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Inherited Power
Steel & Ballast follows an investor-relations executive whose romance with the heir to a shipping dynasty becomes a battle over love, motherhood, corporate succession, and who has the right to control the future. What was the inspiration for the setup of your story?
The inspiration for Steel & Ballast came from the remarkable professionals I have encountered throughout my career in the shipping industry and capital markets— executives, shipowners, finance professionals, and heirs to maritime dynasties who have built extraordinary careers in one of the world’s most demanding and unpredictable sectors. Shipping is an industry defined by constant volatility, immense responsibility, and high-stakes decision-making, yet many of the women leading within it do so with remarkable resilience, intelligence, and determination. I wanted to explore what happens when a woman who has dedicated herself to succeeding in that male-dominated environment is forced to navigate equally complex personal challenges. At its heart, Steel & Ballast is a story about ambition, identity, legacy, motherhood, and the difficult choices that arise when love and professional purpose collide.
How did you research the technical details surrounding LNG carriers, freight markets, public listings, and investor relations?
I am a seasoned Investor Relations and Financial Communications professional with more than 20 years of combined experience across retail banking, investment banking, and capital markets, with specialized expertise in the global shipping industry. My professional experience has given me an in-depth understanding of how shipping companies develop and strengthen their equity story, define their investment thesis, and communicate with the broader investment community, including analysts, institutional and retail investors, brokerage firms, legal counsel, financial media, and other key market participants.
Throughout my career, I have worked closely with publicly listed shipping companies and witnessed many of the defining moments that shape a company’s trajectory from IPOs and U.S. public listings to mergers, divestitures, fleet renewals, equity offerings, reverse stock splits, corporate rebranding, and other significant corporate actions. That firsthand experience allowed me to write the technical aspects of Steel & Ballast with authenticity. Whether describing LNG carriers, freight markets, debrief meetings, earnings calls, or boardroom discussions, I wasn’t relying solely on research; I was drawing on years of professional experience. Research certainly played a role in refining details and ensuring accuracy, but the foundation of the novel comes from having lived and worked in that world.
In my current role, I help executive teams build the narrative that explains a company’s financial performance, strategic objectives, key priorities, sector outlook, growth prospects and long-term shareholder value. My role is to ensure those messages are communicated with clarity, consistency, and transparency, giving investors the context behind the numbers. That perspective became one of the central themes of Steel & Ballast: numbers alone rarely tell the full story. Leadership must explain the strategy, the rationale behind its decisions, and the long-term vision they are intended to achieve. There is no simple right or wrong answer. Every strategic decision carries consequences and shapes how a company is perceived by the market. What ultimately matters is not just the decision itself, but how leadership articulates its reasoning, builds credibility, and earns the confidence of investors and shareholders. To reinforce this view, I incorporated realistic elements such as press releases, earnings calls, and Bloomberg interviews to illustrate the pivotal role investor relations plays in communicating material information.
I intentionally chose the LNG shipping sector because it represents one of the most dynamic and strategically important segments of the maritime industry. The scale of investment, long-term capital commitments, geopolitical considerations, and global energy transition create an environment where every corporate decision carries significant financial and strategic implications, making it an ideal backdrop for the story. Additionally, the attacks on commercial shipping in the Red Sea by Houthi forces allowed me to weave real-world events into the narrative and to illustrate how geopolitical tensions can disrupt global supply chains, alter shipping patterns, and force companies to make complex operational and financial decisions under intense scrutiny. Equally, a company’s listing on Nasdaq serves as a reminder that ringing the opening bell is not the culmination of the journey. Viewed in the rearview mirror, it highlights the immense effort, meticulous planning, and strategic execution required to bring a company to the public markets. Those are precisely the kinds of high-stakes decisions that Steel & Ballast explores.
Daphne remains deeply committed to her professional identity throughout the novel; what qualities did you most want readers to admire or question in her?
One of the qualities I most wanted readers to admire about Daphne is her determination to build a career on her own merits. Although she comes from an influential family of brokers, she never leverages her family’s wealth, connections, or the Contox family name to advance her career or establish her credibility. She deliberately chooses to forge her own path, earning the respect of colleagues and the investment community through competence, integrity, and hard work rather than privilege. At the same time, I wanted readers to question whether that independence comes at a personal cost. Daphne sets exceptionally high standards for herself and is sometimes reluctant to ask for help or acknowledge vulnerability. That tension between independence and belonging is one of the defining aspects of her character. I also wanted to challenge the common assumption that successful women simply choose career over family. Daphne never rejected the idea of marriage, children, or a family. She simply found herself in a marriage with someone who couldn’t truly see her or embrace her ambitions without expecting her to become someone else. What she longed for wasn’t wealth or status that she had been surrounded by both throughout her life, but for a partner of depth and character who would celebrate her success rather than compete with it. Ultimately, Daphne refuses to compromise her identity in exchange for love, status, or acceptance. She believes that the strongest partnerships are built on mutual respect, emotional maturity, and the courage to choose one another as equals.
