10 Juicy Details About ‘Blue Crow Rising’!

While filming (and editing!) my next YouTube video, I thought, hey, I could make this into a blog post for all those folks who don’t like watching YouTube! So here it is… 10 Juicy Details about my novel!

1. It all started with a dream… of someone shouting a name as a woke up. And something about a school. And maybe someone transforming into a crow. And maybe a weird principal. That was it though! Not a whole lot to base a novel off of, but I was possessed! I wanted to know who the name belonged to, and why they were being called! And so I began writing…
2. How did I name my Main Character? Well, they were the one whose name was being called, so this should have been simple but it wasn’t? I thought their name might have been ‘Kuryo’, but as that was the place name for Korea (probably not a bright idea to leave it at that) I changed it to Kyrie, from the Christian prayer ‘Kyrie Eleison’.
3. Was Kyrie based off anyone in particular. Yes! Me! I based Kyrie off of my own goofiness, but that was about it. I wanted to have a nice, sweet, and kind main character for once. I wanted a happy ending for a nice person.
4. Worldbuilding? I didn’t do any ahead of time! I just slammed myself into the keyboard and let it develop from there! It was quite an interesting process, seeing how the world developed around the events.
5. I had no idea what was the solution to the mystery for most of the novel. I knew I was building up to something, but what? I was quite confused most of the story about how it was going to end!
6. The first book (Blue Crow Rising) was written after the second book, which (3/4 of it anyways) was written a year before. Then poof! The two magically worked out together! I was quite impressed.
7. Kyrie was not always my favorite character while writing this series. There’s another character whom I shall refer to as ‘an older/different version of Kyrie’ who was way more compelling when they stepped into the story. I thought they were way niftier then, but now I’m back to liking Kyrie more.
8. Almost all plot twists or events in the book came to me from dreams. I’d write until I had no idea what was happening next, then go to sleep wondering what I’d do. The next morning, I’d have had a dream about what to do. Really useful!
9. People’s reaction to this story have been precious. One person was just like ‘What were you ON?!’ as in, the concept of the book was so… weird for them that they thought I was on drugs. I wasn’t, but hey! I guess that means it’s an interesting concept?
10. My reaction to the story… I kept wondering where the fuck this story was going while writing it! I was like ‘this is going nowhere!’ or ‘it’s never going to end!’. To be honest, it was quite frustrating, not knowing at all where the story’s going, but I managed. It was fun, despite it all.

I hope this was entertaining, and that it makes you a tad bit curious about Kyrie’s story! Read along on my blog HERE, or buy it HERE.

Wishing you all a great day ❤

Author’s Rant (spoilers!)

Awwwh yeah! I just posted the latest chapter in Chaos &Kuryo’s story, and I couldn’t be more excited about it! That little baby is about to be the center of the story, I can just feel it. And watch Chaos be super protective of it. Watch everyone try and protect it. I’m actually wondering if Kuryo body-swaps with Charr. I admit, I thought it would have been super fun for the badguys to show up and shit break out -> and Kuryo spends half the story being a pregnant woman. Heheheh.

But hey – Kay  did mention that someone was trying to kill it, right? Exciting, exciting! I wonder who that could be?! No, seriously, I wonder. Lucifer’s off in his own dimension and busy quelling rebellions and establishing his rule. He’s not dimension hopping last time I checked. My bet is that this has got something to do with the Academy.

For those of you (all of you, really) who don’t know anything about the Academy (because I haven’t posted it yet, duh), shit’s about to get real, haha. I’m totally going to be breathing life back into that old badguy, I’m just not sure how yet. Are they the one chasing after baby God, or…? Someone else? Hmmm…

This also brings me to another point. There will definitely be dimension-jumping coming in, as this story is set in that universe I dreamed up last winter. You might remember it if you’ve been reading my blog a lot. It involves medieval christianity and aliens. Yes, aliens.

So yeah, our characters are about to go get chucked into that world. Why? How? All that remains to be found out, but one thing is for certain! -> We are going to meet Chaos’s other dimensional self! Ohhhh yeah, I’m looking forward to this! I don’t want to tell you, because I want it to be such a surprise for everyone, but yussssss. There will be lots of Chaos in this novel, make no mistake. Much fun will be had with their guilt about destroying God, too. Muah hah hah.

