Please Welcome Marguerite Labbe To The Joyful Approach Celebration! And Don’t Forget To Check Out The Goods!

Make Me Whole – Myths and Self-Fulfilling Prophecies

I’ve loved mythology ever since I was a little girl. The tales of gods and goddess were right up there with tales of dragons and fantasy worlds, the myths may have even ranked higher because the tales were such a pivotal part of some cultures. They were stories of another world, they pertained to my world. That love stayed with my whole life. When I went to college and dived into all the wonderful classes in the Humanities Department, I found myself specializing in Comparative Folklore and Mythology. It brought together my love of stories, with art history, sociology, language and history, all in one intriguing package.

One of the elements that both fascinated and frustrated me about Greek mythology was the self-fulfilling prophecies. Like when Oedipus was doomed to kill his father and marry his mother. Everybody in the tragic tale went out of their way to do something to avoid that happening and everything they did, led to the inevitable outcome. I’d always wondered what would happen if Oedipus’s parents hadn’t given in to their fears and raised him instead of abandoning him. Would that still have been his fate? There had to be a point where they could stop, take a look at what was happening, take a look forward and make a conscious decision to alter their fate in a way that didn’t stem from trying to run from it.

The idea of the self-fulfilling prophecy comes into play with Make Me Whole. Nick Charisteas knows too much about the cursed statues. Finding them has become an obsession to him and he’s spent many hours reading over his family’s journals, reliving the heartbreak of those who failed to break the curse. So when he starts suspecting that he’s the next in line, reborn to try, it has him contemplating running instead. And just to add to his aggravation, Dexios takes it upon himself to emerge from the statues and offer his own kind of cryptic and often angry advice.

Make Me Whole is a story of learning to trust again, with Galen and Nick starting to risk their heart again despite fear of being hurt again, because keeping it safe means being only half alive. I hope you enjoy Make Me Whole as much as I enjoyed writing it. It was a wild ride from start to finish.

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Blurb: After a grueling battle in ancient Greece, lovers Dexios and Lykon committed their lives to each other in the name of Goddess Cythera. After the war, fearing the strength of his love for Dexios, Lykon abandoned his vow and returned home. Heartbroken, Dexios called on Cythera, who changed him into four unfinished statues. In that form he would wait for his fickle lover to return, break the curse, and make him whole.

Thousands of years have passed when Galen Kanellis finds the disassembled pieces in the storeroom of a Seattle museum and makes them the focus of his new exhibit. Needing information, he contacts his ex-lover Nick Charisteas. Nick has a lifelong dream of finding the Dexios Collection, and the last thing he expected was for it to wind up in the hands of the man who broke his heart. As both men search for answers about the statues, worries of abandonment and fear of loss test their renewed relationship, threatening to separate them again—this time permanently.