Midas Touch: The Mythology That Inspired My Fantasy Novel

Midas Touch: The Mythology That Inspired My Fantasy Novel

by fnmanning

Where does inspiration come from? 

And what inspires me to write? For some reason, I feel like I should have a cool answer to questions like these. Just like every superhero needs an epic origin story, maybe novels deserve the same. 

The truthful answer is I just think about things. Then I think about more things. 

All those things become a giant list of maybes until eventually the things I’m tossing around in my head stop being ideas and I actually get attached to them and then have to turn them into a story. It’s not a glamorous process.

My contemporary fantasy novel Strikes Twice is one of the rare exceptions where I actually had a clear starting concept.

Have you heard about the Midas touch or the Greek myth about King Midas? He wished that everything he touched turned to gold. Naturally, this went terribly. For example, food and people are two things that don’t do well as gold.

This was the inspiration for the novel. Except instead of turning things to gold, anyone the cursed character touches gets a zap. Sometimes a big zap.

But it turns out that King Midas has two Greek myths associated with him, which have almost nothing to do with each other. I had absolutely no idea about this until recently. It’s actually an amusing and very weird story.

More to Midas

In the other story, Pan the nymph with wooden pipes and the god Apollo competed to see who was the better musician because apparently the gods had nothing better to do. Most people liked Apollo’s lyre playing best, because in addition to his archery skills, he was also the god of music.

But Midas picked Pan as the winner, and Apollo concluded he must have an ass’s ears (burn?) and so Midas’s ears transformed into a donkey’s ears.

As if this myth weren’t strange enough, Midas wore headgear to cover his ears and swore his barber to secrecy. The barber needed to spill the tea, so he dug a hole near a river and whispered the secret. The reeds that grew by the river then started whispering the secret and telling everyone that Midas had donkey ears.

From gold to donkey ears. The moral of both stories is a warning about what happens when mortals get involved with the gods. Another acceptable moral is that Greek myths are weird.

Shocking Curses

So the starting concept for Strikes Twice was a cursed man shocks everything he touches. Kind of like the Midas Touch where everything Midas touched turned to gold.

That’s the basic premise, but I write romance novels, so it also needed a romance aspect and it turns into something like this:

If a dangerous electrical curse were attached to man you found nearly impossibly to resist, how long would you remember to keep your hands to yourself?

Unlike Midas’s other myth, everyone in Strikes Twice keeps their regular ears. The main character Marty has enough trouble trying to lift Az’s curse without getting zapped as their growing attraction makes distance difficult. 

Strikes Twice features enemies to lovers, an understandably grumpy shifter, an optimistic wizard, action, steamy scenes, cruel curses, and love triumphing against all odds. This the second novel in the Elementally Yours Series, and each book features different characters and can be read as a standalone.

 

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