Welcome to our new blog!  We’re excited to use this space as a way to engage our readers and share tidbits about our book or mythology in general.

Since this is our first post, we thought we’d go way, way back and share the story of how we started this writing journey in the first place. The initial inspiration for the book that became Labors of an Epic Punk (at one point called Mythology High) started eight years ago in a Rainforest Cafe.  Sheri was having lunch one day and saw a funky sculpture of Atlas holding up the world, which got her thinking about all the great tales from mythology. (Full disclosure: she saw the statue in the hallway on the way to the restrooms. Yep; a trip to the ladies’ room started this whole journey. Talk about mighty contests rising from trivial things…)

Our initial concept was a private high school populated exclusively with mythological heroes, only as teenagers. And they’d be taught by famous scholars—Pythagoras, for example, would be the math teacher. As we think about it now, it all seems very “Muppet Babies,” but hey…you have to start somewhere.

Eventually, we hit upon this character of Telemachus—the son of the great warrior and wanderer Odysseus—and we started thinking about how much drama was bubbling underneath the surface of this character. Never knowing his father, who went off to fight in the Trojan War and never came back. Unsure whether or not his dad was even alive. Living in a house over-run by suitors anxious to replace his dad. Yeah, we could do something with that. Very soon, the other “teen heroes” at the school melted away as Telemachus, whom we started calling “Mac,” became the center of the story.

Once we hit upon our main character, things started taking shape. We figured pretty early on we wanted to write a “Breakfast Club meets Clash of the Titans” kind of story—a high school novel that just so happened to take place 3,000 years ago. Our story would have fantastical elements, sure, but the way we saw it, those aspects would work metaphorically; we wanted to show that, for a teenage boy like Mac, asking a girl to dance could be just as scary as facing a monster like the Minotaur.

So, we hope you enjoy our musings. Please check back often, or “follow” our blog to get an email each time we post something new. If you’ve read (or have started reading) Labors of an Epic Punk, leave us a comment below. We’d LOVE to hear what you think!