Bewitched Blooms, our fundraiser anthology for Zoe, is out on 21 March. I caught up with a handful of the awesome authors who are contributing stories and novellas to the book.
Briar Boleyn
The entire anthology is the brainchild of author, Briar Boleyn. All proceeds from the book will go towards help Briar’s friend Zoe as she battles with cancer.
Ruby A. Sinclair
Tell me a little about yourself and your writing journey?
I have been a published author and have written multiple books since 2020. However, I was forced to take a break from writing after I became a target of some online bullies. It affected my mental health and took me a long time to realize that I am my own person and I write for myself and my readers. So I decided to make a fresh start with a new pen name and relaunch all of my books along with a few new ones this year.
I’m really glad I did because now I get to do what I love again. My advice to every author and person out there is never let others have the power to tell you how you should feel about yourself and what you do. You’re you, and as long as you’re honest with yourself you will always have a peace of mind and be happy.
What’s the story/novella you’re contributing to Bewitched Blooms?
I’m writing a romantasy novella. It’s called Veil Of Thorns.
It’s about a cursed Fae King Rhyx of the Night Court, and a human thief Vanya, an orphan, but comes from a long line of witches. When she’s caught stealing she runs and in an attempt to escape she passes through the veil of thorns that only opens once every century. Rarely humans make it out to the other side alive, she does, and she’s the key to breaking Rhyx’s curse but she tries to resist him every step of the way.
Rhyx, bound by his curse to never find true love, feels the shift when Vanya enters his court. He would do everything to make her his, to protect her, no matter the cost. Because how difficult could it be to seduce a human, right? Only he’s not prepared for Vanya’s defiance. She craves his touch but is unwilling to give in or fall for him. Only fate has other plans.
What’s next for you after this?By the time this anthology goes live, I should already have a couple of novellas published. And if you loved this story, then you should definitely look forward to the standalone series I am working on with my bestie Caelen. I’ll give you a hint, it’s about Fae’s, a lot of them. I also have some of my paranormal romance novels ready for relaunch by June this year. My only hope is the readers enjoy them as much as I enjoyed writing them.
Caelen Fae
How did you get involved with Bewitched Blooms?
My bestie (soul sister) Ruby told me about it and told me we would be both writing stories and I laughed out loud then asked what she thought my brain could handle since I was already working on so many stories. Then she wrote a prompt that had me thinking and the words started flowing, then I realized that it works perfectly for something I had been meaning to get started.
What’s your story about?
Blood Oath is one of the stories related to The Purity Wars. In Sacred Awakenings, the first book of the Sacred FaeTs Trilogy, The Purity Wars are mentioned as ancient wars between the Fae that divided their people into , Seelie, Unseelie and Wyld Fae.
This particular story is about a Fae Prince, Lucien who has to choose a new consort every century. He has many willing possibilities for consort, but it’s a captive Wyld Fae warrior who is defiant and hates royals who catches his eye, that warrior, Darian has good reason to despise royals, but soon learns not everything is so black and white, but betrayals and secrets and a looming war could ruin everything before Darian can even admit to himself that after the blood oath he was forced to make wears out, he wants to stay.
Does it fit into one of your existing series? Or is it a standalone?
This will become one of the interconnected/interwoven stories in The Purity Wars, a prequel series to The Sacred FaeTs Trilogy. Anyone who has read Sacred Awakenings might recognize some names and descriptions of ancestors of Willow and Raff mentioned in this story.
You co-host Blended Boulevard, a podcast focused on promoting diverse literature. What inspired you to start this project?
This was the brainchild of my friend Ruby and I. We kept having these deep conversations and a lot of it revolved around how LGBTQIA and Bipoc authors often get overlooked, mistreated or turned away by big publishers and never get enough notice. We have had to take a hiatus until we find some ways to work around some technical issues that happen when the concrete’s and co-hosts live in various parts of the world. Ruby is in India, I am on the East Coast of the USA, our friend Mia is on the West Coast and Daphnee is in Canada. We do plan to figure it out and get back on track with interviews and releasing podcasts in the near future, but in the meanwhile we plan some charity anthologies.
Sera Foxe
Sera Foxe is the joint pen name of Olivia M. Jacques and Vilyn DeVevine.
What story are you contributing to Bewitched Blooms?
