Alyth: Author on Fire

I started this blog on WordPress.com in November 2012, moving over from Goodreads, and decided to experiment with blog-based fiction. In a series of posts, I wrote about my friend Alyth, a beautiful and passionate girl who believes herself to be a witch, and her boyfriend to be a werewolf.

The narrator is myself, a university lecturer, and Alyth is a student whose older sister is a close friend of mine, and the blog posts are my accounts of our meetings. Her story, for the most part, is told to me by Alyth herself, so that I can only guess at whether there is any truth to it – and as a scientist I am disinclined to believe in the supernatural.

As the story developed, it turned dark in places, and erotic and even explicit in others, and what started as a slightly tongue-in-cheek story about a hot alpha werewolf boyfriend evolved into a story about lesbian vampires (go figure). Once I felt the story had come to an end, I turned the bulk of it into a novelette and published it on Amazon as Alyth: Witch on Fire – which, if nothing else, has a pretty hot cover.

Libraries are dangerous places – for a witch.

Young, free and far from home, Alyth has set out this year on a voyage of self-discovery. After cheating on her werewolf boyfriend with an incubus, she is driven into the arms of her lesbian best friend Tina. When Alyth goes in search of the vampire Carmilla one day, an enigmatic librarian called Lily shows her just how dangerous stories can be.

Erotic and explicit, Alyth’s misadventures have only just begun.

(You can buy it if you like, but the complete story is free on my blog.)

I’m talking about it today because I just noticed a review left recently. A one-star review – how delightful! (I’m happy to get any reviews so this really isn’t a complaint.) Here is the entire review:

When you have some unidentified man narrating and leaving out all the personal feelings, you get very poor erotica. I became turned off almost immediately. Unfortunately it just got worse.

It’s interesting how much this short review implies about reader expectations: that a narrator should be immersed in the action, rather than displaced from it; that a story should be shown, not told; even that personal feelings are essential. I dare say every good advice on storytelling agrees, and that Alyth: Witch on Fire fails each point.

But it was fun to write, and I will forever be fond of my friend Alyth.