Free from 1 March 2013 to 3 March 2013
What happens when a fallen angel with no hint of his shady past falls
for a human turned vampire, or a half-lioness Sphinx? Mayhem and
angst, that's what!
When writing Cruxim, I wanted make Amedeo and his love interest
something a little unusual. I knew I need to make him conflicted about
his past and his role in the world. As I was searching through
mythological creatures, I read about Kresniks, which are creatures
from Croatian mythology that are sometimes called Cruxim. They dine on
vampires but are basically angels. I decided to explore making my hero
an angelic being whose mission was to kill vampires, because how can
you be considered holy and yet spend your life killing others? And
then I wondered, what if someone dear to him became a vampire? How
would he handle that when his mission is to kill them all? And the
rest of the story sort of just fell into place. My Cruxim certainly
has a cross to bear!
For me, incorporating the freakshow presented a really good
opportunity to juxtapose the mythological with the supposedly
"freakish." Often, there is a scientific or rational explanation for
the things we consider to be otherworldly, and I wanted to put my
mythological Sphinx and Cruxim in a place where they were the true
explained freaks of nature. Doing that enabled me to spend more time
exploring Amedeo's relationship with his Maker too. Why had he been
singled out to be this creature unlike any other? Or had he? The
hardest part was definitely writing the ending. I worried that some
readers would be annoyed about what happened to some of the characters
(without inserting spoilers). But much more is explained in the
sequel, which I am currently writing and which explains why things
turned out that way. Perhaps, not all is as it seems.