Minotaur and the Light of the Fish

My novel MINOTAUR is coming out in November from Rebel Satori Press!

It still feels rather unreal. I spent so long writing this novel and it’s been quite the journey. I started and finished MINOTAUR during the first year of the pandemic. I was a social person, and it felt so bizarre to me that we were all to be kept apart for our safety. And yet, at the same time, we were all held together, social media and our phones uniting us all. I would have been lost in the dark had I not had some sort of connection to those I love, a spark of light in the dark.

In 2019, before the pandemic had begun, I had been carrying a sentence with me. It was a line of text, and it had become a mantra of sorts. I would say it out loud.

“We were friendly with the dark.”

The only problem was, I had no idea where the line fit. Over time, I realized that it the voice of a young woman who spoke those words to me; I just didn’t know where she was. When the pandemic began in March of 2020, I could see her more clearly.

I knew that her name was Roanne, and that she had that she was disabled and that she in a labyrinth. I wondered what she was doing there, and I knew that I had to put the words down on the page. I wrote a short story that eventually became the first chapter of MINOTAUR. I knew after writing it that I wanted to explore the world Roanne was in. I can’t describe the amount of comfort I found in the labyrinth. It’s like the shadows kept me safe.

When I started writing MINOTAUR, I knew that the labyrinth would be a sprawling place and that there would be a lot of people living there with Roanne, so I put a call out to friends and family to see if anyone wanted to be a character in the maze. In this way, with people I know and love within the novel, I didn’t feel so alone. Almost all the names of the villagers in the book are people wanted to be with Roanne in the labyrinth.

I did an edit of MINOTAUR before sending it out to different publishers, but received solid no’s from a few of them, nothing from some others. I was in the beginning stages of self publishing the book when I heard from Rebel Satori Press. They wanted the book for their Queer Space line of books and of course I said yes!

It’s so odd to me that the sentence I had in my head in 2019 is now a novel about to be published in 2025. I wanted to do a short story or novella to help promote the novel when it comes out later this year. It has the working title of The Light of the Fish. As I wrote it, I realized that it wouldn’t work as a prequel. I wanted the first time you saw the labyrinth to be a surprise, much as it was to me way back when I started writing it. I’ve saved what I’ve written of The Light of the Fish. I think the events of The Light of the Fish take place somewhere around the beginning of the second book in the series that has already been started.

I’m going to hold on to it for now, I hope you don’t mind. I’m so excited for all of you to read MINOTAUR and meet Roanne. I’ve been on quite the journey to get to this point and so has she. It’s almost time. Are you friendly with the dark?