Jelena Dunato is an art historian, curator, speculative fiction writer and lover of all things ancient. She grew up in Croatia on a steady diet of adventure novels and then wandered the world for a decade, building a career in the arts.
Jelena’s stories have been published in Beneath Ceaseless Skies, The Dark, Uncharted and Small Wonders, among others. She is a member of SFWA and Codex. Her novel, DARK WOODS, DEEP WATER, was published by Ghost Orchid Press in September 2023. The audiobook was produced by Spotify in 2024. Her new novella, GHOST APPARENT, came out in September 2024.
Jelena lives on an island in the Adriatic with her husband, daughter, and cat.
Author Links:
Website: jelenadunato.com
Linktree: linktr.ee/jelenadunato
Instagram: @jelena_author
BlueSky: @jelenawrites.bsky.social
X/Twitter: @Jelenawrites
GoodReads: goodreads.com/jelenadunato
Amazon: amazon.com/stores/Jelena-Dunato/author/B0BVW3C66S
Introduction
CMR: Hello, and welcome back to Eldritch Girl, and I’ve got Jelena Dunato here with me. Jelena, would you like to introduce yourself and tell us a little bit about the extract you’re going to be reading for us.
JD: Okay, so hello. My name is Jelena. I’m a writer from Croatia, and I write mostly fantasy, dark and historical fantasy, and horror. And my writing is often influenced by the history of the Eastern Adriatic, and you know, Croatian folklore. My own tradition, my own history. I have published quite a few short stories so far, and some longer works.
And today we are going to talk about my novella, Ghost Apparent. And I’m going to read you a few pages from it. It’s a novella that was published in 2024, and it’s a dark political fantasy about one woman’s rise to power based on the history and folklore of the Eastern Adriatic.
When her father is killed in a bloody coup and her uncle seizes the city, Orsiana pleads for help with the only power still willing to listen, unaware that the gods will use her as a pawn in their own game.
Thrown back on the streets of Abia, armed with the gods’ double-edged gifts, Orsiana must thwart her uncle’s plans and learn what it takes to rule a proud, stubborn city that thrives on artifice and wit.
She will plot, fight and use lethally tuned verse to stir a rebellion. But just when her uncle’s Machiavellian schemes start to topple, a new player will enter the game, and the gods will raise the stakes. It’s easy to fight an enemy you hate, but how about an enemy you fall in love with? If she wants to win, Orsiana will have to risk the last precious thing in her possession: her heart.
A story of revenge and recovery, Ghost Apparent blends the history and folklore of the Eastern Adriatic with the bloody treachery of the Renaissance courts and is a perfect read for the fans of dark political fantasy.
Ghost Apparent was published by Ghost Orchid Press on 24 September 2024.
It’s available in ebook, paperback and hardcover on their website or here.
Extract from Ghost Apparent by Jelena Dunato
JD: So in her quest to win her city back, Orsiana meets different gods, and this is her meeting with Veles, the trickster god of the underworld.
“Little Orsiana,” a voice says and an eye opens among the waves of gold, as big as her head, bright yellow with a slit black pupil. A snake’s eye.
She stands before it, a terrified rabbit frozen with fear.
The enormous snake moves with a sound as smooth as satin sliding off a rack, until its head, as large as an ox, almost touches Orsiana. “What are you doing here?” the god asks.
Despite praying for help in the attic room, Orsiana is just as stunned as when she met Korab. Being plucked out of the human realm and thrown before a deity is not an event one can prepare for in advance.
“O, cunning Veles, the cleverest of gods … I don’t know,” Orsiana answers in her head, her voice still gone. “I was praying for an escape, and then—”
The liquid blaze of the god’s eye burns her like the sun. “I’m not asking how you got here, I know that. You’re here because your shrieking woke me up, because you’re falling through the layers of time, tearing them and leaving a hole that hurts like a knife-wound. Every god hears you now, but I was the closest. So, tell me, what are you doing here? What do you want?”
This time, Orsiana is better prepared. “I come to you seeking help,” she pleads.
Veles hisses softly and stares at her with his unblinking eye. “I am hungry,” his voice echoes inside her skull, “and you look deliciously tender. Should I eat you or should I hear you out?”
Her body trembles but she meets his gaze directly. “I’m all bones, o mighty Veles, you wouldn’t find me tasty.”
