It’s both, I’d say. While the bones are that of the Mahabharata, it’s been reimagined completely.

The Mahabharata is a public domain work and therefore, any derivative works are perfectly legal.

For one, being low fantasy, this is sans all the gods and magic that permeates the original. Once you take away divinity and its trappings, what’s left is humanity, in all its naked and visceral reality. Most retellings want to lean on the shine of gods to carry the tale, but this one focusses on the characters and their very real, human, motivations.

The best version would be the Penguin edition of Debroy’s translation of the Critical Edition. For those who can’t afford it, there’s the K.M. Ganguly translation that’s freely available at Sacred Texts at https://www.sacred-texts.com/hin/maha/

Space Wizard Science Fantasy is a queer science fiction and fantasy indie publishing company started in 2016 to publish William C. Tracy's books. Ten books, six years, a pandemic, and quitting a day job later, the publishing company opened its doors to more authors. Their intent has always been to showcase quality science fiction and fantasy stories with queer characters, because they don't get enough exposure in the publishing world. As a creator from India, avenues like Backerkit and Kickstarter are closed to me, and hence, I reached out to William, who is a friend and an awesome writer himself, who agreed to imprint this edition of Jaya! for the campaign. While I’m in charge of the campaign and fulfilment, William via Space Wizard will be collecting the pledges and do the heavy lifting.

That’s the plan. As an Indian, I definitely want to see these books shipped out here to readers in India, and therefore I do plan to ship worldwide.

The story is already written, edited, and formatted for ebook. Paperback and hardback formatting is remaining but that shouldn’t take more than a week.

Geetha Krishnan is my legal name, and I started writing books under this name. But later on, I noticed that everything I write was based on Hindu Mythology, and when I started writing fantasy and sci fi that has nothing to do with India, I decided to have a different pen name for that.

Drop shipping is shipping directly from the manufacturer to the addressee. In this case, I will be using Ingram Spark to ship directly to the backers instead of having them send everything to me and then me shipping it out. It’s a big save on shipping costs to utilise drop shipping.

Shipping costs are calculated by Ingram at the time of shipping. While I can guesstimate, I would rather wait for the actual time of shipping because tariffs and rates can change making any current calculations obsolete. Ingram does have a calculation sheet on their site that you can refer to at a pinch. https://help.ingramspark.com/hc/en-us/articles/5337658946445-How-Are-Shipping-Charges-Calculated

As a creator from India, shipping books directly is an impossibility and hence I'm opting for drop shipping directly from Ingramspark. Since Ingram has printing at most places, I hope to use them to get your goodies to you asap once all the pledges are collected and orders placed. I would expect that process to take at least a month after the campaign is done, so June 2026 would be a reasonable estimate! The audiobook would need slightly longer since the production cannot start till the stretch goals are met and the project fully funded! For that, an estimate of December 2026 would be reasonable since it's a long book!

Oh yes, I have a cat named Pluto and she's the sweetest girl ever but also very sly. She's an indoor cat but she always looks for ways to escape the house and bullies all the other cats in the locality.

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