But I wrote things in him I want to aspire to as well – his sense of fairness, his empathy, his refusal to quit even when the world is against him. He has a lot of my flaws and shortcomings – extreme snark, self-sabotage, reluctance to rely on anyone else and a tendency to push people away, or make himself so infuriating that they leave on their own. A lot of my frustrations and anger found its way into Remy, my protagonist. Ironically, the frequency of those tweets helped garner interest. But I also tweeted about it whenever I felt especially down, or when I was having recurring symptoms and needed to take my mind off it, as a way to self-soothe. The frequency that I talked about the manuscript was partly because I was genuinely excited about it. If you follow me on Twitter and saw the many occasions where I tweeted about this draft, I doubt that anyone would have realized what was really going on behind the scenes. I saw a glaring lack of it during most of 2020. More importantly, despite the vampiric themes I wanted this to be about humanity. I was a huge Castlevania fan, and I wanted to do something different with the genre. As I tried to get my health back, I started going back to this new draft as a way to distract myself from my problems. I got sick unrelated to the virus, had to be briefly hospitalized and tested (which compounded the stress, despite testing negative) and fell into a depression. That soon became the least of my worries in the months after that, I lost relatives and friends, several of whom had been frontliners, to Covid. The hardcover edition release of WICKED AS YOU WISH coincided with worldwide lockdowns, which proved stressful. I doubt any of us had an idea of how drastically things would change. Those two weeks turned into two months, when the Philippines went on lockdown. Unable to leave the house, I relied on my mother-in-law and my partner to look after the kids while I distanced myself as much as possible “just in case”. Someone in the mall I was at had collapsed, later testing positive for a new virus called COVID-19 local authorities encouraged people who’d been there to self-isolate. I had several deadlines and wasn’t able to write the first scene until February the following year, and by then everything had changed.
I didn’t know what his name was then, but I already knew he was kinda an ass.
No chapter existed yet I only had a visual in my head of a vampire hunter facing down countless hordes of demons, knowing it was a hopeless cause but determined to go down fighting. At that time I had nothing to show for it but an idea that was taking root in my head. That was the first tweet I ever made about SILVER UNDER NIGHTFALL, back in July 2019. “Once I seriously write that hot Regency romance set in a dark fantasy city overrun by demon hordes it’s over for you thots.”
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