Guest Blogger: Sapphire Phelan

The winner of Sapphire's download is: Anne Sorgeson. Congrats, Anne! Send me your email address and I'll pass it along to Sapphire. Thanks to everyone who participated.

Thank you, Lynda, for letting me blog here today.

Since I write horror, fantasy and science fiction under another name and used the same ideas for my paranormal romances, I want to talk about some of the influences in my life that lead me to write like I do.

I grew up reading Edgar Allan Poe, H. P. Lovecraft, Shirley Jackson, Madeleine L’Engle, JRR Tolkien, and Ray Bradbury. I had been writing stories by long hand since I was eight. But these authors were the shapers of my imagination and wonder, the building blocks of me becoming a writer.

Darkness and dark things intrigued me. They frightened me, but I wanted to dissect more of the power that rippled beneath the skin of the monsters. Poe had his monsters, but much of his stories were of the mind. Lovecraft wrote of cities beneath the sea and on land that had terrifying majesty. Creatures, that if we peeked into the shadows and caught a glance of them, would drive us insane.

Three times I had written Lovecraft stories. All three are horror, but two were love stories of a sort. Unwitting Sacrifice, my upcoming one, is like that, and yet, there’s dread and madness too. I keep going back to Lovecraft, as ideas form in my mind. What if that handsome lover is something more? Not a werewolf or a vampire, or a spirit or a demon, but something that came with others from beyond space and time, revered as dark, terrifying gods in our world. Lonely gods. Even monsters fear being alone too.

Why do I keep returning to this world? Maybe it’s my way of exorcising these monsters, trying to tame them, and hopefully to banish the darkness that is within them. Maybe to bring a bit of sympathy to them.

Maybe it’s because they’re different from the normal stream of monsters that hover among the pages of books these days.

What authors of horror, fantasy, and dark fantasy inspired you, the ones you keep going back to read over and over?

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I wanted to let you all know that my erotic Lovecraftian horror novella, Unwitting Sacrifice, comes out as an ebook November 30, 2008 from Under the Moon, and in February 2009 it will be in print, as a chapbook. Also, I have the first in an erotic urban fantasy trilogy, Being Familiar With a Witch coming from Phaze Books January 2009.

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Answer Sapphire's question above and one person will win a download of Unwitting Sacrifice when it's released. The winner will be posted here Tuesday night.

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