How do Sindre and Daniel represent different forms of power, recognition, and partnership in Daphne’s life?
Sindre and Daniel embody two very different forms of power and love. Sindre represents inherited power, legacy, and the expectations of a dynasty. As the heir to one of Norway’s most influential shipping families, he recognizes Daphne’s extraordinary intellect, ambition, and professional accomplishments in a way few people ever have. They speak the same language intellectually and emotionally, sharing a deep understanding of leadership, restraint, and the maritime world they both inhabit. Their relationship is built on mutual admiration, chemistry, and genuine recognition. Yet despite loving her, Sindre ultimately cannot free himself from the obligations of family, legacy, and the expectations placed upon him. His greatest conflict is not a lack of love, but an inability to choose that love over the dynasty that shaped him.
Daniel represents a very different kind of strength. His power is not inherited but emotional. He enters Daphne’s life when she has stopped expecting love and accepts her completely, without asking her to become someone else or fit a predetermined role. Most importantly, he chooses her despite the complexity of her circumstances, including the fact that she is carrying another man’s child. Unlike Sindre, Daniel does not measure love against family expectations, status, or legacy. He chooses partnership over convention and acceptance over perfection.
The story suggests that recognition alone is not enough. Sindre truly sees Daphne, but he cannot build the life they both long for. Daniel may arrive later, but he offers something even more profound: the courage to choose her fully. Through these two men, Daphne discovers that the strongest partnerships are not built on admiration alone, but on the willingness to stand beside one another when life unfolds differently than planned.
Steel & Ballast
Steel and Ballast is a sweeping romantic drama set inside the polished, highly competitive world of international shipping and maritime finance. At its center is Daphne Kontis, an accomplished investor-relations executive whose relationship with Sindre Mørkland draws her into the orbit of a wealthy Norwegian shipping dynasty. Their romance begins through professional recognition and physical attraction, but it quickly grows into a struggle involving family tradition, corporate succession, pregnancy, and control over the future. The book treats love as something deeply connected to status and legacy, so even its most intimate moments carry the pressure of boardrooms, bloodlines, and public perception.
One of the book’s strongest qualities is its unusual professional setting. The shipping industry isn’t simply decorative background. Discussions of LNG carriers, public listings, freight markets, investor confidence, and crisis communications shape the story and give Daphne’s authority a convincing foundation. Her observation that “Investors don’t buy ships; they buy narratives of endurance, leverage, and discipline” captures both her professional philosophy and the novel’s larger interest in storytelling as a form of power. Daphne understands that facts alone don’t move markets or families. Whoever controls the narrative can influence how those facts are remembered, valued, and passed down.
Daphne is the novel’s driving force. She’s intelligent, glamorous, sensual, disciplined, and intensely aware of how others try to define her. Her greatest strength as a character is that her professional identity remains central even when her personal life becomes turbulent. She doesn’t stop being an executive when she becomes a lover or an expectant mother. Instead, she approaches each role with the same instinct for preparation and long-term strategy. Sindre is written as her emotional and intellectual counterpart, though his attachment to inherited power repeatedly tests their connection. Their chemistry is heightened by the sense that each recognizes something rare in the other, even when pride and control keep them from building a stable life together.
The prose is lush, dramatic, and openly fascinated by wealth, beauty, authority, and restraint. Rooms, clothing, gestures, and silences receive nearly as much attention as dialogue, creating a world where presentation is never accidental. The book’s repeated declarations of Daphne’s exceptional qualities give the story the feeling of a modern legend, while the extended romantic scenes emphasize the almost mythic intensity of her bond with Sindre. At times, this heightened style makes the emotions feel deliberately larger than life, but that intensity suits a story in which private choices can redirect companies and dynasties. The later introduction of Daniel Mercer also expands the emotional stakes by offering Daphne a relationship shaped by a different kind of power and recognition.
By the ending, Steel and Ballast has developed from a luxury romance into a story about sovereignty, motherhood, and the ownership of legacy. Daphne’s final position is both emotionally costly and strategically formidable. She protects her son and herself by stepping beyond the structure that once judged whether she belonged, while Sindre moves forward with the public company and dynasty they once imagined shaping together. The closing statement that “power is never defeated by opposition. It is met only by equal force” neatly expresses the book’s worldview. This is a bold, intensely stylized novel about a woman who understands that influence doesn’t always require acceptance, visibility, or a seat at someone else’s table.
