The book took its present form in some interesting settings.

I spent nights on the beach in Myrtle Beach, South Carolina, where a vast, voyeuristic, luminescent moon suspended itself on an eerily calm and imposing Atlantic ocean. As I sat on the edge of the earth, with my feet in the warm, caressing water, the waves kept a constrained distance, certainly in an effort to minimize the twin impacts of my phobias—my fear of water and of open space (hydrophobia and agoraphobia).

In San Francisco, I also found the right writing environment on another beach, Ocean Beach, when the ironically noisy Pacific Ocean was at its most discordant.

Most of my writing sessions took place on the edge of a twin bed (with a tiny console for a table) in a San Francisco hotel where the incessant chants of a Buddhist kept reminding me of the diversity of revelations.

Like the young stars of Athina: The Dark Side of Victory, whose teachers range in age from between 18 and 112, I came up acquiring knowledge in a multi-generational setting, with my great-grandmother, who believed strongly in a transcendent female God and in her rulership to come, as the fountain of that knowledge.

After obtaining two graduate degrees and entering into college/university teaching, I spent years in the publish-or-perish tradition, on which academic promotions depended. Later, other demands of my professional life kept me tethered to my own academic writing and supervision of student writing projects for years while ideas for books such as this one kept piling up in files and boxes. So now, we have one down and others should not be far behind.

Who knows, maybe one day, after I will have completed the series, of which Athina: The Dark Side of Victory is the first, I may even write about my favorite pet of all time, the black mutt I had when I was a few months old. As soon as I could walk, he became my companion every time I sneaked into the small courthouse where my father clerked for a friendly old Judge. Several years later, my mother was more than shocked to hear me recite, in excruciating detail, my excursions with my beloved mutt. That dog loved to eat! As for me, I have never been a fan of foods. The one food that used to get my attention (pepperoni and mushroom pizza), I haven’t had in quite a while because they don’t seem make it like they used to.