Author Insights

When I sat down to write The Waning, I knew almost immediately that the world would need to be as deep as the story itself — maybe deeper. Paranormal romance lives or dies on the believability of its supernatural elements, and I wasn’t willing to build on borrowed mythology. I wanted to earn every moment.

The result is a vampire mythology that took months to develop and now spans the foundation of eleven planned books. At its core, the Gardenia Series reimagines vampires not as the undead, but as the transformed. In this world, a vampire isn’t a corpse that got back up — it’s a living witch who underwent something closer to metamorphosis. The transformation amplifies their innate magical abilities tenfold, but it only works on those who already carry the gift. Attempt it on someone without magical potential, and the virus has nothing to amplify. They simply don’t survive. This single rule changed everything about how the world works, the relationships vampires have with humans, and the moral weight of transformation as a choice.

The origin of vampirism itself reaches back 125,000 years, to the Sangamonian interglacial period and a small meteorite carrying extremophile organisms that crashed in what is now Northern Europe. The virus it carried — dormant in glacial ice for millennia — eventually adapted through animal hosts before reaching a human shaman in a cave system. That first transformation produced a being with extended life, enhanced senses, blood hunger, and amplified spiritual gifts. Everything that followed — the covens, the folklore, the wars — began there.

I chose to ground the supernatural lore in Romanian and Dacian tradition rather than the Stoker-derived conventions most readers recognize. The terms used throughout the series — strigoi, Moroi, moroaice — come from authentic Eastern European folklore with roots far older than Bram Stoker’s famous novel. The Dacian connection felt essential: Drake Corvin is 2,000 years old, born during the Roman occupation of Dacia in what is now Romania. His bloodline is indigenous to the very land that vampire mythology grew from.

The catastrophic supernatural event at the heart of the series — called the Curdling — took place in 1543, during the Reformation, when two opposing vampire factions fought a war in the Carpathian Mountains over a single, defining question: should vampires remain hidden, or should they rule? The war destroyed ninety-five percent of all known vampires and left behind a curse that still shapes every vampire alive today. Any vampire who dies without proper rites — without beheading — becomes a Moroi: a corrupted shadow spirit with eternal hunger, unable to move on, feeding on the life force of the living. It was meant to be the worst possible outcome. It became the new normal.

Building a world this layered — with its own history, its own laws, its own language and hierarchy — has been the most creatively fulfilling project of my writing life. I have outlined eleven books total: six in the main Gardenia Series and five in a prequel series called Origins, which follows Drake’s two millennia of life leading to the moment he sits across from Nia in a community center and recognizes the eyes he has been grieving for five centuries. The world is large enough to hold all of it. That, more than anything, is what I’m most proud of.

I won’t pretend Nia Ashford is purely fictional.

She isn’t me — she’s younger, she lives in Maine, she has a different history and a different face. But when I built her, I built her from the inside. The way she processes information, the way she asks questions until she has the complete picture, the way she finds unexpected comfort in archives and old books — that’s familiar territory. Nia is a research librarian because she needs the world to make sense, and research is how she makes it do that. I understand that impulse completely.

What drew me most to Nia as a protagonist was the idea of a woman who has been hollowed out by something she can’t name or prove. At the start of The Waning, she is waking at 4 AM every night, exhausted and unable to explain why. The people around her can’t see what she’s experiencing. The local news has a clinical name for it — a ‘wasting’ illness — but the clinical name doesn’t help her sleep. She is dealing, quietly and practically, with something that is both deeply personal and entirely invisible to the people around her. I wanted to write that experience with the specificity it deserves, rather than using it simply as a plot device to bring the supernatural into her life.

Nia’s journey across the series is ultimately about recognizing her own power — not as a gift handed to her by someone else’s love or sacrifice, but as something she was already carrying. The revelation at the heart of The Waning is not just that she is connected to something ancient and extraordinary. It is that she has always been more than the life she was handed. She learns this not because someone tells her, but because the evidence keeps arriving whether she asks for it or not. She is, at her core, someone who follows the evidence.

There is also a stubbornness to Nia that I love. She does not stop asking questions when the answers become inconvenient. She does not defer to Drake’s experience or the coven’s authority simply because they are older or more powerful. She insists on understanding the full picture before she makes a choice — and then she makes it decisively, on her own terms. Writing that quality into her felt important. The best paranormal romance heroines, to my mind, are not swept along by events. They choose.

