Asterios and the Labyrinth follows a grieving prince of Knossos as he battles political treachery, invading powers, and ancient prophecy, risking his crown and life to fight for the man he loves and the legacy he must protect. What inspired you to tell this story?

The myth of the Minotaur and King Minos’s Labyrinth has enchanted me since I was six years old. Decades later, while standing before the Prince of the Lilies fresco in the Heraklion Archaeological Museum, the idea of telling the prince’s tale came to me with surprising force. It lingered and followed me through repeated visits to Knossos, where I could see, touch, taste, and breathe his world.

At the same time, I am on a revisionist quest to restore Classic literature with LGBTQ+ characters whose lives were erased or silenced across the last two millenia. In this novel, I envisioned Asterios and Phaistos as a ruling couple in the Late Bronze Age, a union that the archaeological record documents as plausible. Yet I longed to craft a pair whose love could rival or exceed our most treasured romantic archetypes: Helen and Paris, Penelope and Odysseus, Cleopatra and Marcus Anthonius, Juliet and Romeo. By appealing—and bending—The Judgment of Paris, I believe I have done so.

And so I pose the question to the reader: given the chance in today’s world, upon whom would you bestow the Golden Apple?

How did you balance mythic inevitability (prophecy, gods, fate) with the characters’ emotional agency?

The ancient Greeks understood that fate determines what happens, but character determines how we face it. I never allow prophecy to rob my characters of their emotional reality. Asterios cannot escape his destiny, but he can choose how he loves Phaistos, how he rules Knossos, how he confronts his enemies. These choices—made under constraint but made freely—reveal character and generate genuine dramatic tension.

The key is dual consciousness: my characters know (or suspect) how their stories must end, yet they act as if their choices matter—because emotionally and morally, they do matter. But I also resist having gods manipulate events like puppet masters. Divine will operates through human actions and the characters’ own psychology. When gods do intervene, they work within the emotional logic of the narrative.

Ultimately, we’re most human not when we escape fate, but when we face it with courage. That’s the balance I seek: characters who are fated but never passive, shaped by forces larger than themselves yet retaining the dignity of choosing how they’ll meet what’s coming.

Phaistos is both a warrior and a source of tenderness. How did you shape his role alongside Asterios’s authority?

To begin with, Phaistos is a prince in his own right, the Prince of Archanes, a house aligned with the House of Minos, and even before Asterios ascends to the throne, the post of Chief Commander of the Kingdom’s Warriors was already his. Though Phaistos is five years older than Asterios, they have grown up together. However, before they expressed their romantic feelings for each other, Asterios thought that Phaistos was enamored of Ariadne, his sister, which was not true.

In the novel, Phaistos is also recognized as the King’s Consort. But their status as a royal couple does not excuse either one of fulfilling his dynastic obligation; thus they both marry the Egyptian princesses, Meritamen assuming the title of Queen Consort, Princess of Archanes for Iset.

In their public life, Phaistos defers to Asterios’s authority as King in public, yet in private they defer to each other as equals and enjoy their time as two souls devoted to one another. Before all things, even if it they must face grave peril, they act to protect the ones they love and to keep the folk safe from foreign invaders and tyrants.

What is the next book that you are working on, and when will it be available?

Atalanta of the Wild is slated for publication in April of 2026. It follows the huntress’s complete arc, from the Calydonian boar hunt through the footraces and her wretched marriage and transformation, supplying the psychological depth and dramatic scope that Ovid’s compressed epic narrative could not provide.

I also reimagined the ending to honor both the myth’s power and contemporary readers’ expectations for female agency. Think of it as Ovid’s structure meeting the emotional intensity of Greek tragedy and the intimate character work of literary historical fiction. My hope is that readers will see themselves in Atalanta’s struggle between autonomy and constraint—a tension that remains painfully relevant to this day. 

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