Please allow me to introduce myself

I’d like to thank everyone here at Frightening Journeys for inviting me to join them. Though I’ve been maintaining my own blog for a while now, this is my first time being part of a group blog. I’m a little nervous about getting started so I thought I would use this first post as an opportunity to introduce myself.

My name is Sonya, and I live in Tennessee with my husband and our Yorkie. I was born here but I didn’t grow up here, what with my father being career military. The longest we ever lived in one place while I was growing up was two and a half years. Books were one of the few constants of my life. I don’t remember the first paranormal story I ever read, but I do remember it was always my preferred genre. From an early age, I loved all things that go bump in the night. Ray Bradbury, Anne Rice, and Stephen King were my favorite masters of the macabre, and I scoured libraries at Army bases all over the world for any and every of their books I could get my hands on. The eternal twilight of Bradbury’s evocative prose, King showing the horror found in broad daylight and everyday things, and Rice’s existential vampires provided a home I never had to pack up and leave. At thirteen I knew I wanted to be a writer, thanks in part to obsessive multiple readings of Bradbury’s Death is a Lonely Business. I never seriously considered writing anything but paranormal fiction. For me, magic and monsters is where it’s at.

Now years later, those midnight dream are coming true. I’ve finally started my own frightening journey as a published author with the release of my first novella, Bring on the Night. It’s a monster story with a vampire named Jessie as the main character. Here’s the blurb:

Only a vampire can own the night.

If there’s one thing Jessie hates, it’s going after her own kind. She may be used to taking a bite out of human killers, but she leaves her fellow immortals alone. It’s only after a series of gruesome murders have her suspecting vampires and werewolves are going after innocents does she set out to put a stop to it. It’s not long that Jessie finds herself racing against the waxing moon to stop an ambitious gang of monsters with a sinister agenda.

Bring on the Night was released this past Monday by Lyrical Press. Seeing it out in the world for sale and review may be the culmination of one journey, but I’ve realized it’s really just the beginning for me. I have a lot more stories I want to tell, about vampires and demons, witches and sorcerers, magical artifacts and hidden worlds. There may be a lot of aspects about publishing that are frightening, but that journey into the dark, full of wondrous magic and mythical monsters, is one I relish.