Two monsters studied one another, and for them, the war was over.
White Wolf released on this day six years ago. How has it been that long?
The road to the first Sons of Rome book was long and paved with self-doubt and heaps of necessary patience. It was an idea that first germinated when I was still in high school. Its first characters were Fulk and Anna, and Val and Mia. I didn't then know how those four characters fit together within the larger narrative, but when I played with them on paper, I was running two parallel storylines that I hoped to some day converge. Val was always a vampire, and always Vlad's brother, but in my earliest drafts, Fulk was a demon instead of a werewolf, though always the First Baron Strange of Blackmere, a delightfully real nobleman listed in the annals of British aristocracy.
I never managed more than a page or two; mostly, I was jotting notes, daydreaming, and collecting aimless plot bunnies in spiral notebooks. After I graduated college, and started my blog, I attempted several times to begin the series, in a variety of ways: efforts that all stalled out before I'd made anything like progress. Something was missing. Some vital piece of the puzzle that would click everything into place. The project had become monstrous in scope in my mind, and I couldn't figure out how to attack it. I needed an order of operations.
White Wolf, and all its characters, chiefly Nik and Sasha, proved to be that missing piece. Not only did I quickly fall in love with them, and feel the need to tell their stories, but Alexei and the Romanov/Muscovite/Third Rome storyline proved to be an essential and galvanizing building block of the overarching plot of the whole series. By the time I was halfway through the first draft of White Wolf, my vision for Sons of Rome was complete, if daunting, and I knew I had something special on my hands.
This series is my intricate and convoluted love letter to vampires, to wolves, to magic; to Gothic romance, and Classic horror, and epic fantasy sagas. It's bloody, and violent, and spans literal centuries. Not just a "few of my favorite things," but all of them.
The first four books are available, and book four ends on a positive, uplifting, satisfying conclusion, opposed to a cliff hanger, which is a good thing because I don't know when I'll return to this world. One day, I tell myself. After all, I haven't had the chance to introduce Richard, yet. And there's a certain pantheon of old gods waiting its turn as well.
One day.
Until then, Happy Birthday to White Wolf, and Happy Halloween, everyone!
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