Meet the Author of 'Mithra: Stone Sorceress, Hidden Pharaoh'

By Jessalyn M. Vargas, Marketing Coordinator

September 8, 2025

When a fantasy novel captures your imagination, you often wonder about the mind behind the story. Mithra: Stone Sorceress, Hidden Pharaoh has drawn readers into a world of magic, mystery, and adventure. Today, we explore the journey of the author who created this captivating tale. Understanding the person behind the pages adds a new layer of appreciation for the story and its characters.

Early Creative Inspirations and Background

From a young age, the author of Mithra: Stone Sorceress, Hidden Pharaoh was fascinated by tales of Egyptian mythology and monument building. Growing up in the 1970s and 1980s, well before the internet existed, he spent hours reading from his family's set of 1963 World Book Encyclopedias. In addition to the entries about the Egyptian pyramids and tombs, the volumes featured charts of hieroglyphs with their interpretations.

The Old Internet - World Book Encyclopedia Volumes from 1963.

John was encouraged to sign up for Mechanical Drawing classes in the 8th Grade, a course normally open only to high school freshmen. He ended up taking five years of training "on the drafting boards" and assisted in some lessons for his instructor, Mr. Pat Plante. His father and his uncle provided him with his own professional drafting set-up at home, and he made some spending money drawing up floor plans and elevations for small renovations and additions to people's homes in his hometown so they could apply for building permits. He also worked a gig job for a product designer as a draftsman. He drew up the dimensional shop designs for the production templates for Solid Brass picture frames, a brand of lacquered brass frames sold in gift shops in the 1980s and 90s.

Sample of Solid Brass Brand Frames

"Mr. Plante used to say that drafting was the 'language of industry,' which it is," John says. "The early 1980s was a decade before cable TV, computers, and design software...where we used pencils, plastic triangles, templates, and T-squares. I look back on it as 'technical art', a skillset that has long faded, but I find myself using it today to sketch out designs at work to be drawn up in AutoCAD and modeling software that are the work platforms for the Millennials and Gen-Z members of the staff...I have to have the pencil or pen in my hand to think."

In high school, John had early aspirations of becoming an architect, and he was voted in the 1985 yearbook as "most artistic", but he was steered more strongly toward engineering because he got A's in science and math. He went to Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute (RPI) in Troy, New York, and graduated with a B.S. in Aeronautical Engineering in 1989. While he went on to pursue a career in engineering, he still looked for other ways to explore his creative urges, so he turned to writing.

"Most people wouldn't guess engineering involves a lot of writing, but writing technical specifications is a big part of the job," John says. "My employer also encouraged engineering staff to be published in trade magazines. It wasn't a 'publish or perish' situation, but we did get a $1,000 bonus for getting an article published. Eventually, I wrote so many that my boss cut me off from eligibility for the money, but I kept on writing anyway...it wasn't about the bonus."

In 2010, John started dating a woman named Jayashree, who challenged him with a simple question: If he didn't need to earn a living, what would he do with his time?

"It was the kind of question your high school counselor asks you," John says, "but at that time, I had been an engineer for twenty years, had my professional license, and hadn't looked back...until I realized that the one thing I enjoyed doing without even thinking about making a living out of it was writing."

"I had made early attempts at writing a novel," he goes on. "It was a story about a young Ensign in the Navy...they say write what you know. This young officer, while on shore leave in San Juan, is approached by a shadowy-looking guy asking him if he was looking for a date...but the story went on where the 'pimp' was actually someone who could see into the future, and he let the officer know he would be killed in a shipboard accident. It started to develop into a story about free will and destiny, but I didn't get past four or five lousy chapters, so it languished as a WordPerfect file on my computer for years."

The Creation of Mithra

After Jayashree's probing question, John started looking for a new subject to write about and complete a novel. In addition to his early and ongoing interest in Egyptian history, he also read quite a bit about the story of Moses and the parallels between the Isis/Horus story and the Mary/Jesus story in scripture.