The god scoffs. “You’re a funny little thing. Tell me what you want.”
“I would like my voice back.” There are many things Orsiana wants, but she’s learning quickly that it’s best to be short and precise with the gods. And perhaps not too greedy, or the price might be too steep.
“And why do you need your voice back? You shriek loud enough without it.” A forked tongue flickers out of the god’s mouth and disappears again.
“I need my voice to tell people what happened.”
“Why?”
“So I can avenge my father’s death.”
The great coil rolls towards her like a golden tide. “Is that what you plan to do? Run around and cry murder until someone sticks a knife in you and makes you shut up?”
A pang of fury prods at her chest, but she’s still collected enough to know it would be unwise to quarrel with a god. “I—no, I’m not going to do that. I will be careful.”
“And do what?”
“I don’t know yet!” She balls her fists in exasperation. “Why does it matter to you anyway? I am just one powerless girl. What difference does it make to you if I succeed or fail?”
“It makes all the difference in the world, little Orsiana,” the great eye blinks slowly, “whether you rule Abia or your uncle does.”
Interview
JD: Okay! That’s it!
CMR: Yay! [laughter] I love the cliffhanger.
JD: Oooh!
CMR: I really love that extract. Thank you for reading it. So I was thinking we could launch in from here to talking about the folklore that you used and the concept of the folklore.
So let’s start with what inspired you to use the Croatian folklore, especially Veles, the god, for your novella in the first place.
JD: Well, I’ve always been a fan of different mythologies since I was a child, I liked stories about gods and heroes, and when I started writing fantasy, I mean, the obvious path is is to go to your own culture and your own tradition. And with Croatian folklore, the thing is, it’s mostly based on oral traditions.
So we have very few written sources, and mostly it’s just legends which are pretty vague. So you have gods, and you have mythical creatures and their powers, but you don’t have much in terms of canon, and so that that gives you huge freedom as a writer to invent new things, to write new stories.
So basically, you’re not limited, and you know you can really, you know, use the tradition and the legends, you know, but turn them into something completely new. And, for example, in this scene, we have Veles, who is a trickster god, but he has, like so many different qualities in in these legends. So he’s the god of earth. He’s the god of of animals, livestock and the underworld, and he’s also the god of magic and music, which gives you like a huge freedom to explore all the possibilities with him as with other gods. I have the Goddess of Love appearing in the story. I have the the God of the sea. And of course the Goddess of Death. And they’re all based on Croatian folklore, but also they are creatures I’ve created out of my imagination and other myths that I’ve read, because obviously, most gods here are archetypes, they appear in many religions. So even if my readers are not familiar with these particular personifications of natural phenomena, they will be familiar with the idea of, I don’t know, the Goddess of Love, because she appears so many times in so many different religions.
CMR: I really love the way that you’ve described Veles as well, like you’ve chosen the snake version of him, and I think he also like, appears as a dragon in some, and like a bear, or something as well. So why did you pick the snake in this particular scene?
JD: It just fits very well in this, because I wanted to emphasize this trickster angle. And I always, you know, I always saw snakes, as you know, sneaky and tricky animals. No offense to snakes. And also like it’s happening underworld, they’re in a cave. And I just thought that if I were in a cave, what would be the most the scariest thing, the scariest animal, I could meet there.
I mean, obviously, some people would say dragon, but a dragon is a mythical creature, and to me dragons seem like something, you know, noble and powerful, and I wanted something frightening and something that you know appears out of the dark passages, and just I don’t know. Just looks like something that could actually devour you if you’re not very careful.
I mean, the thing is, in real life I’m not even afraid of snakes. I actually like snakes. I think they’re very cute [laughs]. But I thought that, like, a huge massive snake, was a really good personification here to to appear before Orsiana.
CMR: I really love it. I love snakes, too.
[laughter]
I was just thinking about the connection between snakes and dragons as well, like in English folklore we have wyrms, they fall under the dragon category. So I was like, yeah, that makes a lot of sense to me as well.
JD: And also, I mean, dragons are overused in fantasy. So I didn’t. You know I didn’t want to be, you know another person who writes about dragons just because dragons are cool and everybody wants to have them. I actually thought that, you know, a snake was a much better idea.
CMR: I think you’ve got the link as well like the cunning snake in the Garden of Eden. I think people coming from a Christian cultural background might make that connection as well.
