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Visual inspiration for Poseidon & Cleito

andrew August 30, 2016 No Comments

I started keeping inspiration boards for my writing the old fashioned way: cutting out pictures from magazines and gluing them to a sheet of oak tag. That old fashioned method had some advantages. It was nice having something to put up in my office where I write, and it was fun taking the time to snip out images that I liked and to place them on the board. But the variety of pictures was limited, especially since my writing takes inspiration from ancient settings. It also could be time consuming, and I knew at some point I would run out of wall space.

So, about six months ago, I converted to Pinterest for my boards. It actually could be just as time consuming. There’s almost an infinite number and variety of images to search through, not that narrowing down that search isn’t easy, but once you get started, it can be hard to stop. Still, overall, it’s much more efficient for me and gives me tons of ancient world and fantasy material to choose from.

For my Poseidon and Cleito board, I was interested in having some images that were evocative of the characters as well as some that reflected costume, setting and mythology. I shared on my board that Maria Sharapova was a modern day inspiration for Cleito, both physically and in terms of her relentless, impassive persona. That may not be fair to Maria. She’s probably a sweetheart off of the tennis court and would never consider murdering her family for wealth and power. 🙂

I think I found the perfect model for the character of Bromios, modeled on the god Dionysius. The one character-model that was evasive in my research was Poseidon himself. I think my publisher did a great job with the cover artwork in depicting him. My challenge was settling on an image of a guy who was hardy, noble, and not conventionally attractive. Male models abound on Pinterest, but they’re too pretty.

People ask me: who would play Poseidon if your book was turned into a movie, and I haven’t come up with any dream choices. There are a lot of excellent, rugged-looking actors (Tom Hardy, Viggo Mortensen), but Poseidon is nineteen, maybe twenty years old in the story, so it would have to be a younger actor, maybe a less-known European with a tall and thin but powerful build. The kind of guy who looks like he has to chase down his dinner in the woods every night.

In addition to prehistoric and ancient Greek imagery, I looked for seascapes, and costumes for the well-clad Adoratrice Cleito, and flora and architecture that would be evocative of the island that would become Atlantis. You can check out the board through the widget below and tell me what you think.

Remember: it’s #PoseidonWeek! On Thursday, September 1st, 9:00PM, I’ll announce winners of Poseidon swag provided by Zazzle. You can enter by commenting or sharing a post or interacting with my Facebook page.

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It’s #PoseidonWeek at andrewjpeterswrites.com!

andrew August 29, 2016 No Comments

Portrait of Andrea Doria as Neptune by Angelo Bronzino. Retrieved from Wikipedia Commons.

It’s Poseidon Week here at andrewjpeterswrites.com! From Monday, August 29th to Thursday, September 1st, I’ll be posting stories, images, and interesting facts about the famous trident-wielder to celebrate the August 29th release of Poseidon and Cleito exclusively on Amazon. You’ll also find excerpts and some extras from the book. And I’m running a contest. Drop a comment, like, or share any post on my website, or my Facebook page, and you’ll be entered into a raffle for Poseidon swag provided by Zazzle. Winners will be chosen Thursday, September 1st 9:00PM EST.

So what is it you could win? Your very own Poseidon t-shirt, Poseidon mug, or Poseidon notebook. Winners will need to provide their e-mail address and mailing address for shipping.

For today’s post, I thought I’d share some of my thoughts about Poseidon and some lesser known stories about him. Poseidon was never my very favorite personage from Greek mythology. Growing up, I was more drawn to the heroic tales of Jason, Perseus, and Theseus. When I came out as gay, I found new favorites in the stories of Zeus and Ganymede, and Apollo and Hyacinth. But there was always something sympathetic for me about gloomy, aloof Poseidon.

He strikes me as a lonely guy, perhaps misunderstood, lashing out at mortals from some inner torment, whether borne from being overshadowed by his older brother Zeus or something else that was never elaborated on. Most of the Greek gods could be said to be moody and capricious in their sorting out of mortal matters, but it seemed particularly tough to get on

Poseidon’s good side. Being a natural skeptic, I’ve wondered if that was a fair portrayal.

“Artemision Zeus or Poseidon,” a famous 5th century BCE bronze statue at the Athens Museum of Archeology

An interesting thing about Greek mythology is that it changed throughout the eras, and most of what endured, what we recognize today, is from the classical era when Zeus and Athena were prominent and beloved. Some scholars believe that the worship of Poseidon was more widespread in earlier time periods and that his significance extended beyond an association with sea and storm. To people of an earlier age, he was probably a beneficent god of an earthly realm, worshiped for fertility and good harvests. Another matter is that the similarity in Poseidon and Zeus iconography makes it hard to determine which god was most popular among the Greeks, or whether they were both offshoots of a father god archetype.

