I’ve been a writer so long my stories pre-date parts of the internet. I remember haphazardly scribbling in coil notebooks at eleven - a story about a candy world run by a poisonous villain with striking similarity to The Penguin (unfortunately it remains unpublished). Once notebooks became too slow for my hands I switched to Quizilla.com (iykyk) which marginally predated fanfiction.net and fictionpress.com, both of which I eagerly signed up for as soon as they were available. I had no idea I was writing next to Sarah J Maas and K.D Scott, but I was. I ate up early chapters of Throne of Glass until my own writing feverishly consumed me. I remember the writing community fondly and smile when I look through familiar bookmarks. My username will never be revealed and those stories will go into my cyber-grave, but it was such an important time in my life.
I was raised on typical lies about intimacy fed to young girls: virginity is your value, touch is something you should fear, and exploration of your body and the sensual part of yourself will rot you. Years of purity sermons, parental lectures, and bible memorization valiantly tried to lock away an intrinsic part of my humanity. To this day, I’m still horrified by memories of summer camps where we (little girls) promised our bodies away to men we hadn’t met.
The early 2000’s internet was an interesting place. Most chapter-based fiction (fanfiction included) was a foray by tweens and teens into a world of intimacy they didn’t know. We could write about kissing, about touch, and about the complicated feelings that came with it. For many, the typo-riddled, grammar-forsaking tomes of “lemony” or “spicy” writing were the first place we could meaningfully interact with taboo. I wasn’t different. As a soul-starved teenager stumbling her way out of a United Pentecostal background, I desperately needed to read. Fiction was the first place I fumbled with eyes that longed across a room, lust tethered by unavoidable strings, and sex –something so sinister I burned a Tami Hoag book before my mother could find it (Lucky’s Lady, if you’re curious). I could also write about heroines wearing pants, something I envied with bulging eyes.
This early fiction was the first voice against what I’d been taught. Most of it was bad, the sentences run-on, and consent was barely a whisper, but so much of it was good. I read about longing – for more than some pious man I’d walk an aisle to. I explored the emotional world entangled with touching another person and liking it, and I tiptoed through passages of pleasure so intense it made sins seem poetic. When you’re raised being taught to grip stones in your palm so you won’t hold another teen’s hand, the concept of going down on your partner for your own pleasure (or at all) repairs something shattered. The church tried to break important parts of me: feminine power, intrinsic sensuality, and the desire I was always entitled to stoke. Early internet fiction stitched these things back together and let me run.
This is when I wrote the first version of Blood in the Azure. It was the first time I wrote my own curiosities – and badly. At fourteen I didn’t understand consent, didn’t quite “get” the mechanics of sex, and my understanding of dominance was badly warped. Still, the story’s core was the same: finding yourself through being with someone safe, even when the rest of the world judges you for it. It followed a heroine who wanted and an antihero who saw her. It cast the “right man” in the patriarchal light I couldn’t consciously recognize at fourteen, but could feel with gripping horror.
At twenty-four, I broke off a long-time engagement and started rediscovering. One empty night, I logged into my old accounts and found Blood in the Azure’s ancestor. It had a different name and is unrecognizable from what the book is now, but I cocked my head and said “Wow, not bad for fourteen. What if I wrote it again?” Lost and alone, I started my re-write. This version was from an older me who knew things the younger didn’t (many, many things). I wrote at a time when I didn’t want a man, when I saw all the pitfalls of tethering myself to one, and Len was born. Not a waifish princess like her ancestor at fourteen, but a warrior with a purpose. The story did well online but fictionpress started to slow down. I took on more graduate school and my updates disappeared. Unwilling to be silenced, the story gained an online following that saw me force myself to continue until I had three “books” and a sprawling world of magic, politics, and scorching spice. I think Len would blush if she saw what her predecessor had been up to. Kaseus? He’d smile.
Ten years later, the story came back. At thirty-four I was married with one child and soon to have another on the way. I’d travelled for a decade, partied, had all the fun I wanted to have, but motherhood made me stay put in a way I wasn’t ready for. I needed an escape in the hours I was tethered to home wishing for something more. The current version of Blood in the Azure rose from this desperation. I needed Serica, needed the soft heat of Len and Kas, and the strength to carve nations in the night. I think this time, I have the version right (I’m sure Goodreads will let me know).
The funny thing is I’ve almost outgrown parts of the story. I’m not a virgin teenager who needs to see an older, stronger girl make decisions about her body. I’m not a twenty-four-year-old who believes a silver-tongued man will make me feel alive. I am a middle-aged mother who needs adventure, escape, and the intimacy of a warm bed shared with someone who makes my mind stop running. I’ve been Len in every version (she had a different name before, but that’s my secret). I’ve wanted Kaseus every time I wrote him – his name has never changed. Above all, I’ve needed this story and its always found its way back. Now that it’s here with a cover and blurb, a barcode and ISBN of all things, I hope you find what you’re looking for in it, too.
SM Gray
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