JD: Could be. But this, you know, Slavic folklore definitely predates Christianity.
CMR: Yeah, yeah, yeah, no 100%. I’m just thinking, like, if people aren’t particularly familiar necessarily with the mythology, that’s maybe where their mind would go. But it makes sense for a trickster god, I think, because it’s just a very common trope for a snake, not a trope, but like it’s common… It’s like a common personality archetype for a snake. Tricky.
JD: Yeah.
CMR: And when you were designing other gods that you’re using in in the novella, like the goddess of Love, and, like, Morana, the goddess of Death, who is one of my favourites, and appears in another novel that you wrote, which is also one of my favourites, yeah, what were you thinking? And how are you designing those gods as well?
JD: I adore the idea that the Slavic goddess of death is a woman, because so often, in so many mythologies there are male gods, in Greek mythology, in Roman mythology, and I always thought that death should somehow belong to women. Because obviously they give life. But also when you think about ending life — so if it’s not in some, you know, brutal murder sort of way, so if it’s just like a normal ending of life, it’s usually the women who are present there, and they’re usually the ones who take care of the people dying. So to me it was completely logical that the goddess of death should be a woman, and also I very much like the the connection between Morana as a goddess of death, and also the goddess of Winter, and also the goddess, not exactly the goddess of water, but there is this, you know, tradition of drowning Morana at the end of winter. Sort of to invite the spring in, and I found in some sources, you know the legends, that the people, the sacrifices to her, were also drowned. So there is this connection between water and winter and death that was so appealing to me.
When I was writing Dark Woods Deep Water, and obviously I needed some kind of a deity, it was such a happy coincidence that I didn’t have to invent much because it was already there. I just had to use it, and that was fantastic. That’s the great thing with with legends and with folklore. You think you need something, and you think you need to make it up. But you actually don’t. It’s already there.
CMR: Yes. and I think, like, especially when you’re using folklore, that you know really well, you can play with it in ways that someone who doesn’t know that folklore as well, or perhaps doesn’t understand the culture that it comes from as well doesn’t get. So I think there’s something much more — I don’t necessarily like the word authentic. But do you know what I mean? Like? There’s something a little bit deeper, a little bit richer, with people playing with their own folklore in their own cultural context. So yeah, I really love that.
JD: The readers whose opinion I’m really interested in and really worry about are actually the people who do know Croatian folklore.
CMR: Yeah.
JD: Because, I’m aware that to an American reader or to a British reader this will be, you know, just another story. I mean, maybe a nice, original story, but just another story in a sea of different legends and stories which you can read today.
Whereas someone from my own country they will definitely find familiar elements. And you know, I worry about them finding me inauthentic, or you know, because that that would be the worst thing. If my own countrymen, my own readers, thought that I use those legends, or those gods in a way that’s not fitting, and if they didn’t like it, that would be really bad for me.
CMR: Are there quite a lot of people in Croatia using folklore in this way and using fantasy, because I feel like it’s becoming more prevalent, or there’s a strong trend of this now, I think, but I’m just wondering what the landscape is at the moment there?
JD: Yeah, definitely, because there was like, there’s a huge part missing because a few generations completely missed the connection with folklore and tales, because, for example, I grew up in in an industrial town, and you know, my parents worked, and I didn’t have anyone to tell me all those legends and folktales. I had to dig up books and read about them, because the oral tradition at one point just didn’t continue.
So we lost that part, and I think that now, with many new writers coming in, and especially many new fantasy writers coming in, people are rediscovering their own heritage, because I think that for so long you know, so much of what we read and watch here in Croatia is imported, because, you know, the American culture is so prevailing that most of the things you read and hear is basically American stories. And so I think it took us very long to actually realize that we have our own traditions. We have our own stories, and it’s time to start telling them and writing them down.
I mean, I’ve been in publishing for what? 5, 6 years now, for you know, for serious. And I’m completely aware how difficult it is to have any kind of promotion, any kind of reach, any kind of open door, when you’re an outsider, because it’s a very tight knit community, and it’s a very small world which doesn’t let many outsiders in, and especially if you’re trying to tell about your own culture and tell your stories.
I mean people do like — this is not about the readers, because the readers do like different stories. They do like to to read about different cultures and different peoples and histories.