Poseidon remained an important figure in religious practice and folklore throughout and beyond the classical period (and of course, many centuries forward via the Romans co-opting him as Neptune). But for the most part, he was portrayed as fearsome and villainous in the stories from the classical era. In Homer’s Odyssey, for example, Poseidon is an antagonist to the hero Odysseus, preventing the Trojan war hero from returning home to Ithaca in retribution for blinding his son Cyclops. Plato’s story about Poseidon’s kingdom Atlantis in his Critias and Timaeus dialogues has the patron god’s country destroyed by a morally and–one would have to argue–supernaturally superior Zeus.

“The Marriage of Poseidon and Amphitrite” by Italian painter Felice Giani (image retrieved from Wikipedia Commons)

Poseidon and Cleito is a retelling of that legend, including the perspective of the woman Plato named as Poseidon’s wife. A more well-known wife of Poseidon’s from folkore is Amphitrite, who was a Nereid (a daughter of the archaic sea god Nereus), and a sea-goddess herself. Of more notoriety, Poseidon was said to have seduced or even raped the beautiful maiden Medusa in his sister Athena’s temple, which angered Athena so much, she transformed Medusa’s hair to serpents. The Greeks had little charity for women in their myths.

A point of contrast with Zeus: while his older brother was the father of some of the most popular heroes from Greek mythology (Perseus, Heracles), Poseidon was the father of some of the most well-known monsters, such as Polyphemos, also known as the Cyclops, and Charybdis, the female whirlpool monster, of the famous Scylla and Charybdis, aka “the rock and a hard place.”

One last bit of trivia, Poseidon had male lovers too. One particularly interesting story is that of Nerites, who was the handsome brother of the beautiful Nereids (sea nymphs). Both Aphrodite and Poseidon fell in love with Nerites, and the young man refused the love goddess and chose Poseidon, who made him his charioteer.

Let me know what you think about Poseidon by dropping a comment below, and I’ll enter you in the raffle for Poseidon swag!

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Pick up Poseidon and Cleito for just $2.99 through this weekend

andrew August 27, 2016 No Comments

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Brought to you by the fabulously handsome Chris Hemsworth (or, I guess I should say his lovely public domain gif), this jaw-dropping announcement:

Just through Sunday, August 28th, you can buy my upcoming release Poseidon and Cleito at Amazon for the ridiculously low, pre-order price of $2.99!!

That’s like nothing. You probably spend more on your morning coffee. Next year, if you’re a New Yorker, you’ll probably spend more on a subway trip. It’s less than a 16 oz. package of Nutter Butter cookies at Walmart. Nutter butters make for a great snack while reading the story by the way.

So, how can Amazon afford to offer the book at such a low price, you might be asking? I have no idea. I’m not an economics major. I’m hardly versed in e-book marketing, and christ knows it feels like a chunk of my heart is being carved out with a scalpel when I think about the years it took me to write the book all costed out at the price of a medium-sized Tupperware container. But my guess is it has something to do with Amazon looking at the long-range gains if lots and lots of people buy the book and tell their friends, generating a tidal rush of buyers that will make them tons of money when the price goes up to $5.99 on August 29th.

What I see is a win/win situation. I mean, you probably don’t care about the fat cats at Amazon getting richer. So why not buy their product for three bucks less and really stick it to them?

Maybe that was a bit crass. Truly, the reason you should buy Poseidon and Cleito is it’s a great story about a man who becomes known as the god of storm and sea and his wife who the Greeks conveniently left out of his legend because, let’s face it, if you think male writers tend to be sexist today, that’s nothing compared to the way misogynists like Plato and Sophocles treated women back in the day. Do you like stories with strong female characters? Do you like revisiting legends from a totally different point-of-view? Do you have an e-reader and an extra $2.99 laying around the house? If you answered yes to any of those, Poseidon and Cleito is the book for you.

Now how about a little more Chris Hemsworth?

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In closing, buying Poseidon and Cleito for the crazy, early release price of $2.99 may just be the most important thing you do this year. I mean, I’m not saying there aren’t a lot of big things going on in the world, like presidential elections and global warming and economic uncertainty. But why not take a little break from all of that unpleasant stuff and immerse yourself in an amazing adventure story? You’ll be contributing to adult literacy. You’ll impress people with your reading cred when you can drop into conversation: “Yeah, I happen to be reading a really excellent book too.”

I guess what I’m saying is you can’t afford not to buy Poseidon and Cleito at this amazing, early release price. As the great Ted Cruz said at the Republican Convention: “Vote your conscience. E-books matter!” OK, maybe he didn’t say that last part. But do you care?

