MYTHIC HEROINES

First, hello and welcome to HOOKED on HEROINES. At this, our christening moment, allow me to simply say that we are MARIA LIMA, author of Blood Lines series from Pocket/Juno Books, LAURA BICKLE, author of Sparks and Embers from Pocket/Juno Books, ALAYNA WILLIAMS author of Dark Oracle and Rogue Oracle from Pocket/Juno Books, and myself, LINDA ROBERTSON author of the Persephone Alcmedi series. And no, this isn't a JUNO thing. We just happen to like each other. :-)

I'll let the other ladies introduce themselves (and tell you what they want you to know) via their forthcoming posts, but for me...please let my intro suffice with this: I've been chasing this writing dream of mine for over twenty years and I'm jubilant that my dream is coming true.

Now, on to the subject matter the title of this post indicated.

MYTHIC HEROINES. In particular, Persephone.

I'm sure there are plenty of folks out there who are familiar with the mythology behind Persephone, her story of being abducted and taken to the underworld and how she regained freedom. There are probably many who are scarily knowledgeable about it. (You know who you are and I've heard you talk on panels at cons.) I'm not even going to put my toes on your turf. I don't have a degree in mythology and I'm not going to rehash info that we could all google.

Instead, I'd like to veer into the realm of how I'm borrowing from this particular myth and, hopefully, paying homage to my MC's (main character's) namesake without rewriting a predictable and/or modernized version. And no, I'm not knocking the imaginative re-tellings out there. I'm just saying that is not my intention with the Persephone Alcmedi series.

So how did I end up with an MC who was named for a goddess if I didn't intend to link her to that goddess? I guess I came at it backwards. I wanted to create a witch character descended from a long line of witches. I wanted them to all have names for goddesses, muses and the like. I wanted them to be Greek, though not exactly purists on that bloodline issue. In fact, my MC has been told her father was an Egyptian. Hence, she was named Persephone Isis.

At first...I knew that her first name would mess with some people. (I have reminded my mom repeated how to pronounce it.) But that allowed me to contrast the MC's name with a very common name for the hero--Johnny. And he could conveniently decide to give her a nickname, Red...as in Red Riding Hood because she lives with her grandmother and he, being a werewolf, gets to pay them a visit. Thereby I get to give a little nod to the Big, Bad Wolf story as well.

But as I got deeper into the story I wanted to tell, the characters I wanted to create, I saw how giving nods to that mythology was not only fun, but could foreshadow or deepen certain scenes. Now, again, this isn't to say you'll find the Persephone myth retold if you're looking for it. It's not there. But it created room to play and I couldn't resist.

One of those nods to the myth is that my MC was raised by her maternal grandmother, named Demeter. (If you want to play seven degrees of separation...in Bram Stoker's Dracula, the ship that brought the vampire to London was named the Demeter...so she has links to vampires already.)

Other nods to the myth are the involvement of Hecate that you will see as the story grows, and the hints of Tartarus and the Underworld.

So, between the elements of the mythic Persephone's story that I can borrow from, and the inevitable path I've laid before my character, combined with the influence of the cast I've surrounded her with, there's no predicting where she may end up!