Temple of Love -- my first novel (free on Kindle for 3 days)

I can't even begin to express how happy I am to be re-releasing my first novel, Temple of Love. It is a story of passionate poets and sacred service in honor of love.

AND ... It's available FREE on Kindle from today (Feb 18) through Thursday (Feb 20)!  Get it here.
The book follows the life of Sappho, the famous Greek poet from Lesvos.

"This was part of Sappho’s art, to give herself so completely in lust and sweat and satisfaction, to allow herself to be contented and dependent on her lover. … She hadn’t yet learned that this art was a double-edged blade – one that would cut her again and again. It would lend heat to her passion and poetry, and it would eventually break her."

Sappho, the lyric poet whose life and lovers give us our current understanding of the word “Lesbian,” was hailed as the Tenth Muse on her island home of Lesvos and all throughout Classical Greece. Her poems of passion and longing were directed at the men … and women … whom she adored and sometimes envied.

Like most girls of Lesvos, Sappho lived a life among women. After her earliest education, though, she rejects the traditional married life and gives herself in service to the temple of Aphrodite to become a priestess of love, beauty, and sexual ecstasy. Cloistered among the sacred courtesans, she opens her heart and body to love. But when Pittakos the tyrant and Alcaeus the poet vie with each other to be first in her heart, will she lose herself and all that she holds dear?
 
Read it on Kindle (FREE for a limited time) or in paperback.

After you've read it, will you post a review in the comments? I would be delighted to hear what you think!

Finding a Mystery in a Well-Known Tale

Sappho and Alcaeus

On a professional writing forum in which I participate, a (romance) author asked the group what type of mystery or suspense we like to include in our stories.

As we all learned in elementary school (and had repeated throughout our formal educations), all stories are propelled by a major conflict and perhaps by a series of lesser ones.  You remember: man v. man, man v. nature, man v. society, man v. himself.

The novel I have already written (Temple of Love -- due for re-release in January 2014), as well as the several that I am planning within the same loose series, are all historical fictions based on Greek mythology and history. They are romances, to be sure; but they are also re-tellings or re-imaginings of famous lives or well-known legends.

For me, this means that the conflicts that propel the stories forward are already built in. In most cases, they are well-known conflicts -- Sappho's tempestuous emotional state and numerous lovers, Helen's love triangle that ignites the Trojan War, Psyche's attempts to prove herself to her immortal mother-in-law.

So, in my case, the conflicts were written 2500 years ago, but the "mysteries" are left to me to sort. Providing understandable motivations, fresh interpretations, and characters that are approachable to modern readers -- those are the mysteries my readers get to unlock.

I'm polishing up Sappho's story now -- Temple of Love (excerpts available behind the link). It will be available again VERY SOON, with a big marketing push to bring it into the public eye. After that, I will be continuing my work on Helen's tale -- Temple of Beauty (more excerpts). Beyond that, I'm not sure who will follow. Psyche? Medusa? Pandora? Ariadne?