Guest Post: Writing Minos by Burt Weissbourd

Minos by Burt Wiessbourd

Series: Corey Logan # 3

Release Date: 26th May 2016
Publisher: Rare Bird Books

Genres: Mystery / Thriller

                                 Writing Minos

Minos is the most difficult book I’ve ever written. I had to imagine a disturbed teenaged girl, Sara, actually walk in her shoes. Sara has constructed an entire mythological universe and language, an alternative reality where she lives and struggles with a terrible secret, too frightening for consciousness. She’s trying to reach Theseus, ancient Athens’ “hero of all heroes,” the young champion who slew the minotaur. Sara needs him to help her slay the Beast, a present day monster that she can’t even identify.

Sara is sent to Dr. Abe Stein for therapy. She doesn’t want to talk about her friends or family. When he asks what he can do to help, she scoffs. When he presses her she asks him if he can help her reach Apollo’s oracle at Delphi, to ask Apollo to influence Theseus. She asks if he can give her more power to fight the Beast. Sound preposterous? It gets worse, there are monsters in her world—the Furies with snakes for hair, blood dripping from their eyes, and brass-studded scourges; Cerberus, the three headed hellhound who guards the gates to the underworld, Phae, the Crommyonian sow, a monstrous wild pig that ravaged an entire region, and of course the ferocious, child-eating Minotaur, a creature with the head of a bull and the body of a man.

So the challenge is to make Sara’s intense inner life coherent, believable, understandable and finally, infused with present day meaning. The primary tool I had to accomplish this was the Greek myths. A word about the myths. They’re very dark. Offending a god, even a small slight, can have horrific consequences. For example, Prometheus is chained to a rock with an eagle feeding daily on his regenerating liver. Atlas bears the weight of the world on his shoulders. When Minos fails to sacrifice the Cretan Bull to Poseidon, as promised, Poseidon makes his wife, Pasiphae, fall in love with the white bull and their offspring is the hideous minotaur. And so on.

Sara is tormented by these horrific stories, and it’s made worse as her friends start dying in the present. Abe is dumbstruck by her prescient knowledge of Snapper’s hideous murder. Snapper is Sara’s friend and Abe’s wife Corey’s client. In Sara’s world, Snapper is the Horseman, Theseus’ charioteer. So the ultimate challenge of this book was not only to make Sara’s world credible, but to make sure that the reader is hugely emotionally invested in Abe’s efforts to crack the code inside Sara’s head. And, when together they’re able to do that, make sure that the reader understands viscerally how important, how essential, it was for Sara to construct and hide in her mythological world. I think the reader will be surprised, even astonished, by the horrible buried secret that Abe and Sara finally discover together. Hopefully this revelation will satisfy, resonate on multiple levels, and finally thrill a reader with it’s unexpected, chilling truth and significance.   

Book Blurb

 
Minos, the third work in the Corey Logan Trilogy. The title derives from the mythical king of Crete who every lunar year condemns seven Athenian youths and seven maidens to be eaten by the ferocious Minotaur. Minos begins at the Olympic Academy, where Billy's friend Sara has just carved a magic circle in the hardwood bathroom floor with an ancient double-edged dagger. She twirls inside her circle calling on the Oracle of Apollo to help her find a modern-day Theseus, the reincarnation of Athens' “hero of all heroes” who slew the Minotaur. Lost in her magical dance, she knocks over a candle, sets fire to the curtains, and is suspended from school. She is sent to Abe for treatment. Abe discovers that Sara has patched together an entire mythological universe and language with which she tries to make him see that lives are at stake. It is not easy to convince the authorities. But Corey knows that young people are indeed being murdered, and soon Sara's dire warnings begin to make sense. But who is the modern-day descendant of Minos? The key is inside Sara's head.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

 Burt Weissbourd is a novelist, screenwriter and producer of feature films. He was born in 1949 and graduated cum laude from Yale University, with honors in psychology. During his student years, he volunteered at the Museum of Modern Art in Paris and taught English to college students in Thailand. After he graduated, he wrote, directed, and produced educational films for Gilbert Altschul Productions. He began a finance program at the Northwestern University Graduate School of Business, but left to start his own film production company in Los Angeles. He managed that company from 1977 until 1986, producing films including "Ghost Story" starring Fred Astaire, Melvyn Douglas, John Houseman, Douglas Fairbanks Jr., and Patricia Neal, and "Raggedy Man" starring Sissy Spacek and Sam Shepard, which The New York Times called "a movie of sweet, low-keyed charm." In 1987, he founded an investment business, which he still runs. INSIDE PASSAGE is the first in the Corey Logan trilogy.