But publishing is incredibly conservative. And they’re so afraid of letting, not just different stories, but different ways of storytelling, in. It’s something that it’s really hard to break in.
CMR: Yeah, I was also thinking about like the, there was an anthology of Greek mythology based stories without a single Greek author in it.
JD: Yeah, I remember that one. Yeah, yeah, I mean in in some ways, we in Croatia are much more fortunate than the Greeks, because their mythology got retold by everybody but the Greeks, whereas here. I mean, yeah, there were some like really bad examples of using Slavic mythology in books, but not nearly as bad as as Greek mythology.
CMR: I genuinely think, when I was a kid, there were more books about Greek mythology for children than they were about Welsh mythology for children in the English language. That kind of really resonated with me when you said that you grew up in an industrial town, and you didn’t have that oral tradition, you didn’t have anyone to tell you the folktales, and that feels very much like here in Wales as well. Where again we have our mythology repackaged for fantasy a lot.
Welsh, and Irish mythology, and also Scottish as well, gets smooshed together without any kind of thought, and it becomes a very homogeneous mess of “Celtic” in inverted commas, which somehow also manages to exclude Cornwall. But and then, you know, at the same time, you have people trying to recover Welsh history and Welsh mythology and Welsh folklore and use it in different ways and different contexts and things.
JD: When I was growing up, we had only one children’s book of Folk Legends. And I mean, it’s an amazing book. It’s a beautiful book, but it’s just one book, and I hope that there will be more young writers exploring Slavic and Croatian folklore, and more books written because I think if you’re not in touch with your own heritage, if you’re not in touch with your own folklore, I think you lose a huge part of your identity.
I think it’s really important to have these stories, which anchor you in your place, and give you a sort of a place in the world. And I think most of this feeling comes from knowing those stories, from seeing the nature around you and thinking, this is where my ancestors live, and this is what they believed in. And if you don’t know that you have no connection to it.
CMR: Yeah, a hundred percent. I think that that’s very true. And like landscape as well. And language are two really powerful things for me, like when I think about folklore in Wales, it’s always very rooted in place, and also in Welsh. And so my, I kind of grew up, not speaking Welsh, because that was stamped out of my family in the 19th century. And so I also grew up in the coal fields, which was a very multicultural kind of place, where, I say multicultural. It was a mix of like Welsh and English people coming in to do anyone basically who came to work in the mines. And so we — we lost a lot of that [language].
And so where I live, it’s very difficult to find that equilibrium again, I guess, and it’s very difficult to access stuff. It’s a lot easier now because the Welsh government has got a lot more Welsh language schemes, and there are free classes. And there, you know, it’s become a big, a bigger thing. People are sending their kids to Welsh [language medium] schools, even though they don’t speak Welsh themselves. And so we’re recovering like slowly.
Yeah, it’s just one of those things that I think the next generation will benefit from a much richer heritage treasure trove.
JD: We had similar problems with erasing the language, because, you know, the Croatian language became the official language in Croatia in the 19th century, and before that they were, you know, Croatia was divided between several big big powers; the Habsburg Empire, the Venetian Republic, the Ottoman Empire. And so much of what is written about Croatia and about Croatian history and tradition is not in the Croatian language.
And also, there’s the problem with Christianity erasing folklore and old beliefs. Because, you know, Croats were Christianized in the 9th, 10th centuries, and basically everything they brought from their old homeland was more or less erased, so it was only preserved through oral tradition, but as they were mostly illiterate at the time, they didn’t write those things down. So what we have written is written in the Christian tradition, and the old tales were not.
CMR: Yeah, it’s the same for Wales as well, because we were Christianized much earlier than you, I think, with sort of like the 4th century, and Welsh Christianity, back in the day, traced its direct ancestry to John, the beloved Apostle. He was the great granddad of the Apostolic, you know, [succession], And then his, his great great disciple moved over and was a Bishop of Gaul, and then evangelized Wales. And that’s the kind of the heritage that the early Welsh Christians had. But they didn’t write down… We were an oral tradition for centuries. And so by the time we got our tales written down, it was like the 11th or 12th century, and monks wrote it down. It’s interesting from that layered historical perspective, but also frustrating as well.
