Beautifully Strange, Morally Complicated, and Everything in Between

Long before I started writing adult romances about demons, shadow creatures, Fae, and men with questionable morals, there were books I read in my early teens that stayed with me. I didn't know it then, but these books shaped parts of me that would eventually find their way into my writing. Not through their plots or characters, but through the feelings they left behind and the ways they changed how I saw the world.

Dangerous Angels by Francesca Lia Block

I don't think I can fully explain what this book meant to me when I first read it.

I saw pieces of myself in every character. Not necessarily in their experiences or circumstances, but in their emotions, their contradictions, and the ways they moved through the world.

I'd loved books before, but I'd never connected with one quite like that. There was something incredibly powerful about finding parts of myself scattered across the pages of someone else's imagination.

I think that's what Dangerous Angels gave me as a future writer. The understanding that fiction could reach someone in ways ordinary conversations sometimes couldn't, that characters didn't have to be perfect, conventional, or even easy to understand to make someone feel seen.

Tenderness by Robert Cormier

This one probably makes a little more sense when you consider the kinds of things I write now.

Looking back, I was probably way too young to be reading Tenderness, but apparently nobody stopped me! 😂

Tenderness is deeply unsettling. Its central characters are desperate for affection and searching for something they don't really know how to find. But their understandings of tenderness are vastly different, and for one of them, tenderness is seemingly inseparable from violence.

What fascinated me wasn't the violence itself or the idea of romanticizing it. It was the complicated relationship between longing, affection, vulnerability, and danger. The uncomfortable reality is that wanting to be loved doesn't automatically make someone good. That someone can appear charming and caring while being capable of terrible cruelty. That a character could be compelling without being someone you would willingly encounter in real life.

This was one of the books that made me appreciate just how psychologically complicated fictional characters could be. More than that, it made me realize how complicated people could be. Real people weren't necessarily good or bad, kind or cruel, simply one thing or another. Human beings are contradictory, sometimes in ways that are difficult to understand or uncomfortable to acknowledge.

There was something about this book that stayed with me long after I finished it. I couldn't fully explain why it affected me the way it did, but I kept finding myself drawn back to it, rereading it and trying to understand what it was that I couldn't quite shake. Looking back, I think I was trying to make sense of humans in a way that I didn't have the experience or perspective to fully understand yet.

I didn't need a character to be good to find them interesting. I wanted to understand what made them who they were, even if the answers were uncomfortable. And considering how much I enjoy writing morally questionable characters now, I think that fascination stuck.

Demon in My View by Amelia Atwater-Rhodes

This book appealed to a different part of me entirely.

I loved the idea of a young woman creating entire worlds in her head, keeping that part of herself somewhat separate from the people around her.

I think this book helped make the idea of being a writer feel a little more tangible. Writing wasn't just something other people did; it was something I could do (even if it would be years and years before anything came of that hobby!).

While my own stories have taken a decidedly more adult direction, that early motivation that I found in this book stayed with me. It made me feel like the stories I had in my head were worth putting on paper, even if nobody else ever read them.

For me, that journey started with writing fanfiction for everything from Sailor Moon to Harry Potter, creating stories simply because I loved the characters and the act of writing itself. Then, somewhere along the way, I went from writing in someone else's fictional world to creating worlds of my own. What started with fanfiction eventually led me here, publishing stories I once might have kept entirely to myself.

So what does any of this have to do with what I write now?

On the surface, probably not much.

My books are written for adults NOT a YA audience. They are explicit paranormal romances that feature possessive shadow entities, demons, Fae, supernatural bargains, and relationships that would probably raise a few eyebrows with the wrong audience. But when I look back at these books, I can recognize pieces of their influence in the stories I've created.

I want to create that same intense emotional connection with my own characters, to give others the chance to see themselves reflected in the way that I did. I want to explore human nature and what makes even the most morally questionable characters compelling.

None of these books resemble what I write today, but each one left something with me that helped shape the writer I've become. Which sounds very profound until you remember that I mostly write smut about demons and fairies and shit.

And peep those well worn books below 🖤