Wrapping TAMER OF HORSES

Theseus and Centaur (photo by Yair Haklai
[CC BY-SA 3.0  or GFDL], via Wiki Commons)

In January, I finally finished TAMER OF HORSES, a historical novel about Hippodamia's marriage to Pirithous, and the war with the Centaurs that followed. I started writing TAMER in 2012 -- prompted by an anthology call for ancient Greek themed romances. At the time I thought that turning a tragedy into a romance was just a question of picking the right end point in the story. There was no way I was going to turn the war with the centaurs into a happily ever after, if I included it in the novella. There was just too much death, too much destruction, and too much STORY to pack into anything with a 40,000 word limit.

So I wrote the romance novella and submitted it. Lucky for me (no, really!), I got the big R. Finally, I had the time and the words to turn that novella into a full length novel and cover the WHOLE story. And I am so stoked that I did. The more I wrote, the more I loved writing it. Hippodamia didn't have to be a typical Greek -- she'd been raised by Centaurs, after all. And with Pirithous came Theseus, and even better, his Amazon wife, Antiope. There is nothing not awesome about getting to write the four of these characters, particularly after I'd written HELEN OF SPARTA. I got to explore what Pirithous and Theseus were like in their glory days, and meet the women who had the strength not only to match them, but even to exceed them. Together, the daughter of the centaurs and the daughter of Ares make a very formidable team!

It was a stop and start struggle to figure out the path of the book and pull all the threads together. When I started during the summer of 2012, I never expected that it would be a two year journey. But I'm pretty proud of the nearly 110,000 words I ended up with! Hopefully my early readers will feel the same way, and after that... well, publishing is unpredictable at the best of times, but whether or not Hippodamia's story sells, I'll never regret having written it!

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