[Laughter]
JD: Yeah, but that makes it so interesting, because, you know, it’s a curse, and it’s also a privilege, to live in a country that you know, changed rulers so often as we [did]. You have so, so many layers of history and so many different peoples, actually. I mean, I’m writing in the Croatian tradition, and I see myself as a Croatian, but also where I live now, it was Venetian territory for over 400 years. So when I look around, it’s almost all Venice. There is no Croatian tradition here. It’s been Venice.
And also I mean you have Greeks, you have Romans, you have Hungarians. You have Hapsburgs, you have… Even the French came here with Napoleon.
It’s like there’s so many layers of history. And I think that makes it very rich, and that makes it maybe unique, in the sense that when I’m when I say Slavic culture, or when I say, Croatian history, it’s not what you would expect of, you know, a typical, or what an average reader thinks is a typical Slavic story, because it’s not all snow and forests and little villages and things like that. It’s also the coast and the sunlight and the olive trees.
So it’s a very mixed culture, and I think that makes it, of course, that makes it rich, and that makes it such a beautiful playground for ideas and for stories.
CMR: I was gonna say, because in Dark Woods, Deep Water you have that kind of split happening between that gorgeous city that the main characters find themselves in at one point, versus the manor in the forest that’s muddy and creepy and snowy, and the playground of the Goddess of Death. You have, like those two completely different areas. How do you use Croatia as your inspiration for that?
JD: I mean, if you think, especially in Ghost Apparent, you have Abia as a city state. It’s all based on history. If you travel the Eastern Adriatic coast, if you visit Croatian coast, you see so many little walled towns that used to be medieval communes. Which were independent in some way, because, you know Venice allowed you a certain measure of independence. And so you had your own government. You had your own nobility, you had your own, you know, rights. And so I mean, it’s all basically history. So I didn’t have to invent much here.
But, on the other hand, we are also, you know, snowy forests and castles, castles in dark woods. That’s also part of the tradition. So if you go north, if you move from the coast, you will see a completely different history and a completely different tradition. So we are, you know, we are a small country, but we have many different histories here, so I just had to look around. I didn’t have to invent much.
[Laughter]
CMR: Do you find that fantasy is a good distancer for writing about your own heritage and your own culture? Like, if you were writing a contemporary story, would you find that maybe harder to put folklore into a contemporary story in a modern industrial town? Or do you think that would be something…
JD: I’m not really good at contemporary stories, I must say I always liked the sheer scope of fantasy. The freedom that it allows you. To be quite honest, I mean, and I do read contemporary novels, but I don’t think I could ever write one, because to me, you know, writing about life in an industrial town, or writing about a woman living in 21st century Croatia, it would seem… small? I don’t know. I definitely like the idea that in fantasy you can have gods communicating with mortals. You can have legends. You can have curses. You can have miracles, and not just because it’s pretty fireworks, but because it tells the truth about people in another and maybe deeper way.
Because, you know, when you look at the first things that people wrote, when you look at the ways that religions were created, it’s all basically fantasy, you know. But when the first people sat down to write a story, it wasn’t a story about, you know, contemporary people living. It was a story about gods. So I think there’s something that communicates some deeper level of understanding. If you know what I mean, something within us that is true, even if it’s fantasy.
CMR: Yeah, there’s a lot more that you can get at with people if you put them in different circumstances, or you can give them access to an archetype to engage with. And then look at how that works with the themes of the book that you’re writing, but how that works with their character. What does that say about them? How did they interact with that? How does it fundamentally change them?
JD: Hmm.
CMR: And I think, yeah, as you say at the beginning, the gods that you’re talking about are archetypes. And you can do so much with that, and you can fold that into so many different themes and different ways of understanding the world and different ways of understanding people.
So what do you think that the main themes of Ghost Apparent are, and how do the archetypes you use there play with those themes?
JD: I think that the main idea of Ghost Apparent is actually defining who you are, because that’s the whole story about Orsiana. She needs to grow up really fast. She needs to decide what she wants to be, but also, this mythological layer, this layer of gods, what I wanted to show, what I want to show with every story that I write, is that gods are not merely, you know, fairy tales, and they’re not just, you know, those supernatural beings who grant you wishes and give you blessings.
I like the idea of very human-like gods, just way more powerful like. They have all the bad human traits. They can be jealous. They can be wicked. They can be all kinds of things. But they have this power to to influence your life, and then screw up completely.
