A Bewitching Guide to All Things Halloween: Blood Ritual Halloween Flash Fiction

The Sting of Victory is going on tour! Today's stop is All Things Halloween Guide Blog, where they're featuring the EXCLUSIVE short story - Blood Ritual, the tale of a witch seeking to resurrect her fallen lover. Click the link below:

A Bewitching Guide to All Things Halloween: Blood Ritual Halloween Flash Fiction: A requiem for the fallen gently lulled through the quaint cottage. Vornalla sang a spell to the backdrop of the setting sun, watching...

The Story Behind the Story: Beneath the Loch

This week's post is brought to you by Jasmine, who did everything in her power to prevent me from typing.










Surely you've seen this image floating around my blogsphere:

It's not my first published work (though I'll certainly write another post on that soon. Note the year it was published - ancient history, practically), but it is the first I did all on my own. I adore it, I'll admit.

Once upon a time, feeling lost and alone in the writing world, I did what many lonely writers do - look for anthology contests. After all, that's how I published my first. Why not try a second go?

In my search, I stumbled across a contest dealing with . . . cryptids?

I'm a romance novelist, at my core. I'll admit, the idea of writing the candlelit adventures of bigfoot didn't really appeal to me*, but I went and Googled for a list of cryptids, ended up on Wikipedia like the lazy former AP student I am, and found a surprisingly substantial list.

Like any proper child, I'd read Fantastic Beasts and Where to Find Them, so I zeroed in on the word 'kelpie' pretty quickly. "Basically a demon mermaid?" said my hyperbole'd thoughts. "Perfect!"

Kelpie's are cool, y'all. Scottish folklore describes them as "the Lowland name of a demon in the shape of a horse. (Harper, Douglas, "kelpie (n.)", Online Etymology Dictionary)" So, demon horse. But, they can also turn into attractive young women to lure their victims in - whatever floats said victim's boat, I guess.

The Kelpie by Thomas Millie Dow, 1895

Not exactly a standard romantic prospect, but you work with what you got. Thus, Mairi finds herself smitten.


I didn't end up entering the cryptid writing contest. Instead, I got swept away in a whole different prompt, and I don't regret it for a second. More novellas are sure to come (as well as a few big money items - stay tuned!).


*That said, I don't judge.

*** 

As a child, Mairi made a deal with a young fae - a kiss in exchange for gills.

Now, betrothed to a man she hardly knows, Mairi is desperate to escape her fate. When she finds that same fae at the river's edge, she's offered a proposal that makes her skin grow cold . . . and her blood run hot.

Romance meets horror in this dark lesbian fairytale. Do you dare dive . . . Beneath the Loch?

Find it on Amazon here.

Welcome

As the resident author, my main hope is that my splattering of ideas is the least bit amusing to my readers. Realistically, that's any writer's dream - an audience.

For years, my audience has been small and niche - really just me regaling written and verbal tales to my closest friends and my dearest wife. The story of how I got here will undoubtedly be told in time, but what matters is even imagining a large-scale audience is a new and uncharted world to me. I was never going to be an author. Writing was just a thing I did for fun.

Really, I was and am a book editor (there's a party story for ya - 'Remember that one time I accidentally landed an internship at a professional publishing company?'), and it's a job I continue to love every minute of. But when you spend so much time absorbing someone else's joy and helping their dreams come true, you subconsciously begin to crave it too.

I write romance and horror (yes, together), and virtually always in fantasy or historical settings (because what is escapism if it's in the real world?), so we'll be talking a lot about that. Specifically, I write about ladies who kiss other ladies because . . . write what you know, right?

Ultimately, though, I'm here to have a good time. Hopefully you are too.