Blood and Roses
A story about love and vampires!
Blood and Roses started its life the way many novels do, as fanfiction! It was originally posted in 2023 as The Huntress and the Heiress on AO3, though sadly I've lost the original version. It was a story about a jaded vampire hunter visiting a small and isolated town to solve a series of suspected vampiric murders, only to fall into a wider conspiracy far beyond her reckoning.
Way back then people encouraged me to make it a novel, and maybe a year or so later I decided to give it a try. I started serious work on it two years ago when my previous career as a software developer naturally came to a close. I had a vision in my mind and a goal behind it, instead of just filing off the serial numbers like many others have, I decided I was going to rewrite the entire thing from the ground up as an original novel. It was fun, taking the story and world from the Boiling Isles into it's own thing. We took out the demons and the magical realm, and what was left was ripe for development.
The world of Blood and Roses is dark. A bleak place, the Empire is crumbling, rotting from within as the common folk are stretched thinner and thinner trying to survive. Monsters lurk in the darkness, just beyond the lamp-light. Sickness ravages towns. People start to doubt the power of the clergy and the Goddess. Roads decay, the garrisons are ill-trained, and crops fail.
This, is the world we find Elizabeth Ashford living within.
More stuff about my novel