So I like the idea that every gift Orsiana gets from the gods is also a curse, so she needs to find a way to use those gifts. But also she needs to find a way to fight those curses. And I think that that gives it a sort of a layer of unpredictability which which I find very fun when I’m writing.
I think it makes it much more interesting than you know the straightforward story of God’s gifts.
I always like to write intelligent characters. I don’t like dumb characters. And Orsiana is definitely very intelligent. I also wanted to write someone who sees the situation as it is. Someone who can actually judge the situation. But all their options are bad, and I wanted to see how they fight the results, and how they end in trouble, not because they’re stupid or they make wrong choices, but because all the choices are bad. These are the stories I like to write.
CMR: Yes, I like that.
[Laughter]
CMR: There are no good choices here.
[laughter]
JD: Yeah!
CMR: There is only the least worst.
[Laughter]
JD: Yeah! It’s the same in Dark Woods, Deep Water — My favourite character in Dark Woods, Deep Water is definitely Telani. He’s a reflection of myself. And I like him because he sees everything that happens like he sees the whole story clearly. He has the most precise idea of what’s actually going on, and he can’t do anything about it. And he loses the most, and he can’t do anything about it. So I find those those characters are the best characters to write about, because they’re interesting.
CMR: I was gonna ask, what is your favourite character from Ghost Apparent?
JD: Orsiana would be the the obvious choice, but actually like, if I had to choose one character who’s not her? It would be her father. I think he’s absolutely amazing. [Laughs] I think he’s amazing because he’s flawed. Because he’s doing his best with, you know, with the talents he has. He’s not a warrior, and he’s not a fighter. He’s just a very intelligent and well educated and basically very nice man who is ruling a very dangerous town.
And I like him for it, because in in the end, when we have the man who saves the day? He’s none of that. He’s the complete opposite of Orsiana’s father, actually, and obviously he wins because he’s the complete opposite. But that doesn’t make us like him more. That doesn’t even make me like him more.
CMR: [Laughs]
JD: No, I mean, that’s the important thing to say, because what I want to say — and this is the historical part of this story — what I want to say here is, it’s hard to rule something. It’s difficult to be a ruler, and it’s also it’s lethal as well. And you can be a good man. You can be a very nice, decent, talented, wonderful man, and you will get killed. And also you can be like a complete bastard, and you will win. Because that’s the way of politics.
CMR: That’s the way it works. Yeah.
JD: That’s the way things work. But I wanted, you know, obviously, this, this is a story. This is a fantasy story. This is not, you know, a serious historical book. But I wanted those things to be obvious. That, you know, being nice does not necessarily make you a good ruler, and this is something that Orsiana had to learn as well.
And you know, I like that arc where she actually realizes that she has to be both sneaky and she has to lie, and she has to push people. And she has, you know, basically to survive. Otherwise she would have been killed. And I think this is maybe a reflection not only of our own political history, but also of our current situation as well.
CMR: Yeah. I was just thinking about all the fantasy books where you know that that morally good, upright ruler is held up as like the paragon you know of like this is what you’re supposed to be like.
JD: No, I don’t believe in that.
CMR: No. And like as a kid, I just kind of like lapped that up. And then I learned a tiny bit of history, and I was like, Oh, no, he would have been dead in 2 seconds.
{Laughs]
JD: Exactly, exactly. When I write about people who have power, I always think about, you know. What kind of decisions they have to make in order to, you know, for the whole thing to work. And obviously, you know, as Orsiana learns, sometimes you have to sign the death sentence. You have to sign the death warrant, and sometimes you have to make extremely hard decisions. Sometimes you have to sacrifice people and things. and it’s never a black and white situation, and I think, I mean, in modern fantasy, you have some very very good portrayals of rulers. So I think that maybe you know this idea of a perfect, perfectly good ruler belongs to some, you know, older older…
CMR: Yeah.
JD: I think that now, many writers are doing great things. I mean, we’ve all learned from The Game of Thrones, you know.
CMR: Oh, yeah, for sure.
JD: I find Grimdark fun. But again, that’s not something I would want to write, because, like, even even if I write stories that you know end in tears for most of my characters I still need some kind of hope. I think that, even in the worst of worlds, you have to have something to believe in. Otherwise, you know, what’s the point of telling a story?
