The Story of Egyptian Heart from Author Kathryn Meyer Griffith
I am blessed to have veteren author – Kathryn Meyer Griffith blogging with me today. Kathryn, thank you for joining us. The story of how Egyptian Heart has come to be in it’s current form is as interesting as the story itself. Congratulations on the release and on finding a new forum for your voice in e-publishing.
Let me start with this: I have always loved ancient Egyptian stories since I was a child. I wrote one of my first school papers at around eleven years old in pencil on the ancient Egyptians after dragging home an armful of musty smelling books from the library. I don’t recall exactly why I loved this particular time period and the people that lived in it but it might have had something to do with the movies The Ten Commandments (I was raised a Catholic), the horror mummy movies of the 1960’s and the early TV shows on Nefertiti and Cleopatra. I just had this affinity for the period.
It was February 1994 (I noted it on the outside of the manila folder where I keep a book history on each novel) when I began Egyptian Heart. Originally I called it The Cursed Scarab. Later, I retitled it Egyptian Heart because I wanted it to more reflect the romance tale it had become.
My agent, who’d sold four earlier novels for me to Zebra Books told me about a new romantic horror line that Silhouette was starting called the Shadows Line. They wanted to tap into the darker romantic paranormal market.
She wanted me to branch out so I wrote two manuscripts for the Silhouette Shadows Line or tried to. Egyptian Heart and Shadow Road. To make a long story short, Silhouette Shadows turned both down.
After that my agent dropped me. Ah, the life of a writer.
So, then life (as it has many times in my 39 year writing career), family and job problems, and my other novels (I was into murder mysteries for years and sold two to Avalon Books), got in the way and Egyptian Heart and Shadow Road went into drawer hibernation until 2004, when I rediscovered them, dug them out, rewrote them. Sometimes, I’ve found, a book left alone in a dark cubbyhole ages like good wine. (Or sometimes it just turns to vinegar.)
Egyptian Heart has had a very long history. Simply put, it’s a romantic time travel paranormal romance set in the ancient times of Nefertiti and her heretic Pharaoh Akhenaton. It’s more romance than history, though I did a lot of research in 1994… originally for my 1994 Zebra horror paperback The Calling. I thought: why waste all this hard work for research on just one novel? So I also used it for Egyptian Heart and an erotic short story, The Nameless One, one that Zebra had placed in their 1994 horror anthology Dark Seductions.
The new cover for Egyptian Heart by Dawne Dominique is amazingly beautiful and Kim Richards was my editor. Thank you both.
So from a child’s love of ancient Egypt to the finished book, it’s been a long journey and goes to show all you writer’s out there that, yes, persistence does sometimes win out. And a good book never dies. It just ages like wine in a dark drawer.
I hope you’ll give Egyptian Heart a look and a read. The best way to describe it is through its blurb and so here it is:
Maggie Owen is a beautiful, spirited Egyptologist, but lonely. Even being in Egypt on a grant from the college she teaches at to search for an undiscovered necropolis she’s certain lies below the sands beyond the pyramids of Gizah doesn’t give her the happiness she’d hoped it would.
There’s always been and is something missing. Love.
Then her workmen uncover Ramose Nakh-Min’s ancient tomb and an amulet from his sarcophagus hurls her back to 1340 B.C – where she falls hopelessly in love with the man she was destined to be with, noble Ramose, who faithfully serves the heretic Pharaoh Akhenaton and his queen Nefertiti.
She’s fallen into perilous times with civil war threatening Egypt. She’s been mistaken for one of Ramose’s runaway slaves and with her light hair, jinn green eyes and fair skin she doesn’t fit in. Some say she’s magical and evil. Ramose’s favorite, Makere, tries to kill her.
The people, angry the Pharaoh has set his Queen aside and forced them to worship one god are rising up against him.
Maggie’s caught dangerously in the middle.
In the end, desperately in love, will she find a way to stay alive and with Ramose in ancient Egypt–and to make a difference in his world and history?
Because Maggie has finally found love. ***
Thank you all! Kathryn Meyer Griffith
E-mail me at rdgriff@htc.net I love to hear from my readers.
Eternal Press buy link: http://www.eternalpress.biz/book.php?isbn=9781615724437
You Tube Video Link: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cogCNYKzPqc