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Flamecon 2.0: I came. I flamed. I was entertained.

andrew August 25, 2016 No Comments

What a weekend! I had been feeling quite an emotional build-up over the past few months in anticipation of Flamecon 2.0. It came and went in a blink as did the Rio Olympics, which I had also heavily anticipated and watched with lots of emotions. Between the two happenings, I was drained, which is why this post-event note is coming out on a bit of a time delay.

Geeks OUT did a tremendous job with the con. Super well-organized, full of great programming, and staffed by amazingly friendly and helpful volunteers. Flamecon 2.0 was a big expansion on the inaugural event last year, and the organizers met that challenge, garnering crowds for two days and impressive media coverage. They already announced that because of the success, they will be putting on the con next year.

My one regret is that I didn’t take more photos. I had been hoping to tweet and Facebook throughout the weekend, but I got snagged by unreliable Wifi and cellular connectivity. I’m sharing the few photos I took along with some of the highlights for me.

Without a doubt, the best part of the con was meeting up with my fellow Genre Junkies to work our table. I was glad to be back with David Swatling, who I had joined up with last year. Christian Baines and Joel Weinberg were pretty new to me, and luckily they both turned out to be terrific guys. Joel even gave me a signed copy of his book True Religion, which I look forward to reading.

Here we are, the Genre Junkies, l to r: me, David Swatling, Christian Baines and J.L. Weinberg.

Of course, there were a ton of exhibits to check out, and I picked up an “Expecto Patrnonum” t-shirt, which was exactly what I’ve always wanted even though I didn’t know until the moment I saw it. That’s kind of what Flamecon is like in a nutshell. You realize just how right everything in the world can be. A dude walking around in a t-shirt emblazoned with a lizard waving a rainbow flag. A girl in pigtails wearing an R2D2 mini-dress. Boys with purses shaped like hamburgers, and a trio of con-ers weaving through the crowd strumming ukuleles. For me, It was the little things that made the biggest impressions.

I had the chance to attend the panel: “Breaking the rules of teen lit” with authors Laurent Linn (Draw the Line), Bil Wright (Putting Makeup on the Fat Boy), Allison Cherry (Look Both Ways), and Michael Barakiva (One Man Guy). They are each impressive writes who have made it into the mainstream via big house publishers. One thing that stood out from their talk was Cherry’s discussion of the challenge of writing bi teen characters, what she called a “lose, lose, lose, lose” situation. Closely paraphrased, she talked about how:

A. If you write a bi girl character who ends up with a boy, you’re criticized for portraying bisexuality as a passing phase.

B. If you write a bi girl character who ends up with a girl, you’re criticized for portraying bisexuality as merely a passage to lesbianism.

C. If you write a bi girl character who ends up with neither, you’re criticized for suggesting that bisexual characters don’t deserve a happy ending.

D. If you write a bi girl character who ends up in a polyamorous, or open, or multi-gender relationship, you’re criticized for propagating the stereotype that bisexual people are greedy and promiscuous.

Such is the position of those of us writing characters who stand in as representatives of everyqueer. Happily, more YA books about bisexual and other queer characters are getting published each year, so hopefully, readers of LGBT YA can appreciate that a single story is just one perspective on being B or L or G (even slower to gain a variety of perspectives: the Ts, Qs, TS’s, Is and As).

Though I wonder sometimes: we’re an awfully passionate community. I expect that debate about “good” and “bad” portrayals will persist beyond my lifetime; and that’s not a terrible thing. As the panelists’ stated, we’re all entitled to speak our truths.

Here are the few photos I took while I took a break from the Genre Junkies table and wasn’t too distracted taking everything in.

Here’s Flamey, the con mascot, who greeted us at the door.

The main exhibit hall

Con’ers lining up for Saturday’s contest.

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Check out the latest dispatch from Hogwarts’ G.S.A.

andrew August 23, 2016 No Comments

Perry Moore, image retrieved from perrymoorestories.com

Over at Queer Sci Fi, the Hogwarts G.S.A. was inspired to write up a retrospective piece in tribute to author and activist Perry Moore.

Moore was an openly gay man in an industry where, if being gay was not exactly taboo, it certainly wasn’t talked about much. With his credentials, he could have quietly continued as a successful, big budget filmmaker, or separated his activist life from his professional life. But Moore’s twin passions of fantasy and LGBT social justice led him to be a crusader in the entertainment industry. He wasn’t the first person to speak out about homophobia in Hollywood and comics, but his platform made him an effective champion of the cause.

You can read the full article here.

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