The Blood Bound Series: a journey

I was fourteen in 2010, full of angst and desperation to understand the world, or to have the world understand me. In order to do that, I began to channel the emotions and hormonal overdrive into writing. I’d dabbled in fanfiction and those cheesy “girl in a home where four ridiculously hot men who are also vampires/werewolves live and are all in love with her”. It’s embarrassing to think back on those pieces, and yet, you have to start somewhere. And honestly, a woman in a home with four hot paranormal men are in love with her sounds like my kind of book now. Maybe I ought to revisit that…

But I digress… The purpose behind this entry is getting lost already. The point is, I started writing what would become Blood Coven during this period of my life.

Originally titled “The Truth Behind Little Red Riding Hood”, the entire story was fueled by an image I saw online. It was a drawing, and I wish I could find it again and locate the artist who did it. Red Riding Hood was holding a gun to a man’s belly, he was wearing wolf’s clothing, and had his hand on her breast. It sparked a lot within me, and while the original version of Blood Coven was wildly problematic with large age gaps and questionable consent, I look back at this and understand why I channeled this into that version; it was all I knew. 

I won’t get too into depth of my problematic start in relationships, though. The crux of it is that the original version of Blood Coven was a deeply emotional outpour that started my journey of writing. Doesn’t most writing come from some form of trauma? But I won’t give that to my abuser, I refuse to credit them for this. 

Over the next ten years, I added to this tale, put it away, locked it in drawers, forgot about it. But it never left me -- some stories never do. If you’re an author, you likely know what it means to be perpetually haunted by a concept, a character, a line. When I started writing what would become Song of the Sea, it was so easy to loosely connect to this concept I had locked away. Subtle, mostly just done for me, but it sparked something inside of me. 

Song of the Sea is my golden child; the story wrote itself and remains one of my strongest tales to date. I didn’t struggle once with its inception, the characters spoke to me during car rides and hot showers. I was late for work countless times because I just needed to finish the next scene or chapter. From the creation of Song of the Sea came two characters I simply could not relinquish: Roman and Ivan Sokolov. 

Natural born killers, in a sense, these two characters grabbed hold of my throat and refused to let me breathe unless I wrote more about them (children are ever so greedy). And from this came Ashen Heart. My decision to write Ashen Heart was where everything changed. It was not an easy story to write, I’ll be the first to admit that this one stumped me a few times. But I persevered and out came a story that I resonated with on a variety of levels. By this time I was in my early 20’s, learning who I was while not being able to grow. So I grew through my writing, channeling versions of myself into characters who would remain on paper, minds, and hearts. 

With these three books written, I was at an impasse. 

What to do with these three tales… Leave them? Weave them together? Write a finale? 

At this point, it was a struggle to figure out how to wrap them up. They were all so individual. Sure, characters crossed over, long lineages of Luca’s and Sokolov’s had their stories penned. But it wasn’t enough. 

So I rewrote Blood Coven entirely. My problem child, Blood Coven, but still my first born. The story that you read is nothing like the original version. I had to give it a complete makeover. And so it was always a difficult relationship that I had with Blood Coven, and still do to this day. It’s not my strongest piece of writing, but it was the first thing I wrote that I thought “I could publish this…”. And that means something. 

Once all four books were written, COVID hit. I came into a lot of money and decided “Fuck it, I’ll publish”. So I went with a vanity press, didn’t know much about anything to do with publishing. I put a lot of money into the first two published books: Red & Æsa (Blood Coven and Song of the Sea). They were well received, but I couldn’t possibly go on publishing via a vanity press. But I wanted my books out there, The Blood Bound Series deserved to be published. 

That’s when I got into indie-press publishing with Quill & Crow Publishing. Republishing an entire series with new titles and covers was more difficult than I expected. People don’t want to repurchase, reread, or give much time to something they’ve already committed to. Time is money, after all. 

I have a complicated relationship with The Blood Bound Series. I love it to pieces, it shaped much of who I am as an author. To put it lightly, it has been a fucking journey getting from a short 10K Wattpad story about a seventeen year-old girl and a four-hundred year old wolf, to a four book series spanning hundreds of years with a plethora of characters who are unshrouded versions of me. 

The cover reveal for the fourth book, Blood Queen, came out today via my Instagram. It’s bittersweet knowing that the series is going to wrap up in 2025, but after over fifteen years of working on it, it’s time.