Ry Herman’s new novel Bleeding Hearts is out today from Jo Fletcher Books, a queer romantic comedy with a paranormal twist that’s a sequel to his Love Bites out last year. Here, Herman discusses how real life and fantasy blends…

 

When I tell people that the most autobiographical work I’ve ever written is a vampire romance, they think I’m joking. I’m not. Well, mostly not.

That character isn’t “me”, exactly. There are dozens of differences, large and small, in both that first book and the sequel. Some of the things that happened to the character would be completely impossible for me, like fighting off an angry vampire, or being able to afford an apartment in Cambridge, Massachusetts. Nonetheless, that character has my old job, my sense of humor, and a big slice of my romantic history.

That’s because when I started writing a romance, I wanted to write about the best day of my life, and the worst.

On the best day of my life, I ran into a friend of a friend in the back room of a goth club. We started talking. We kept talking. And we never stopped – our twentieth anniversary is coming up in a month.

The worst day of my life happened a few years before that. After too much time in an abusive relationship, I swallowed a handful of sleeping pills. I lived through that, but it could easily have gone the other way.

Those experiences fuelled the book. My aim was to show that range of emotion, the movement over time from one to the other. But, being me, I wanted to do that with a romantic comedy about vampires.

Not just vampires – werewolves, witches, angels. I threw the whole fantasy kitchen sink at my life. I wanted to write the kind of story I love to read, where fantasy and myth are the funhouse mirrors to reality, reflecting it back on a larger scale. A book where dreams become spells and sharp words are fangs.

Even transfigured and disguised that way, there are risks to putting such large pieces of yourself into a novel. It can be hard to resist the temptation to make your alter ego just a little bit wittier, just a little bit prettier, until you push it too far and they become repulsively perfect.

There are advantages, too. Writing about yourself opens a path to putting in all the weird truths of life, like my cat’s tendency to perch on door lintels and drop on my head. It can also be an opportunity for deep self-exploration, which in my case included the joy of being able to write about “myself” with a different gender than the one I was assigned at birth (my gender in real life still being something of a work in progress.)

Every work of fiction contains aspects of the author. At the same time, every autobiography is another kind of fiction. They’re inevitably altered by memory and self-perception, and whatever remains gets a selected edit. All narrative writing sits at that intersection of the real and imagined, the You and Not-You that combines writing from experience, from imagination, and from research.

Not all such stories, it’s true, feature a character who has to hand over their underwear to a unicorn on the way to the netherworld. But that’s the beauty of fantasy. It reveals reality using the wildest, most impossible fictions. After all, a certain kind of blood-sucking vampire is very real; we’ve all met a few. So when I wanted to depict my life with emotional accuracy, I found the best way to do it was to throw in the vampires. And the underwear-stealing unicorns.

 

Bleeding Hearts, published by Jo Fletcher Books, is out now; click here to order from Amazon.co.uk

To be together at all, Angela and Chloë have had to overcome almost impossible odds, but their final obstacle might be insurmountable. Is there a solution, or is the divide between the living and the dead too wide for them to cross?

Author photo by Kate Haag