Anyways! Despite all my cheer, I’ve not been doing so well, so forgive me if there’s not a lot of posting going on lately/in the near future. I’m still under the weather, but hopefully on the upstreak again. I did absolutely nothing yesterday, and managed to do the dishes today as a small victory. So yeah.

I wish you all the very best! lots of love to you all!

Let’s Talk about Bella…

Hi everyone! I have to say that these past few days have been exhausting, borderline devastating for me. Shit’s been rough, but in a strangely distant way. So me and my little nest is okay, thank the gods, and things should stay that way. Still, it has taken its toll. I spent the day in bed, just overwhelmed by everything. Not my preferred activity, to say the least.

However! I am here now to talk to you about Bella!

Come on y’all, I loved Bella! I really have fun with my villains, and probably way overthink them! Here are several topics I really wanted to discuss with y’all.

Her Powers!

• Bella’s powers are directly pulled from my own experience of a mental health crisis, and my research on schizophrenia. I really did feel the occasional burst/episode of ecstasy with my symptoms when they weren’t controlled, and think (from my research) that they can be symptoms of schizophrenia and psychosis. When writing Bella’s powers I was just like ‘what if she controlled a person’s pleasure centers, like it can happen during mental health crisis?’, and that was it – boom. Bella’s power discovered.
• The outgrowth of that was the ‘hive mind’, which was inspired by the book “The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test” by Tom Wolf that I read during my university years about how the ‘merry pranksters’ were trying to achieve a sort of unified mind-state through their drugs. I thought ‘hey that sort of sounds like my shoddy understanding of a hive mind so… I’mma do that!’.
• So really, Bella’s powers are all related to drugs and psychosis, by how all that ties in to the brain’s pleasure centers, and how that can have such a grip over someone. I myself did miss my episodes of ecstasy, because life seemed really dull for the longest time without them. Similarly, my grandmother missed the ‘angels’ who used to speak to her in her schizophrenic episodes.

Her Personality!

• She was quite fun to write! Like so many of my villains, I base them off of personal experience with mental health and jerks combined in certain people. What strikes me in so many of the villains I’ve met is their immaturity and insecurities. Yes, some aren’t, but some are and after all they’re still human and imperfect like the rest of us. So I was pretty excited to make her well-rounded (I hope!) by not just being mean, but by also having real emotions. SHe really did love Chaos, was jealous of them, but never respected them (never stuck to their pronouns!) or tried to take care of them (bad partner, boo!).
• Also in my experience, real villains aren’t mean 100% of the time. What makes a good manipulator so dangerous is that they can actually be very nice and charming and funny. Now, Bella wasn’t really that nice, but she had her moments (I hope!) where her and Chaos actually did connect and touched on that ‘something’ between the two of them.

Her Backstory!

• Bella was a daughter of Mara, the demon who tempted Buddha and tried to draw him away from his enlightenment. He (and his daughters) were famously dismissed/defeated by Buddha’s hand gesture. This, in Buddhist mythos (at least to my understanding), marks the defeat of all temptations by the Buddha’s enlightenment and teachings. So in the story, this was where Bella would have had her only major defeat. This would seriously piss her off, especially as Buddhism spread and grew and her defeat became famously enshrined in a popular Buddha-pose. Furthermore, Buddhism calms the mind and helps defeats the snares of  ‘false’ (physical or fleeting) pleasure, which is how she lures people in. This would make Buddhism her arch-enemy.

But but but … if she’s a demon why does she have the blue eye? Well, I never got the chance to explain it in the story (I will have to chuck that in with later edits) but it’s actually a tattoo. Yes, she got her eye tattooed blue to trick people like Chaos. My inspiration for this was meeting (at a street festival) a couple who were tattoed head to toe, even in their eyeballs. I think the woman in the (hetero) couple was the first in Quebec to have her eyes tattoed. So when I was writing Bella, at some point I remembered them and was like … ‘hey, what if her blue eye is a trick? Like, a tattoo?’  and it actually made sense. So that’s the official story. She’s a full demon with her eye tattooed blue to make her look like an angel.