And also, this is the wonderful thing about fantasy. There are always heroes. They don’t have to be typical heroes. They might not be what you expect them to be. But you can have like such wonderful stories with people, you know, being their best selves and and showing incredible qualities. And you know, overcoming horrible things. And I think that’s really — because fantasy gives you this scope, and obviously, you can have heroes in real life, and you can have heroes in contemporary stories, but you know, in fantasy you can have heroes with, you know, capital H, like huge big characters.
[Laughter]
But hey, I have a new book. Which is a love story, basically.
CMR: Oh!!
JD: It’s it’s yeah. I mean, it’s fantasy. It’s not Romantasy. But it’s a story of, you know, hope, and loyalty and love. So I’ve written something. Well, it’s also dark, and it’s got, you know, murder and war and stuff like that.
CMR: There it is!
[Laughter]
CMR: I was waiting. I was waiting.
JD: And gods behaving badly, and all – yeah! All those things are still in there. But I challenged myself. I said to myself, because in all the other books, like Dark Woods, Deep Water, and in Ghost Apparent, I’m quite cynical about love, if you’ve noticed, especially about romantic love.
CMR: A little bit.
JD: I mean, I’m not cynical about love in general, but I’m cynical about romantic love, and it usually ends badly. And this time I said to myself, Jelena, you are going to write a happy love story. You’re going to give your characters a happily ever after. And I said, Oh, my God, how am I going to do that?
[Loud laughter]
JD: But I think I’ve managed to do it so hopefully I will find, you know, a publisher to actually publish it.
CMR: What’s it called?
JD: It’s called Love Lethal, Death Divine.
[Loud delighted laughter]
CMR: There it is.
[More laughter]
CMR: Oh, I hope you do. I hope you find a home for that, because it sounds amazing.
After this interview was recorded, Publishers Marketplace announced the deal for LOVE LETHAL, DEATH DIVINE
coming from Dark Matter Ink in spring 2026
JD: This time I forced myself to write the last chapter before everything else. So, of course I changed the details and everything, but I had to have it sketched. I had to say, you know this person comes here, and this person is waiting for them, and they meet each other again, and they get together, and it’s a happy ending, because otherwise I would risk my story leading me somewhere, and you know, characters running wild. But this way, this way, I said, I have pinned down the final scene. I know what it looks like. I know what happens. So everything I write has to lead to that point, and that helped me.
CMR: Brilliant. Romantic love is hard, though. It’s hard.
JD: I mean, in in order to prepare myself for that ordeal, I read a lot of romantasy, and you know, books with happy endings. And actually, I found that I’ve been prejudiced all this time. They’re actually good books.
[Laughter]
JD: Mea culpa. I shouldn’t have doubted them. I mean, millions and millions of readers can’t be wrong, can they?
CMR: Right.
JD: But I did have to sort of change my whole frame of mind, because, you know, coming from dark fantasy and coming from horror into a more romantic, well, happier stories, it was really hard, but I think it was a necessary change. It was something I had to do to grow as a writer, I mean, I’m not saying that I will necessarily continue in that way. But it was, you know, it was a good lesson to learn, and I enjoyed, I really enjoyed writing it and and learning it, and I think I have a good book as a result. So we’ll see.
CMR: I think it’s hard, because romance, especially when you’re writing any kind of romantic plot. It’s got its own set of beats. It’s got its own genre expectations. It’s got its, you know, and I genuinely find it. One of the hardest genres to write is for me is romance and murder mysteries.
And when I find books that I love. They’re almost always Beauty and the Beast stories or Phantom of the Opera stories. Do you know what I mean? Like that sort of dynamic? I love that, but it’s always fucked up. Like yes, into my veins. The problematic shit. Thank you. Yes, that’s what I wanted. But I can’t… When I’m sitting down to write something, and I’m like, no, it’s going to be happy. Everyone is going to be happy. … Oh, maybe he’s like a, maybe he’s an alcoholic, and he’s not quite in recovery yet. And so the problem is him.
JD: No, because that makes it more interesting. I understand you completely. I like fucked up characters, and I like. As I said, I like difficult situations. I like to torture my characters, and also I mean, I have to say, this book does not have romance beats in it. It doesn’t, because it’s not a romance book. So, it has a love story in it, but that doesn’t make it a romance.
CMR: Right.
