For #SlashedandMashed Release Week, I’m sharing some book extras. Today I thought I’d post an excerpt from the lead story in the collection “Theseus and the Minotaur.”
I wrote “Theseus and the Minotaur” almost two years ago when I was prepping to start a Patreon page and wanted to front-load some of the work providing content. I love Greek mythology, so a natural place for me to start was re-imagining some classic myths and giving them a queer spin.
I’m in between BIG, EXCITING publication news, so I thought I’d blog a little something on the subject of retold stories and folklore, which has sort of become my métier.
An interesting thing that happens once you get published is friends, colleagues, family members, neighbors, and even strangers come out of the woodwork to confess they also wrote a novel, or their husband also wrote a novel, or they’re working on a novel and wonder if you have some advice.
I always enjoy sharing some of the visual and musical inspiration points for my titles, so I thought I’d do just that in follow up to my post about Irresistible last week.
It’s an upbeat, pop music kind of story, and the one song that was in my head a lot while I was going through the first round of editing was “I Feel it Coming” by The Weeknd. I think it fits perfectly for Brendan and Cal’s first night together, and it might get you in the mood for the book.
I wouldn’t be surprised if most people haven’t heard of Nerites. He didn’t make it into Edith Hamilton’s seminal work on Greek mythology, and though he earned a Wikipedia entry, it’s pretty sparse. According to the Theoi Project, a comprehensive glossary of mythological figures, his story comes from the Greek historian Aelian (c. 2 A.D.) who wrote about how a spiral shell of exceptional beauty came to be called a nerite. He claimed the story was well-known among sailors.