Sometime around 1996, John came across a copy of Holy Blood, Holy Grail, a supposed nonfiction pseudo-historical work that explored the existence of a secret society known as the Priory of Sion and its distant ties to the Knights Templar, the Freemasons, and the Merovingian bloodline of French royalty, whereby the book theorized that Jesus was married to Mary Magdeline who then escaped to the south of France after the crucifixion to raise their son, thereby continuing the bloodline. This story led to so much popular intrigue, it became the basis of the plot depicted in The Da Vinci Code by Dan Brown and the 2006 movie adaptation directed by Ron Howard.

"As a kid, I used to watch In Search Of and read about flying saucers and the speculations about alien visitors and Martians," John says. "I knew intellectually it wasn't real, but there is a place within us all that wants such mysteries to exist, or where our primal fears lurk, like the bogeyman.... the stories about the Templar Knights, Cathars, and the Merovingians were really no different. It was basically fiction woven into some facts and presented as nonfiction."

UFO Magazine from 1986

John also read books by Whitley Strieber, an author from the 1970s and 1980s who wrote tales of alien abduction and the infamous Roswell UFO incident of 1947. Strieber's book, Communion, was purported to be non-fiction and based on Strieber's claims of his personal alien abduction experiences when he was in upstate New York. Majestic was a speculative fiction novel written as non-fiction about a CIA agent named Wilfred Stone who investigated the UFO crash site at Roswell, New Mexico, and written as if it were a biography and a confession.

"I may not have realized it at the time I started writing Mithra, but these stories of speculative history and fiction pretending to be fact probably influenced my approach," John admits. "If the bloodline of Jesus survived his crucifixion through Mary Magdaline, why couldn't Cleopatra's bloodline survive through Caesarion and any offspring he might have had if he did, in fact, survive despite what history believes?"

Creating Mithra: Stone Sorceress, Hidden Pharaoh was an evolution over several years. The author didn't start with that idea. Rather, he wanted to create a character from the same time of Jesus's birth but lived an entirely different life in a different place. The character was a fourteen-year-old girl, Mithra, and the place was Alexandria, Egypt. He started exploring storylines, getting to know the character, and developing her personality. At first, she was an orphan being raised by her guardian, a Greek man named Weni, and a hired Egyptian matron named Kiya, who taught her the Egyptian language. "In Alexandria at that time, people spoke Greek," John explains, "During the Ptolemaic Dynasty, Greek was the prevailing language, and Egyptian was the language of the native peasants...the uneducated."

He worked on the idea of a magic sapphire that seemed to resonate with only her. However, he could not envision a compelling story to tell. While doing some research into the time of Cleopatra and the decades after during the Roman occupation, he came across an interesting article about Cleopatra's son, Caesarion. "The general belief about Ptolemy XV Caesar is that he was eventually killed by the Romans, ending the Ptolemaic reign of Egypt," John says, "but Cleopatra had three other children besides Caesarion, whose destinies are also clouded in uncertainty." Some historians and archeologists speculate that Caesarion may have escaped Egypt and settled in the East, maybe in Persia or as far as India, living out his life in obscurity. John even came across a novel by Gillian Bradshaw called Cleopatra's Heir, where Caesarion survived the invasion by Octavian and the death of his mother, Cleopatra.

"This speculative fiction became the springboard for Mithra's backstory," John says. "I did the math, and by adjusting some dates, it became plausible that Mithra's guardian, Weni, could actually be Caesarion living in Alexandria as an aristocrat of Greek society, raising his daughter, who was technically the crown princess of the Egyptian throne stolen by Octavian." From there, this setup had a built-in conflict. What if Caesarion's and Mithra's identities became known to the Roman ruler in Egypt? The son of both Cleopatra and Julius Caesar had always been a threat to the ruling class in Rome, and Mithra's existence was an extension of that threat. "Pile on some magic power, and there is a story to be told."

Writing Process and Challenges

Writing a novel like Mithra: Stone Sorceress, Hidden Pharaoh involves discipline and creativity while setting aside logic and reason. "I actually thought I could sit down and bang out a rough draft in less than a year," John says, "but after a dozen drafts over about five years, I finally came across a story I wanted to tell."

