From The Inside Out

The most exciting aspect of writing fantasy is artistic license. There is no right or wrong, only what those before you have created. If you love fantasy, you’ve probably already got that switch in your brain that is willing to accept that, when it comes to fiction, anything is possible. And, if you’re anything like me, you like your writers to create a few new slants and concepts here and there to keep the subject fresh.

I always wanted Blackthorn to be an intricately built, complex world that included my own creations. I’ve lived with it a long time now. Avid followers will know it’s been sixteen years, in fact. That’s sixteen years scribbling away in the background creating things just as I wanted them, without subjecting them to scrutiny or reviews or trends. Soon, various stories became a series as I interwove naturally occurring threads that increasingly bound these standalone romances together towards an eventual conclusion.

Both of these elements – creating an unfamiliar world and developing a series – became a challenge when I needed to switch Blackthorn from being my stories to being suitable for an audience. For the first time, I had to think how I developed my world and its characters for my reader, especially with a lot to reveal, whilst avoiding painful info dumps that come hand-in-hand with having fantastical elements and concepts. And how, when I already have the bigger picture in front of me, to choose what to reveal where, when and how. It takes faith on the part of my reader that they’ll find out what they need to know when they need to know, and it takes patience on the part of me, as the author, not to spill too much too soon. It’s a very delicate balancing act.

But I know there are some readers already itching to know more – sneaky peeks into how I created the world of Blackthorn and why I have done things the way I have. So, for avid fans of Blackthorn who want that little something extra, I decided to slot in this series of posts between now and the launch of Blood Roses.

Do you need to read all these posts to enjoy the books? Are they an essential guide? No. The heart of Blackthorn is not fantasy, it is romance. Take the backdrop and subplots away, my intention from the very beginning has always been to create dark and intense, sometimes claustrophobic, character-driven romances about two individuals colliding and how they get through the conflict inherent between them. Even the series element comes out of the impact their love is going to have on the other relationships and subsequently how all the romances are going to meld to eventually shape the fate of Blackthorn. The love developing between the central characters will always be at the core, and everything you need to understand that will be right there on the page.

Instead these posts are an addition as you await my next release and I work on book 3, which I can reveal is called Blood Torn (do let me know what you think!). No other spoilers yet!!

So, if you’d like to know why Blackthorn vampires don’t ‘turn’ humans, why they bite with incisors and not canines, why I refer to them as the ‘third species’ and what the underlying themes in the series are, please come and visit every Tuesday and Friday – what triggered the creation of this series is up next.

I hope you enjoy!

xxx