It's officially the dog days of summer down here in South Carolina, where our highs are regularly in the triple digits. This means we're eating our weight in watermelon and catching up on our TBR stack that's been diligently growing since winter break because it's too hot to do much else.
I've got a good mix of literary fiction, fantasy, and young adult fiction to keep me busy reading through this heat wave, whether that be inside where the AC is running full blast or at a hot, sandy beach on the weekend. But one that I'm particularly excited to read is Gateways to the Paranormal.
You'll see my name if you scan the contributing author's list, but I'm really looking forward to seeing what my fellow writer friends came up with. I love a good romance story, and what could be better than having 14 of them in one book? Given the state of the world, I'll take any and all happy endings I can get even if they are fictional.
Every anthology I've participated in has resulted in a slightly different approach (mainly because they've been completely different genres), so I'll tell you a bit about how I worked on this particular story.
I'm obsessed with mythology. I love seeing what types of stories and creatures have ruled the common folk's beliefs all over the world. I've done retellings of Irish folktales (in my debut novel, The Curse Breaker), Japanese and Middle Eastern folktales (Malfunction Junction), and a few more short stories/novellas that you'll see in the coming months if you follow my author page on Amazon. But for this anthology, I wanted to mix mythology.
When I first accepted the invitation to write for this project, I immediately wanted to write about a vampire. I know there have been a million vampire stories, but there's something in that mythology that keeps me coming back. Perhaps it's the versatile nature of these creatures, but either way, I knew right from the start that my vampire, Soren, was benevolent.
From there, given that this is a romance story, he needed a love interest. So Lavender Collymore was born. Lavender is an over-achiever to the max, but she's not quite human either. Now with these two main characters in mind, as well as a word limit to honor, the pair needed some kind of problem to solve.
I'm not opposed to bad vampires. In fact, they often add a lovely amount of tension to a storyline. In modern literature, we spend a lot of time reading Romanian vampire lore spin-offs, but they aren't the only type that exists in the world. In fact, there are many different kinds of blood-suckers, and Australia has some of the coolest monsters I've ever read about.
In their mythology exists a creature called the Yara-ma-yha-who. I'll let you google the full lore (you're in for a treat), but for the sake of this post, I'll tell you that these little guys feed on one victim again and again until they've fully converted their prey into another Yara-ma-yha-who.
Soren and Lavender obviously have to stop this guy from eating up their fellow townspeople. If you want to see if they were successful, preorders are up now (the official publication date is 6/17/2022). You can follow this link if you're interested.
Either way, I wish you the loveliest of summers. Stay cool and happy writing.
