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alisha costanzo, author, blood, blood phoenix, book, Broken World, claimed, curse, Death, fangs, fantasy, folklore, hope, horror, myth, novel, paranormal, paranormal romance, reflection, release day, religion, Ria, romance, self-publish, urban fantasy, vampire, vampires, victims, writing
I’ve published my second book in less than a year. I can’t explain how ecstatic I am. Vampires have been tinkering around in my brain since I was sixteen after I read The Last Vampire by Christopher Pike, and unlike many others, my first vampire love was a woman. God, I wanted to be like her—brave, strong, and quick to act, yet she seemed so human at times.
Vampires are strange things, besides becoming more obscurely gentle or out to seduce all of mankind, they represent the evils in humanity. In the last fourteen years, I have seen a great many vampires: Bram Stoker’s, L.J. Smith’s, Anne Rice’s, Sherrilyn Kenyon’s, Justin Gustainis’, P.C. and Kirstin Cast’s, Laurel K. Hamilton’s, Rachel Caine’s, Joseph Sheridan Le Fanu’s; and let me tell you, the list carries on and on. And the better ones, they find their root in some ancient evil, the ones from which vampire bore—in the dark places humanity couldn’t otherwise name.
They intrigue me the most: the cause for disease, miscarriage, sudden deaths, and the most reproachable sins. Vampires were curses, not cursed. They embodied what couldn’t be explained and what culture deemed sinful. Why else would crosses and religious paraphernalia repel them?
Why don’t they affect my vampires? A lot of myths don’t pertain to recent vampires as authors, like myself, seek to change the core principles of vampirism. Rather, they grow to highlight varying aspects of humanity—wrath, pride, lust, and greed, no doubt, but also temperance, diligence, patience, and hope.
I’d never thought of myself writing those words, but vampires represent hope: a hope that humanity does not always have to be inherently evil, or that when something more powerful than ourselves infiltrates humanity they will, too, have some with that spark of goodness.
It wouldn’t be a release day post if I didn’t say to check out my newly mythicized vampires in Blood Phoenix: Claimed, out today!
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