Blood of Hercules (Villains of Lore, #1)
Blood of Hercules (Villains of Lore, #1)
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Jasmine Mas on Blood of Hercules (Villains of Lore, #1)
In her own words: quotes and insights from the author.Why she wrote it
A vegetarian in a cow-sacrifice courseThe foundation was laid before she could name it as research. By the time she enrolled at Georgetown to study ancient Greco-Roman classical studies, Greek mythology had already been living in her imagination for years, seeded first by a Disney film and then by a novelist who taught her how to take those myths personally.
Besides the Disney movie Hercules, he was the first person who introduced me to the Greek myths. His stories laid the foundation for how I perceived Greek mythology for the rest of my life.
Georgetown deepened the obsession, though not always in the ways she expected. Her classical studies lectures gave her genuine fluency in the ancient world, but the semester that actually unlocked the book was one that started as a disappointment: a senior-year course on the Greek gods that turned out to be a ritual studies class, complete with a twenty-step protocol for animal sacrifice. What she extracted from the wreckage of her expectations was a principle that gave her creative permission she had not realized she was waiting for.
what we do with ancient myths is entirely up to us. No one is going to say, ‘Artemis had this color hair and acted exactly like this,’ because she’s a myth. No one can know for sure.
That realization removed the ceiling. If no version of a myth is canonical, then every retelling is a legitimate act of imagination, and she could remake Hercules from scratch.
The most visible remake was also the most instinctive one. Readers have repeatedly expressed surprise that Hercules is a woman in this retelling, but for her the gender-swap required no argument, only a memory of what it felt like to watch the original story as a girl who wanted to be in it.
It’s strange, because people seem surprised that Hercules is a woman, but it wasn’t something I even thought about that hard. It just felt fun. Probably because as a little girl I wanted to be the one to save everyone like Hercules did. I wanted to be the hero.
How she wrote it
Hallucinating at 4 AM with a deadline two days outThe world she built fuses Greek and Roman civilizations rather than treating them as separate mythologies, and that choice came directly from her coursework. Her classical studies major had spent significant time on how ancient Greek society migrated into southern Italy and effectively became Rome, a historical throughline she found too useful to ignore.
My book Blood of Hercules is a true enemies-to-lovers, fantasy romance retelling of Hercules that combines aspects of both Roman and Greek civilizations.
Deciding what to combine was easier than deciding how to make it feel alive on the page. She had the academic material and the emotional conviction that these ancient societies deserved the romance-fantasy treatment, but translating that feeling into a workable structure took longer than the research did.
the reality of bringing to life the feelings I had about these societies was no easy venture. There didn’t seem any easy way to capture it. No clear-cut path or direction I should take to bring it to life.
Humor presented its own set of problems, separate from world-building and plot. In a video interview on writing comedy in romance, she described her working method: write the joke even when you are unsure it lands, because you can always cut it but you cannot recover a funny moment you never put down. The underlying premise is that comedy resists systematizing.
Humor is not a science, it’s kind of like an art. Who knows what is funny. [paraphrased from audio]
Some of the book’s funniest material was written during all-nighters, when she was too exhausted to self-censor and sent a joke to her mother at 3 AM, then watched on FaceTime as they both dissolved laughing. The delirium, it turned out, was part of the process.
The manuscript’s final push happened while she was still a practicing lawyer, and the two careers converged in a way that nearly broke her. She was editing a 600-plus-page draft on a four-day countdown when a large legal brief landed on her desk simultaneously.
Work was blowing up so I could only edit my book from 6pm-4am. Two days into sleep-deprivation, I got assigned a huge legal brief and I called my mom crying because it was all too much. She told me that I could do it (my mom reads all my drafts and she stayed up with me for all four days giving feedback). I remember sobbing while writing as fast as I could. Two days later, I was hallucinating from exhaustion, but the book draft got done and I met the deadline.
Even the cover was a considered decision rather than a default. She came to HarperVoyager with a specific visual logic already formed, rooted in how ancient Greece had always looked inside her imagination, and with one non-negotiable requirement beyond the palette.
I really wanted a cover that seemed gilded with gold because that’s how I envision ancient Greece in my mind. So I knew I wanted it to be white and gold. But it was also really important to me that it portrayed Hercules was a woman and that it was a romance.
The personal thread
Medusa and the stories that still matterThe doodled margins, the Latin grinding, the failed vegetarian semester: her path through classical studies was sustained by something more personal than academic interest. She was not just studying these figures; she was cataloguing the ones whose stories she felt had been left unfinished. Medusa was at the top of that list long before the book existed.
I’ve always been drawn to Medusa. Her story of survivorship is still hugely important for women today and I think a version of it with a happy ending deserves to be told.
That same impulse shaped how she built the protagonist Alexis, Hercules reimagined as a woman navigating questions of heroism and moral ambiguity that the original myth never posed. The duality she assigned to Alexis was not a plot device; it was the reason she wanted to write the book at all.
Her story is about resilience and self-discovery, yet at the same time she is a character who struggles and can be unaware. Alexis represents the duality of women.
What she wants us to sit with
Awe, and the strength you have not measured yetThe book leaves its moral questions open by design. Alexis is not a clean hero, and the line between hero and villain is something the narrative questions rather than resolves. That ambiguity is the argument, not a side effect of an unresolved plot.
Alexis deals with the moral themes of good and evil, and what it truly means to be a hero or a villain.
Beyond the moral architecture, she wanted the book to land as an emotional experience with a specific texture. She had carried a feeling about ancient Greece since childhood, and transmitting that feeling to a reader who had never sat in a classical studies lecture was as important to her as any plot beat.
I hope when you read Blood of Hercules you get the same sense of awe that I feel about ancient Greece.
When asked directly what she wants readers to carry away, she answered in six words. The sentence doubles as a description of what Alexis earns by the end of the book, and as something she seems to have needed to believe herself during those four days of sleepless editing.
You’re stronger and more impressive than you even know.