Demons, serial killers, & a romantic rendez-vous inside a mausoleum?
Don't worry, that's just my horror writer brand 🖤
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Happy Monday! This past month, I got to remind myself that I AM a horror writer, even though my horror tends to lean towards the romantic and gothic variety…and I can feel the imposter syndrome withering away finally 🖤
So let’s dive into a bit of darkness for a horror-themed newsletter about the villains, demons, serial killers, and romance within my horror writing 😈
Let’s begin with villainous quotes from The Blood of a Divine 🩸👑💀
Earlier this week on Instagram, I shared several quotes from the villains that my main character, Ehren, and his cohort will face along their journey to Hell in TBOAD.
While I’ve talked a lot about Ehren, introduced you to the full main cast, teased about the romance, wrote up a newsletter about the historical inspiration, fashion, and social context of TBOAD’s setting, and even introduced you a bit more intimately to Ehren’s father, the Lord of the Underworld, in my last newsletter… I realize that except for one excerpt featuring our ghost hunter, Brennan—I haven’t shared that much about the horror side of this novel!
So without further ado, read on for some of my favorite quotes in The Blood of a Divine spoken by the demonic and divine villains Ehren and company face in TBOAD—including Ehren’s half-brother, Xavier, a god of the Underworld who is even more dangerous than any other demon you will come across in this book…
Researching demon folklore across different cultures, making it my own, and getting to write so many action scenes featuring some of the most intriguing creatures I’ve learned about in addition to vampires was one of the most fun parts of writing this story! And I even put my own very unique spin on vampires—but I won’t give away my secrets, so you’ll just have to wait to read this book when it gets published to find out what makes them so special in TBOAD.
And now let’s shift gears…to “horrormance” 🥀
Now, even though TBOAD is a few different genres blended into a gothic historical fantasy cocktail, I think we can sufficiently consider the main romance between Ehren & Adrian a horrormance (romance within a horror setting—although, if you really want to get technical, TBOAD is gothic horror mixed with historical fantasy…so really, it’s horrormantasy 😉). Theirs is a romance that blooms alongside the demonic horrors they face on their journey to literal Hell…but the horrors are also what bring Ehren & Adrian together in the first place ❤ (quite literally, they end up kissing in a mausoleum right after slaying vampires in bloody fashion…and it really doesn’t get much more horrormantic than that imo 😘)
Speaking of kissing in cemeteries, I am already working on a painting of one such scene from TBOAD as a reward for reaching 200 followers on Instagram! Check out the WIP below:
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I’m only 13 followers away from the upcoming milestone, although I really hope to reach a lot more people, so if you’d like to help me out, please follow me on Instagram and/or share my pinned posts—any posts about me or my book to help me gain more followers who will be interested in TBOAD—then we all get rewarded with art!
*and again, I am an amateur artist who only started teaching herself how to paint 2 years ago, but I hope to do my best work with this piece—and I’ve been very excited with the whole process ❤ one day, I hope to share commissioned pieces for this project to really bring The Blood of a Divine to life visually, though!
And speaking of an entirely different horrormance…
In case you missed the news, I have a short YA fiction piece being published in the Pride Issue of Haunted Words Press, Bleeding Hearts Beat Still! 👻❤🌈
I’ve been informed that this is going to be a print-only anthology for now, but before Pride Month ends, I want to share a bit of my story with everyone following me! So here’s an aesthetic moodboard for Final Girls, my flash fiction story about two teenage girls who find love in a slasher film nightmare 🔪💘
It feels extra special that my first piece to get officially published in a literary magazine is a horror/romance story about two teenage girls in love 💖 Final Girls is based on my own experience as a viewer of slasher horror films—I used to watch them a lot more when I was a teenager, and while it’s not my favorite genre of horror, I’m the type of person who always loves to see romantic potential between the final remaining survivor characters and I’m always like “can we not just take a minute to kiss or confess while we’re hiding for our lives?” lol but no, they almost never do in slasher horror films!
So I wrote Final Girls to fill that void in my heart—and I of course made it sapphic because what’s better than a teen slasher movie with a final girl?
TWO final girls who fall in love! 👏💕
Thank you for reading & supporting me. Have a great week, everyone!
-Jazmin