tell. So, then I add some upstanding white person who sort of believes in the empire’s evil lies, but then sees the error of their ways, and helps the rebellion help succeed. I’m no longer telling someone else’s story, but now I’m potentially telling a white savior story or, at the very least, I’m giving the white character grace. I’m “not all white peopling” my story.
So, I took a step back and I engaged with a lot of decolonial literature and came to terms with the fact that I’m still in the beginning stages of my own decolonizing, anti-racist, activist journey. I don’t have the answers and that’s ok. I don’t need to write from a place of authority on what is and isn’t decolonial. In fact, what I needed to do was be completely honest and vulnerable and say, “yeah I don’t know anything, but this is what I’ve learned so far. This is where I am, please, tell me where I’m going wrong.” And so, my stories become a decolonizing journal of sorts and I hope it proves to be a progressive story. Like I start with an okish (hopefully) foundation with Say I Slew Them Not and by the end of the series, maybe I’ve achieved something almost decolonial.
What does that mean in terms of writing? I’m not a hundred percent sure because I’m still working it out, haha. Right now, my two biggest writing principles are: First, my white characters hinder more than they help, especially if they mean well and they’re always learning, always changing, always growing. They are going to have core values or views that are colonial or racist, etc and the story has to be about the evolution of those beliefs. Some characters are going to be able to grow and change but I also need to acknowledge when that doesn’t happen and why. If they don’t change, that doesn’t mean they leave the activist sphere, but it means that their approaches aren’t always the best and they can’t always be trusted because they still have this baggage.
And then the narrative has to become about that white character dealing with that, and again sometimes they’re going to acknowledge their limitations and sometimes they’re not and that’s when they become a danger. I approach the arc of my white characters and my colonizer characters (especially if they’re well-meaning) as “the road to hell is paved with good intentions”, because I think that reflects where I am in my own journey and where the United States leftist movement is in its journey.
Second, revolutionary violence is not only a direct response to the empire’s intransigent nature, but can be purposefully incited to further the empire’s goal. In the United States, we’re having a lot of conversations about “when violence is ok and when it isn’t and oh no you destroyed a Target store front! That is absolutely terrible!” Say I Slew Them Not joins that conversation and details why violence becomes an option for those fighting to be free, and how a white, colonial democracy will manipulate that violence to their benefit. No one is more treacherous than a white politician clinging to a colony and nothing is more insidious than colonialism. If a colonizing power can’t crush a revolution, it will destroy it with a thousand little cuts and betrayals.
White governments, in particular, are really good at turning people against each other, demanding compromises that undercut the resistance’s values, its leaders, and it’s goals, promising one thing and then doing everything in their power to turn that victory into a pyrrhic victory, and/or using the bigger colonial system to punish and suppress their formerly colonized subjects.
As a white writer, I can and do write about the destruction of these systems, but I also have to be brutally honest about how those systems are kept in place, how they survive long after they’re defeat because people will preserve that toxic way of thinking and nurture it until it’s strong enough to make a comeback, the lasting legacy and impact of this system on the formerly colonized and the colonizers, and that white people will commit to decolonialism until it reaches a certain stage and then it becomes too much.
I think as a white person, I’d love to write about that one white person who makes it all the way and it truly committed to decolonialism (and, for full transparency, there are a handful in the series), but as a decolonial writer, I have a duty to focus on those who struggle, those who falter, and those who fail, because we can never truly decolonize our minds unless we truly understand why it’s so hard to do it in the first place. Basically, if I’m feeling too warm towards my white characters I’m probably giving them too much grace, haha. But, I’m also still learning and I’m eager to see how other people respond to my stories. That’ll be the real test of where I am in my decolonial journey: if I can take feedback and adjust my writing, instead of getting defensive about it.
What gave you the idea to create Say I Slew Them Not in the text form of ‘found footage’ / a compilation of letters and edited interviews?
I was inspired by my love for history and its inherently biased nature. I was introduced to how skewed history can be by researching the American Civil War, but you can see it in every aspect of history because historians are reliant on primary materials and primary materials are written, collected, and preserved by humans who, themselves, are biased and so complete historical truth is almost impossible to achieve. You can only strive to get as close to the capital ‘t’ Truth as possible and that idea fascinates me.
I’m also a survivor of child abuse and nothing will make your question reality and the existence of truth more than your caretakers abusing you. So I already had this personal experience of not being able to trust my reality and then I go into this field, history, which is supposed to be academic and fact based, etc, and to find out yes, sort of, but also no, here’s a long list of biases that have plagued this field for centuries. I also specialized in asymmetrical conflicts from 1850-1950 and grew up during the United States’ war on terrorism, so not trusting anyone or anything became second nature, haha.
When I started Say I Slew Them Not, I knew I wanted to investigate the myriad facets of historical memory and how the past creates the future, but the future also creates the past because the very concept of past, present, and future rests on this concept of perspective and perspective is constantly changing. It took a lot of experimenting, but I eventually settled on this idea of a narrative at war with itself. So I took Kingsley’s memoir and made it the anchor for the reader and then slowly chipped away at that anchor by including letters, journal entries, interviews, etc. However, the additional material also needed to have obvious biases, because I don’t want the reader to feel comfortable picking one side over the other, because I’m not trying to tell that clean of a story. I want readers to have doubts at the end and to question everyone’s motives and perspectives.
How did you develop the political intrigue in the book, and what references and research did you do for it?
