If you ever want to set yourself up an impossible hero to write, try a Mesopotamian god-king who has two weeks (a month?  I can’t remember) to assimilate, fall in love, and commit in Southern Ohio in the twenty-first century.  Yes, I know that’s not believable.  The dogs talk.  Deal with it.

The biggest challenge in writing Sam was getting his personality right.  Ancient gods do not make good modern boyfriends, what with the swans and the bulls and the insistence on omnipotence and absolute obedience.  So I started off with four important assumptions.

One: Sam is not arrogant.  He’s the son of a goddess and a king, but he grew up tutored by two grumpy old men, his father’s armorer and his mother’s priest, the ancient mathmetician Milki.  Neither one of these guys was going to spend any time with a spoiled brat, but they both loved him so he had two great if gruff fathers and a mother who dropped down from the sky from time to time to tell him he was fabulous.  Then at fifteen he became a foot soldier in his father’s army which was for him kind of a permanent fraternity party with occasional blood and death.  So he had a very earthy, common early life with an intermittent but powerful mother which undercut his ability to say, “Woman, bow before me,” with any real authority.   He doesn’t become king for ten years, not until the city’s goddess decides it’s time for a god-king sacrifice and his father decides there are wars to fight elsewhere and hands the job over to his son.  Even then, Sam spends time walking through the city the way he used to when he was a foot-soldier.  He’s a good king because he knows his people and feels responsible for them, the way a good leader should.  He’s confident, but he’s not blinded by his own wonderfulness.

Two: Sam is not deep.  If there’s a war to be fought, he’ll fight it; if there’s a job to be done, he’ll do it; but what he really wants is to drink beer and have sex and then lather, rinse, repeat.  When he wakes up in the 21st century and discovers television, his life is complete.   The only really incomprehensible thing to him is Shar’s fixation on fidelity.  On the other hand, she has a flat screen TV.  Among other things.

Three: Sam is flexible, which I figured was probably what any good soldier needed to be to survive, especially one that spent a lot of time invading foreign countries.   He’s thrown into a world he doesn’t know where things are completely alien and evidently going to hell in a handbasket, so he gets the lay of the land by talking to people, learning their customs, becoming a part of the community even as he naturally gravitates to a position of leadership (this happens a lot with god-kings).

Four: Sam is destined to love Shar, absolutely and completely.  (The dogs talk.  Deal with it.)  She’s destined to love him, too, but she’s not nearly as open to the whole destiny thing as he is, since free will is a big part of modern life, not so much in old Mesopotamia.  This was really key because otherwise the idea that an ancient god-king would become a stay-at-home dad in two weeks (dad to the dogs, that is) would be sort of . . . unbelievable.  Did I mention the dogs talk?  Also, I’m pretty sure he gets bored with the stay-at-home part and becomes mayor of Summerville or governor of California or Minnesota or something.  See, that’s realistic.  I can be realistic.

Of all the scenes with Sam in this book, all the sex and magic and sacrifice, the one that really stands out for me is the scene where he rescues Milton, the puppy.  It’s such a small moment in the greater scheme of things, but it just nails for me who Sam is.  He’s the god king, he’s in charge, and he’s going to make sure everything is all right.  I think that’s when Shar falls in love with him.  That’s when I fell in love with him.

Sam, a god-king you can believe in.  Because the dogs talk.