John had to admit to himself that creative writing was a special craft needing special training, but was a skill best learned through trying over and over. "I also read many books on different aspects of writing, like story structure, character development, dialogue, and a bunch of other stuff. I even took some courses and seminars at a local writer's society, but I found it more helpful to work with a writing coach."

"My coach told me to start outlining because the direction of my writing was all over the place. Mithra was such a rounded character that she started to 'highjack' the story, which can happen. So, I started studying the plot structures of popular movies and the idea of the Hero's Journey Monomyth popularized by Joseph Campbell."

"At first, I tried hard to make my prose original and compelling, which in a way is important, but it becomes obvious that an author is trying too hard. I had to relax and be myself. I wasn't trying to win any writing awards; I just wanted to write a story in my own voice."

How is Mithra Best Described?

"She's a handful," John says. As a descendant of Julius Caesar and Cleopatra on her father's side, she is predisposed to rule and has a strong will. She doesn't know much about her mother, only that she was a Zoroastrian princess named Chandra. What she doesn't know is that Chandra is descended from Amenhotep III, an Egyptian Pharaoh of the 18th Dynasty. It's a distant connection, but a significant one with a supernatural tie to a magic sapphire that controls water and earth elements. This sapphire was always meant to be passed on to Mithra as its blood owner, tracing her line back to the ancient Pharaohs just before the rule of Tutankhamen.

Being of both Greek and Persian heritage, she bears a strong resemblance to her mother, and when she was very young, living in Alexandria, Egypt, people often called her "Persian Girl." But she was of the aristocratic class of Alexandrian society, who wasn't spoiled, but "over-indulged" by her father, who loved his daughter but remained emotionally distant. He made up for it by providing her with a hefty allowance and seeing that she had the finest education at the Serapeum Temple, where she was an accomplished scholar with a particular gift for languages (Greek, Latin, Egyptian, Aramaic, Hebrew, and Persian) and an interest in astronomy.

Her favorite craft hobby was making and collecting bracelets. She wore pretty much all of them on her left forearm. She wove and strung her own but also enjoyed going to the Alexandrian markets to barter for new ones that arrived from Judea or Persia. Her father taught her the skill of archery, and she liked to wear her leather armband all the time because it looked "cool" to her (or however one would say it in Greek back then).

Because she was the daughter of an aristocrat, and because the abduction of wealthy citizens was common to collect ransom money, her father hired a matron named Kiya, a native of the city and a former member of Egyptian resistance to Roman occupation. Kiya was a fierce assassin, and if anyone looked at Mithra in a way that made her suspicious, she was likely to gut them first and find out what the threat could have been as they lay at her feet bleeding out. Mithra once got into trouble when she was ten. One day, nobody would take her out to Pharos Island, where she liked to play on the shore, where she believed there was a spirit living in the sea named Sheena who would sing to her. So, she ran off on her own to be found by Weni and Kiya hours later. She was never left alone to stray off by herself after that.

"But I see Mithra as a combination of Cleopatra, the ancient scientist Eratosthenes, and the later Chief Librarian of the Library of Alexandria, Hypatia - who was a philosopher and astronomer of the fourth century and who was murdered in the streets by angry Christians who regarded her as a pagan."

"And for those who are interested," John says, "she's left-handed, has a gray cat named Pepi, and is a Scorpio."

Connecting with Readers

The author encourages readers to explore their own creativity, whether through writing, art, or other forms of expression. He believes stories have the power to connect people and spark imagination.

Upcoming Projects and Future Plans

Following the success of Mithra: Stone Sorceress, Hidden Pharaoh, the author is working on a sequel that continues Mithra’s adventures. The next installment is tentatively called Mithra: Blade of Fury, due to be published in 2026.

Stories like Mithra: Stone Sorceress, Hidden Pharaoh come from a place of dedication, imagination, and hard work. Knowing the author’s journey enriches the reading experience and invites us to look forward to what comes next. If you enjoyed the world of Mithra, keep an eye out for new tales from this talented writer. Your next favorite story might be just around the corner.