Welcome to Marketing for Romance Authors 52 week blog hop challenge.  Each week, a lovely group of romance authors blog on a common theme. Today we discuss our story inspirations.  Visit them all here.

One of my favorite wells for story inspiration is mythology.  Most of them are sad and their personalities difficult, but myths are full of human insight and struggle that is based in history yet very, very valid in today’s world.

My paranormal novella, Shifter Trials, is an updated version of the Atalanta myth–the woman who would only marry a man who could beat her in a footrace. Turn her into a shifter, make it a marathon, and you have the makings of a great story.

Another source of inspiration is extraordinary careers. My science fiction novel, Race to Redemption, started out with Elaina as  Nascar driver and Erik as a bioterrorism expert undercover as a doctor with Medicins Sans Borders. For many reasons, I decided to turn it into a science fiction story, but kept close to those original career choices, making them equally extraordinary even in the science fiction world.

What career or myth (or both) would you like to see in a romance novel?

 

 

12 Replies to “Myth Madness #MFRWauthor #amwriting”

  • I love mythology! There are so many possibilities for inspiration! Norse mythology is the inspiration for my upcoming Valkyries series.

    • Norse mythology is my favorite. Its so dark and cold, with a hazy moral structure grounded in strength. Makes for sexy heroes, sassy heroines and interesting villains.

  • Mythology does offer many great options. I’ve never used it as a story idea myself, but I’m only 1 book in so anything is possible in the future. 🙂

    • I also like reading it. I like to write what I like to read. And you are so right, anything is possible in the future.

  • I love the idea of using mythology as well as fairy tales for story inspiration, but I always have trouble managing it. Usually, the similarity of a myth/fairy tale to my story comes to me after my manuscript is complete. Great post, Shari!

    • Thanks, Alina. I think in truth we tend to draw on old tales and myths quite naturally. They are the stories of our youth, and we find them everywhere if we look

  • Over the years I’ve seen people take myth and religion, pull out the threads they like of one or more, and twist them together into their own belief system. The world of Tallav is built around a whole planet settled by women who created their own society based on an Irish Celtic mythos with a huge dose of generic goddess worship thrown in. The story is set far enough in the future, that they often have skewed things or are flat out wrong about the myths the use to underpin their worldview.

    • I love the getting it wrong part. That feels like such an accurate depiction of how society works. We use myths and lore to support our own ideas and agendas rather than vice versa.

  • This may seems dumb, because it seems kinda dumb to me, but I want to see actual jobs I’ve had. I’ve written teachers, a janitor (as a secondary character, granted), classical musician, and in my WIP, technical writer. The thing is, none of these are sexy roles (with the possible exception of musician, though rock musicians have about a gazillion more allure points than oboists), but the challenge is to make the person interesting. Not the job, the person.

    • Its not dumb. Many great stories are ordinary folks surviving extraordinary circumstances. An ordinary job is a version of that. I like to play with other jobs as kind of exploration. You don’t have to pop off to a different planet to find someone different than you, but think through what it would take, who a person would need to be, to take on a different type of life path. Also I personally get tired of folks have the same jobs over and over again in romance novels. Like the alpha jobs–police, firefighter, CEO, Billionaire and female jobs such journalist (really common to show a woman can ask a lot of questions), assistant, in a café or restaurant somehow, etc…

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