My Top Five Favorite Books (That I Wrote)

Like all writers, I have a love-hate relationship with my work. I have written some books that I would probably love even if they were written by someone else, and I have some books that I wish I had done a little differently.

Here are my top five favorite books that I have written!

5. Through a Glass, Darkly. I have written about vampires before but I really wanted to write a dark and brooding vampire story that dealt with things like existentialism and death anxiety; I used to write a lot of vampire stories when I was younger but they were more straightforward horror novels (although when I was fourteen, I did write a pretty fucked up one that will NEVER see the light of day, although one of the characters in it was the foundation for the villain in my Shadow Thane series). I wrote this story in just under three months when I was really depressed and I think it helped me confront a lot of the feelings I was dealing with at the time. It's very loosely based off an RH storyline that I also wrote when I was fourteen but I'm actually not super into RH anymore so I ended up making it about two separate "love" interests, and the bad guy became a Scottish vampire instead of a fire demon. Yolo.

4. Wishing Stars: Space Opera Fairytales. This is the book of mine that even most of my readers haven't read which makes me sad, because I really like it. I wrote this one in just a couple months, too. It's pretty short, and it's basically a collection of short stories that are all space opera retellings of popular fairytales, with some of my fairytale-inspired poems included in the back (some of which I wrote as a teenager). Those That Struggle Always Drown is probably my favorite poem that I've ever written and it is included in this collection.

3. Star Crossed. This is book #4 in my series and it took me about a year to write after about three years of staring at the twenty pages I had written when I was in my early twenties and crying. I'm honestly so happy with how it came out and a huge part of that is because it kind of ended up becoming a struggle that I felt like I overcame in a really good way. I also just love the characters. Who doesn't love a psychic witch prince who enjoys melting people's arms off and is a bit psychotically obsessed with his love interest? Ikr.

2. Escape. It's another book #4! This one took me like seven years to write. SEVEN YEARS. I feel so bad but also... you would not have wanted what I had in store seven years ago, conceptually. I originally wanted to take the book in a completely different direction and had written like twenty pages (again) only to hate them all, scrap everything, and go in a completely new direction. Which just goes to show that sometimes you have to murder your darlings LOL. (In this case... maybe literally. Gavin is a psycho.) I'm honestly so happy with how this series ended though. The wild and crazy ending was definitely inspired by some of the old skool bodice rippers/gothics I have read and enjoyed. Which brings me to...

1. Quid Pro Quo. I had so much fun writing this book. Originally, this was going to be a reverse age-gap student/teacher romance but I couldn't bring myself to write that. So I made them stepsiblings instead. (Yay?) The hero is also probably my favorite hero... in the sense that he's one of the few who probably wouldn't kill you just as soon as look at you. Even if he, you know, is a little psychotic. Batter My Heart is set in the same universe as this one and it made me happy to give these characters a cameo in it because I didn't feel like giving them a sequel but also wanted to include a nice send-off. After all the hell I put them through, it felt like they deserved it.

But oh no, Untitled mafia romance might be coming for Nicholas's wig. I actually like the hero of this one a LOT... and I don't want to say too much about this book yet, but I can't wait for you to meet him and his woman. :)

Anyway, I hope you enjoyed this behind the scenes about my work! My mom, in a recent well-meaning nag, said that I need to promote myself more and I really hate doing that (talking about other people's books and why you should buy them is so much easier), but I do like blogging, so I thought if I wrote a blog-style post about my books, I could manage a bit of ye olde "look at me, look at me, I'm an author, buy my shit" without wanting to bury my head in a hole.