Liv: We are contributing a big fat prequel about one of the characters in Blood Iron and Bone. It’s essentially a villain origin story about Andar’s mother when she was young. (Andar is of MMC in Book One of The Lightbringers.) But we are going way back in time, well before he was born, to see this woman’s backstory, which comes complete with a fated, forbidden love affair, major political conflict, drama, danger, and more.
How do you manage the co-writing process? What are the challenges and benefits of writing as a duo?
Vi: We each have our own strengths that we draw upon. We are still figuring it out but we are finding what works is to start crafting the story and then go back over it again and again until everything works together and we buff out the edges.
Liv: I would say I sometimes create challenges because I take a lot of things personally (unmedicated ADHD for the win). So I often feel like I owe Vi an apology, haha. But one thing I feel great about is that we are a team, so there is always support. If one of us is derailed by life, the other is there to keep things moving and take up the slack. So we have a situation where balls are never dropped, no matter what arises. That’s a huge positive.
Can you tell me a little about yourselves?
Liv: I’m a mid-40s mom with so many past careers, it’s awkward to even begin to name them. I’m a former print journalist and TV media personality, an editor, I’ve worked in advertising, and so on. Vi and I met in grad school in the aughts and became friends because we had both been out in the workforce for years before deciding to get our MAs in English Lit.
Vi: I am a forty something mom of two, living on the east coast of Canada. I’ve been an educator for 17 years, but writing has always been what I wanted to do when I grew up. So I’m finally doing that thing I loved as a kid.
What advice would you offer to writers looking to craft expansive fantasy worlds and complex character dynamics?
Vi: Start small and build your worlds with care, but keep lots of notes!
Liv: Seriously. Notes. Notes notes notes. You will forget things! Our first book in The Lightbringers series (Blood Iron and Bone, releasing March 21, 2025) is about 130k words, which is more than 500 pages. I have an incredible memory and I co-wrote the thing, yet details are still easy to forget, especially if you take a break. So keep those notes.
Evelyn Silver
How did you get involved in Bewitched Blooms?
I saw someone in a group chat I’m in make a post letting authors know that this was a thing that was going on, and went to check it out. I saw that it was for such a good cause and had to volunteer because I had a thematically perfect story that has been sitting in my computer files collecting virtual dust for years.
What’s your novella about?
My novella, titled sub+Human, is an Orpheus and Eurydice reimagining that takes place in the same world as my published books, but all new main characters from a different part of society. The story follows a girl named Carmen when she’s turned into a vampire after a car crash. But, not just any vampire. She’s an incredibly weak vampire, that stronger and older vampires barely count among their number, and she’s warned by her also very weak maker to avoid them. As she learns to feed, she ends up encountering a man named Forrest for a night of passion that turns bloody when she loses control, but luckily he’s as understanding about it as one can be, and she assumes she’ll never see him again. Years later, they meet each other again by chance and begin a very steamy and kinky D/s relationship. All is fun and games until he’s diagnosed with cancer, and Carmen’s blood is too weak to save or turn him. She has to brave the world of ‘real’ vampires and beg for someone to save him for her, or he’s doomed to die. This story was one I wrote inspired by a lover I had a few years ago who was in fact diagnosed with cancer and passed very suddenly, so this story is a very personal one for me. I hadn’t published it until now because I hadn’t been sure there was a right way to tell this story. But donating it to help fundraise for someone else who has cancer seems the right thing to do, and I think he would have liked that.
Does it tie into an existing book you’ve written?
The characters in this short story are all new, but the world is familiar to my readers. There’s a secret kingdom of vampires on the east coast of America, run by the vampire royal family who are the main focus in my book series, The Bloodline Chronicles, set around the year 1999. A few main book characters have cameos, so I hope my readers will enjoy those nods to my original series in this novella! My first book is Witch’s Knight (The Bloodline Chronicles 1) and that’s followed by Midnight Fear (The Bloodline Chronicles 2).
What else are you working on?
I’m currently ironing out the third and final installment of my main trilogy, Vampire’s Queens (The Bloodline Chronicles 3) which happened to get too long and my editor recommended taking some parts of it and doing a book 2.5 novella, so I’m also expanding my outtakes to make a novella focused on a side romantic character who is a trans man and pyromancer with a tragic past involving vampire attacks learning how to become a knight in the vampire kingdom.
