The old gods are pacing in their ruined temples, waiting to be unleashed. While some of them flicker faintly, ghosts of themselves, in and out of peoples memories.
“Remember when we were something?”
“Remember when you worshipped us from everything to death and grain?”
“Remember when you once feared our names?”
We are still here. Still waiting.
There are no fairytales anymore. All that remains are relics, buildings covered in cobwebs, with carpets covered in glass and blood stains of revolutions. Shells of bullets left from battles fought long ago. And lonely ghosts wandering the halls and ballroom floors. Kings and Queens put to the grave, in the ground, where they should be. With a different kind of fairytale to take their place.
One without crowns and dynasties.
When people talk about Hawthorne, they talk about him like he’s this dusty, out of touch author. And sometimes I wonder if that’s because people miss the point of one of his most famous works and that’s why we’re where we are at now.
Hester Prynne gets put with a big, bold Scarlett A on her clothing. For a mistake that wasn’t hers alone to make. Marked forever.
And isn’t that what the internet does? It looks for scarlet letters. Sometimes deserved. Sometimes not. And so we’re all Hester Prynne.
Living with mistakes. Sometimes not even ours.
I’m not religious. Maybe because I never had any faith I could tie myself to. Maybe because organized religion has hurt too many souls for me to feel anything but apathy towards it. Still, every once and a while when I’m seeking something, I go to the movies.
The cinema. The multiplex. Whatever you want to call it.
I sit in those plush, leather chairs. Or velvet depending on which theater you are in. In total darkness. Sometimes with a friend, mostly by myself these days. And I watch the images dance across the screen. Light and sound moving together, capturing something that never was and never will be again. Introducing me to people and places that have never existed.
Delighting me, thrilling me, saddening me.
I experience the whole spectrum of human emotions in the span of two hours. For two hours, I feel something that I’ve never felt in any kind of church or temple. The feeling of, “Oh, there’s something bigger out there. And someone understands.”
But maybe I’m just sentimental. I am Californian after all. We make movies there. I think it’s in my blood to love them. Anything else would be blasphemy.
Do you think rage tastes like blood? If it were a thing that you could consume, would it be coppery, bitter, and metallic? Something you wanted to spit out instantly?
I am so filled with it all of the time. If it were a food, they’d call me a glutton. And I wish I could toss it away, like left-overs gone bad.
But it’s an addiction to this feeling that comes over me like an angry god of ancient times, waiting for some innocent mortal to come down and strike for things that they unknowingly did. While not taking any of the blame myself.
Whatever rage is, I wish I could cut it out of me. It hurts too much to have it. And nothing to do with it.
When I ask my father about being married to my mother, he talks about it like it’s a faded memory. Like he doesn’t know what was real or what wasn’t. Or maybe he’s hiding something.
And I know he’s hiding something.
Because the memories my mother has told me bleak, desolate nightmares. But if he told me the truth, that would mean ruining the fiction—the love story—he’s invented in his head. And I, meanwhile, am left haunted by the ghosts from the horror story I know it was.
Recently, I completed something called an author boot camp with E Global Creative Publishing. They are a company from China and are working to make webnovels popular in the US. I had to complete a 50,000 word novel in a month and they gave me free editing and a cover as well and have posted it on multiple webnovel platforms. Right now The Alpha’s Witch is available on Webnovel, Dreame, and iReader.
Serena Setter is a powerful witch who expects to mate with a warlock she thinks she loves. But, at the Revealing ceremony, a werewolf is declared her mate instead. Macon Forrester has been around for a long time and is just as surprised as everyone else when Serena is revealed to be his mate.
None of them is happy with it, but they need to think about the safety of their pack and coven, so being together is actually the best option. Shocking news also put them on edge, trying to figure out who is behind mysterious disappearances amongst them.
While Serena and Macon try to understand their feelings, they discover that the enemy might be closer than they imagined.
***
“You really want me to kiss you?” I asked.
She nodded. “Prove to me that there’s something between us besides complete disdain since you always have to babysit me.”
“Disdain? What makes you think that I have disdain for you?”
The Alpha’s Witch is created by Cambria Covell, an eGlobal Creative Publishing signed author.
The Diaries of Series is all official now! And by official I mean we have a url. So if you go to thediariesofseries.com you can find Lucy’s diary and get all of her secrets! So go read and find out what Lucy Collins saw in the year of 1999.
-Cambria
Okay so aside from The Vampire Institute series on Kindle Vella, I’ve started some other things. The first is a personal blog where I’m going to write about projects and different things I like called Cambrian Culture. Its https://cambrianculture.wordpress.com.
The second is this new way of storytelling I’m trying, through Instagram. This has been done before by Rachel Hulin. She wrote heyharryheymatilda through a series of e-mails using instagram posts to do it.
I’m doing something similar, only I am using aesthetic pictures from pinterest. The series is called The Diaries of Series and I plan on doing some different ones. The first one is The Diary of Lucy Collins and it follows her summer with the Gold family.
Follow the account @thediariesofseries on instagram if you want to follow along. And don’t forget to follow https://cambrianculture.wordpress.com
-Cambria
So, a while ago I was documenting my experience with Kindle Vella. When it first started no one really knew it was out there. And it was cluttered with things like Role Plays and a bunch of other nonsense that I wasn’t quite happy with.
I’ve tried writing on Wattpad, and have started to understand the type of content that works there by reading as well as writing.
And so I decided to do the same with Kindle Vella. I read one of the serials which was actually Hot Vampire Next Door by Nikki St. Crowe. It’s a steamy adult paranormal romance novel and actually pretty fun.
So, now that I understood the tone and what was popular on there I decided to give it a try. I think with platforms like these it’s really important to write FOR the platform if you want to be successful. I don’t think literary fiction is going to be popular on something like kindle vella, unless maybe you were already an established audience.
I took this week to rework a story I had published on another platform a few years ago and published it on Kindle Vella. This one is called The Vampire Institute and it’s about a girl who signs up to be a blood donor for vampires. Of course, it’s a romance.
The first seven episodes are up now and the first three are completely free! If you were able to read Her Dark Love that is the story I reworked for this. Click the cover to go read or at the very least like to support!
