A Minotaur’s Guide to Dating and Finding True Love
by
Stephanie Draven
I don’t think it was an accident that Anais Nin, famed erotica writer, called her book Seduction of the Minotaur. As it happens, the famed monster of ancient Greek lore has a lot to teach us about dating and finding true love. Certainly, the modern-day minotaur of my own new romance novel, Dark Sins & Desert Sands, knows how to put the moves on my heroine. So, without further ado, here are some things we can all learn from a Minotaur:
Keep the Mystery Alive. The ancient minotaur lived in a dark labyrinth. People get turned around, confused, and never made it out alive. Allegorically makes him the perfect template of the dark and sexy stranger into whose eyes we might fall and get completely lost! If you’re dating, you might want to keep a little aloof and make sure not to reveal all your secrets at once.
Be Bullish On Love. In mythology, the minotaur’s mother was a particularly lusty woman who got it on with a bull. I like to think that he inherited a little of her...shall we say...passion? My minotaur hero isn’t afraid of commitment--it’s the heroine who can’t trust in love. This leads to a very sexy scene in which my hero tells her over and over again, “You love me.” And then he proves it to her. If you go into a dating situation with a cynical attitude, it’s going to be that much harder to find what you’re looking for. So try to infuse everything you do with the confidence that you deserve to be loved and that love will come back to you.
Don’t Be Afraid to Admit That You’re Horny. I always like an alpha hero who knows what he wants and isn’t afraid to ask for it. Ray Stavrakis doesn’t have any trouble accepting either his sexuality or how it tends to manifest itself against the wall, on a train, and in other inappropriate places. Eventually, our heroine finds that when it comes to the man she loves, no place is an inappropriate place. Now, I’m sure the minotaur wouldn’t recommend that you do something with your date that could get you arrested, but he doesn’t advise playing hard to get.
Stephanie Draven is currently a denizen of Baltimore, that city of ravens and purple night skies. She lives there with her favorite nocturnal creatures–three scheming cats and a deliciously wicked husband. And when she is not busy with dark domestic rituals, she writes her books.
Stephanie has always been a storyteller. In elementary school, she channeled Scheherazade, weaving a series of stories to charm children into sitting with her each day at the lunch table. When she was a little older, Stephanie scared all the girls at her sleepovers with ghost stories.
She should have known she was born to hold an audience in her thrall, but Stephanie resisted her writerly urges and graduated from college with a B.A. in Government. Then she went to Law School, where she learned how to convincingly tell the tallest tales of all!
A longtime lover of ancient lore, Stephanie enjoys re-imagining myths for the modern age. She doesn’t believe that true love is ever simple or without struggle so her work tends to explore the sacred within the profane, the light under the loss and the virtue hidden in vice. She counts it amongst her greatest pleasures when, from her books, her readers learn something new about the world or about themselves.
Stephanie also writes historical fiction as Stephanie Dray and has a series of forthcoming novels from Berkley Books featuring Cleopatra’s daughter.For more about the author and her writing, you can visit her web site by following the link below.
http://stephaniedraven.com/
