Stacey Chillemi: What inspired you to write this book?
Royce Murcherson: Most of my adult life, I believed that there was a single order of things. We’re born, we die, and hopefully go to heaven, that’s it. I believed that the only control we had over our lives was in what we could do with our own hands and mind. And then there was my doctoral dissertation. It changed everything. I began studying eastern religions and philosophies that focused on spirituality in an effort to see if we humans have more options. And eventually through a lot of reading and research, I discovered that there may be more options. Options that shape our collective belief in a universal creator, options that shape our ideas of what constitutes an afterlife, what it is, how many we may have if we are not limited to one. Options that explore the concept of love, how it binds us together, how it may sustain us on some universal level. Options that help us to see that we can create our own reality, visualize how we want our lives to be, pre-plan our destiny. Options that help us to see that we are more than what we understand ourselves to be, much more. What inspired me to write this book? I wanted to put some options on the table like a deck of cards and spread them out for all the players in this life, readers of Remembering Olympus. I wanted as many players as possible to put their hands on them, move them around, pick one up, study it closely, put it down, select two maybe three more interesting ones, hold them together as one winning hand, and then play that hand.
Royce Murcherson: The title is a metaphor. It represents a greater idea just as the book, Remembering Olympus is an allegory in which is embe dded a greater story. The mythical Mt. Olympus was considered the home of the gods, super beings of which no feat was impossible. What if those options I spoke about earlier might be forgotten things, things could be remembered? This is what the title represents, remembering greater possibilities.
Stacey Chillemi: Who should read Remembering Olympus?
Royce Murcherson: Anyone who wants to believe that there is more to our world than what meets the eye. I wrote it for people who want to believe that we humans are capable of accomplishing magical things when we truly understand ourselves and our potential. I wrote it for people that want to broaden their understanding of the universe, our place in it, and our purpose for being here. I wrote it for people who want to be truly happy, successful and in control of their lives and destinies. I wrote if for all the faithful idealistic players in this game of life who want to believe and become ‘more’. I think that covers most of the wage earning, literate population regardless of race, nationality, class, gender, and ethnicity.:).
Stacey Chillemi: What is it about?
Royce Murcherson: Remembering Olympus is about transcendence, about transcending the world around us we think is real, it’s about past lives, and most importantly entangled destines. It’s also about choices, the choices people might make if they suddenly discovered they had the power to create their own reality. One meaningful quote from the book is “There’s always a choice to be made, even in the best of worlds, the most perfect places. It’s the choices that can turn a paradise into hell. That’s as simple as it gets. The complications set in when the choices start to parade themselves before you.”
Stacey Chillemi: Is there a message in your book that you want readers to grasp?
Royce Murcherson: We are better, greater beings than we believe. When we finally figure it out, what road will you take, what choices will you make?
Stacey Chillemi: I love how this book carries more than one genre, tell me more?
Royce Murcherson: This is what makes the story technically distinctive, it crosses many genres when the rules say stick to one. And herein lies the rub, why stick to the rules? I don’t think most people want to believe they’re prisoners of destiny. I think people want to be inspired to believe they can create their own destiny. I think people want to believe that love is real and eternal. And that just maybe, one life may not be your only life. This is what makes Remembering Olympus special and why it must break the rules by including all of the most effective means of storytelling: mystery, romance, spirituality and adventure.
Stacey Chillemi: What is your favorite part of the book?
Royce Murcherson: Spoiler alert!..:)…My favorite part of the book can be summed up in one of Aaron’s interior monologues: I suppose you could say I began to feel superior, higher through my dreams. “In my dreams I was becoming someone else. Each time I slept, I walked along a street and remembered, falling into another life, taking part in actions that appeared to be my own. They were familiar and cruel.”
Stacey Chillemi: Where can I read an excerpt?
Royce Murcherson: You can go straight to
Amazon and click on the ‘read inside’ option. You can read roughly ten or eleven pages. Later this month, I plan to post half of the first chapter on my author web site,
www.roycemurcherson.com. If it generates great interest, I would be willing to post further pages in the first chapter.
Stacey Chillemi: What are your current projects?
Royce Murcherson: I am currently writing a novel very different from Remembering Olympus. Its’ a story focusing on the crisis of racial identity and the pressures of conforming to family tradition. The setting is Texas during the nineteen-sixties civil rights era. Like Aaron in Remembering Olympus, this protagonist will have to reconcile the past and present to create a future. But unlike Aaron, her environment will be the source of much external conflict in which she strives to make her present life, the only one she knows, live-able.
Royce Murcherson: Yes,
www.roycemurcherson.com. You can also follow me on Facebook, Twitter, Pinterest, and Linked-in.
Stacey Chillemi: Where can people buy the book?
Royce Murcherson: You can buy a print or e version at
Amazon.com or Barnes and Noble online or in the store itself. I’ll post the ISBN number on my website.
About the author
Royce Murcherson holds a Ph.D. in English specializing in rhetoric, composition, and comparative literature. Currently, she is a professor of English in Dallas, Texas. Having taught for seventeen years, her teaching areas are American and African-American literature, creative writing, composition, business writing, and visual rhetoric. Her interests include the literary genre of magical realism, Eastern philosophy, and Jungian psychology. Her debut novel, Remembering Olympus will be released in June 2015.
Prior to teaching literature and writing, Royce spent several years in the business world and has recently published an instructional book, The Guide to Persuasive Business Writing: A New Model that Gets Results. Royce is also a guest writer on business writing and workplace etiquette for BOSS, a business and office systems support resource at Richland College.