As an amateur historian with a masters in international relations, I have a lot of historical references and academic frameworks to use when I’m designing the political influences and intrigues in my stories. My biggest inspiration on how I write political intrigue is my very problematic favorite movie Lawrence of Arabia. There isn’t a single scene or line where someone isn’t playing someone else in that movie and characters are at their most dangerous when they believe the bullshit they’re selling.
Then again, if people didn’t believe in these “ideals” or “causes”, they couldn’t be manipulated. Also, politics (and by extension war) is always base. It doesn’t matter what kind of rhetoric is used, what kind of bravery is shown, what kind of sacrifices are made, at the end of the day, the goal will always wind up being something absolutely ridiculous and base. As Lawrence of Arabia puts it, the entire Arab Revolt (mostly because of colonial bullshit) achieved nothing more than a “British waterworks with an Arab flag on it. Do you think it was worth it?” Of course Lawrence of Arabia is a fictional account of a real historical war, but the real war really isn’t any less base and the colonial European powers weren’t any less manipulative and cruel than their counterparts in the movie. World War I in general is a great conflict to study if you want to understand how ridiculous, stupid, and base politics, especially global politics, really is.
So, when creating political intrigue, I find it helps to assume everyone is absolutely terrible, incredibly self-absorbed, only cares about their own self-interests, and will do absolutely anything to get what they want. The system doesn’t punish anyone for being terrible. In fact, all governments thrive and depend on people being their absolutely worst selves. There is no such thing as a noble cause in politics, only causes that sound noble, haha. Also, everything is political and can be used to a character’s advantage or disadvantage.
What challenges do anthropomorphic crocodiles pose to your writing process – what sort of things did you have to consider in terms of writing body language, choreography of action scenes, and so on?
This may be the gender dysphoria talking, but I actually found it easier to write about anthropomorphic crocodiles than humans. It’s a lot of fun to approach the world from a perspective that is so different from a human perspective.
It was also important to reflect how white (or in my world’s case, white human) superiority asserts itself in cultural, health, and social spaces without enforcing white supremacy in my own writing. Some of the things I had to consider was the size of crocodiles versus humans and how that is reflected in the human architecture vs crocodile architecture and public spaces.
How do clothes fit on a humanoid crocodile body, what aspects of the crocodile body/fashion style were humans going to find scandalous, disgusting, etc. What elements of the crocodile body would humans find attractive? How would the colonizers police crocodile bodily expression? I decided early on that humans would see crocodile people as inferior. How is that reflected in human-crocodile interactions and values?
I also had a lot of fun figuring out how gender works for crocodile people and how it works for human societies. I think the biggest challenge was considering dietary and health needs. If you put a real life crocodile in a tank, the tank needs to be 60%-70% filled with water.
Ok, so how do I reflect that health need in my world? Adult real life crocodiles need to eat anywhere ranging 2 to 5 pounds a day. How do my crocodile people access that amount of meat in a colonial human society?
Then there is the attraction aspect which was oddly fun to develop, haha. Crocodiles in general aren’t the most expressive animal. I tried to play around with what sort of expressions crocodiles could make with their snouts and then I pushed it by making their eyeridges more expressive than they really are. That wasn’t enough so I added cow-like fur ears to help express their feelings. And then I threw in antlers as well, because why not. Well those two features also matter when it comes to attraction. Do anthro crocodiles like really furry ears or not? What kind of antlers are considered attractive? What kind of scale and horn care is expected? How can anthro crocodiles make themselves more attractive? What do humans find embarrassing attractive about crocodile people and how do they respond to that realization? So it was a lot of fun and made me question a lot of social interactions and expectations that we humans take for granted.
How does the novel translate into a podcast script, and how does it work in that format?
Transforming Say I Slew Them Not into a podcast was actually a lot easier than I thought it would be and I think it’s because I went with a found footage/epistolary novel format. Say I Slew Them Not is an adult queer fantasy noir podcast about Kingsley Montivelo, an anthropomorphic crocodile being tried for war crimes he definitely committed. He must manipulate Alex, a traumatized journalist whose wife Kingsley once tortured, into saving his life by publishing classified documents that will implicate world leaders in their own war crimes. What? He’s done worse.
So basically, the main gimmick is that the story is a memoir plus additional primary materials collected by Alex, a journalist for the Ferdarian Gazette. This story was originally published in a series of articles in the Ferdarian Gazette and then Alex’s niece, Nazima, collects everything Alex published regarding the trial and organizes it into the podcast I’m releasing on September 28, 2024. And then she’s going to run a fundraiser to publish the podcast as a beautiful book, so keep your eyes open for that announcement.
Keeping this context in mind, I organized the script like a 50s radio show. So each episode starts with an announcement from Valerie, the Minotaur host, a short ad, and then the story is narrated by Pepper, a phoenix. Since I’m the one doing the actual recording, I had to think of a reason while all the characters sound so similar and so I just went with the, it’s all narrated by a single person excuse. In terms of the actual material itself, I didn’t change much. I guess it could be considered more of an audiobook than a podcast in that way. But I basically just read the chapter as is with some sound effects and music cues thrown in. I even managed to find free to use records of actual crocodile growls that I was able to use occasionally to stimulate the crocodile language.
And then Valerie wraps up the episode with a short recap of what you just listened to, what product sponsored the episode, and a preview of next week’s episode. Interested listeners can subscribe to Say I Slew Them Not now on Spotify, iTunes, Amazon, and anywhere else they listen to their podcasts. I’ve published a few teaser trailers and special features and will publish the first three episodes on March 18th, 2025. I also published additional information like character bios, maps, character art, etc on my website www.theferdariangazette.com
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