By the end of The Waning, Nia is not afraid. She is angry, she is training, and she is ready. That shift — from hollow exhaustion to clear, chosen strength — is the arc I most wanted to write. I hope readers feel the difference.

Drake Corvin is not an easy man to write.

He is 2,000 years old, born in Roman-occupied Dacia — modern-day Romania — to a Dacian mother and a Roman father, both vampires. He has survived the rise and fall of empires, the Reformation, the Curdling War, and five hundred years of quiet grief. By the time we meet him in The Waning, he attends AA meetings — for blood addiction — specifically because he has decided that structure and community are the only things keeping him from becoming something he doesn’t want to be. He is not broken. He is contained. There is a difference, and it matters.

What makes Drake compelling, I think, is that his ancientness is not decorative. He carries it. He has five centuries of grief paintings in his tower studio, all of them the same woman. He has kept his promise to a dead wife who sacrificed herself to end a war he couldn’t stop. He has built a found family — his coven, his mentor Ambrose, the people who live and work at Thornvale — and he holds them with the kind of fierce, quiet love that comes from knowing exactly how much can be lost. He is dangerous. He is ethical. He has spent two millennia figuring out how to be both at once.

The blood addiction is one of my favourite elements of his characterization, because it complicates the mythology in a way that feels true. Drake is not the frictionless, elegant predator of classic vampire fiction. He is someone who attends a recovery meeting every week because he needs it. The thing that makes him powerful is also the thing he fights hardest to manage. That tension — predator and protector, ancient power and genuine restraint — is the engine of his relationship with Nia.

He doesn’t intend to fall in love with her. He intends to assess the threat, protect her from the Moroi stalking her, and maintain professional distance. The moment that plan fails is the moment he looks at her across the AA circle and recognizes her eyes — the eyes of his wife, Gardenia, dead five hundred years. He tells himself he is wrong. He tells himself he is projecting. He goes home and tells Ambrose, and Ambrose confirms his worst fear: he is not wrong.

Drake’s name carries its own history. He is known historically as Dragos, and by one name further — Draza — that only one person in the world ever called him. When Nia says it aloud in an unguarded moment, neither of them has words for what that means. Some things don’t need to be explained. They just need to be recognized.

Every story needs a villain. The Waning has one who is, in some ways, more tragic than terrifying — though it doesn’t make him any less dangerous.

Desanguinate is a Moroi: one of the corrupted shadow spirits created when the Curdling War’s curse went wrong in 1543. Unlike the others, he has a human history. He was Marcus Abel — a pharmaceutical executive in Bangor, Maine, who came from a family with old ties to the vampire world and who decided, somewhere in middle age, that he deserved more than a human lifespan. He found a way to attempt the transformation without coven knowledge or approval. The process was incomplete when Nia’s father, Edgar, killed him in an act of protective rage. Marcus’s death went wrong. What remained of him became something the series’ terminology names precisely: a Moroi, a shadow person or energy vampire, an eternal hunger without a body to feed it.

He chose his own name. Desanguinate. It means drained of blood. There is both self-awareness and bitterness in that choice — a man who wanted transformation and immortality and got instead an existence defined entirely by deprivation.

What makes him effective as an antagonist is his patience. He has been stalking Nia’s family for her entire life — since she was a child — building slowly, feeding just enough to sustain himself without triggering alarm, always waiting for the right moment. He doesn’t rush. He is, in that sense, more disciplined in shadow form than he ever was as a human. He has a plan. He has always had a plan. The plan has Nia at the centre of it, and it requires her to be as close to depleted as possible before he acts.

He is also, underneath all of that, a cautionary figure. The lore of this world is clear on what happens when someone wants vampiric power without earning it, without the gift, without coven guidance or ethical grounding: you die, or you become something worse than dead. Marcus Abel chose ambition over caution and ended up as neither alive nor at rest, feeding on a young woman’s life force in the dark while she wakes up exhausted and can’t explain why. There is something in that which goes beyond horror into something more uncomfortable — the recognition that his hunger was, at its root, ordinary. The wanting more, the believing the rules shouldn’t apply to him, the harm done to others in service of that belief.

He is not sympathetic. But he is legible. And sometimes that is more unsettling than a monster you can’t understand at all.