JD: It’s still definitely Dark Fantasy, it just has a love story in it. And that was hard enough. Yeah, I agree with you. I mean writing straight [as in, Romance as the primary genre, not straight as in heterosexual] Romance with all the beats, all the tropes, I don’t think I don’t think I could manage that.
CMR: I’ve interviewed quite a lot of Romance authors on this podcast for this season, like hats off to all of them. I’m always fascinated with people’s ways of plotting, ways of thinking, when they’re writing books. And I’m just sat there like, this is amazing. Tell me more. I deeply respect when I read a Romance novel that actually made me feel like, Oh, my God! That’s that’s really hot. and like that doesn’t happen very often. And I’m like, Oh, my God, this is like the best book I’ve ever read in my life. Because I don’t know how they’ve done it.
JD: But it’s same with, you know, with other novels, I mean, good books are good books, no matter what genre. So I mean, there are some incredible romance novels. There are some incredible love stories. Just as there are some incredible fantasy books, and there are some which are unfortunately not, so I don’t think it depends much on the genre. I think it just depends on the quality of writing.
CMR: Yeah.
JD: But what I’ve learned as well with this experiment is that you really have to keep an open mind, as a reader as well as a writer. You have to, you know, challenge yourself to write and read outside of your genre, to go into genres that you would usually never pick up, and you know, read the books that you believe are good, and then try and see what they did, what the writers did, that was, you know, that impressed you, that made the book work. And because it’s a different genre, and because it has different expectations, there is definitely a lot to learn.
CMR: Yeah, I, yeah, a hundred percent. I think that’s a really good way of doing it. I think to be a good writer of any genre you do have to read… something. And look at how people pull off what you want to pull off, and you can kind of analyse it a bit and dissect it, and work out what works, what doesn’t work.
JD: It’s much easier to see what doesn’t work, because it sticks out, than to see what actually works, because when a book works it’s seamless, it pulls you in. And you actually stop yourself and think and say, Wow! Like, I’m really enjoying this scene like, what are they doing in this scene? And like, how did they tackle it? and it’s, you know, the the better the writing is, the more seamless it looks. And and you know, the more difficult it is to see the the technique and the skill behind it. And that’s really admirable.
But yeah, I mean, when you write a certain genre, you obviously have to read so many new books in that genre that sometimes you forget that there are other books in other genres. And you know, obviously, everybody’s time is is limited, and you can’t read, I don’t know, 20 books per week, but I think we all should occasionally try and read different genres. Because you can. You can learn so much from them because they’re like a complete new set of skills. That is, for example, required to write a mystery book, or, you know, a romance. So I think there is very much to to learn from the other genres.
CMR: Yeah, I agree. I’m just going to bring it back to folklore really quickly at the end.
[Laughter]
And say, do you have some favourite piece of folklore that you haven’t used in the story yet? Or something that you have used, but you would use again?
JD: Yeah, actually, the tradition that I’m really interested in, and the tradition I really love, is the tradition of the bell men [Zvončari], which is a pagan carnival tradition, where you have men wearing animal masks and usually sheepskins and they carry large bells, usually cowbells, and clubs, and they’re driving away evil spirits, and they’re driving away winter.
JD: And it’s it’s a very old tradition, but it’s still alive. It’s a live tradition, still happens, and when you see them and I had the, you know, the amazing opportunity to actually see them walking around villages and making this absolutely hellish noise. It’s absolutely terrifying. But also, you can almost believe that there is something you know, sacred and holy about that ritual that they’re actually driving away winter and and they really really look so terrifying when you see them, when you see them in nature, like it’s not the same when you see them in sort of, you know, carnival surroundings. Then they’re just one of the, you know, many masks there, but when you see them walking the country roads and making that noise they’re absolutely believable and true.
CMR: Yeah. Oh, that sounds amazing. Thank you so much for coming on and having a chat with me. Just before we wrap up, I’m gonna give you some space to plug whatever you’ve got coming up in 2025, and anything to look out for from you.
JD: Well, hopefully, I will sell the new novel. But you know obviously more about that later. [Love Lethal, Death Divine is now sold!]
I have a folklore story coming up in Beneath Ceaseless Skies. I don’t know when yet, but it’s actually a retelling of a Croatian folk tale, and it’s quite dark, and I think you will like it very much.
And also you can find me and my writing and all the information about me on my website, which is jelenadunato.com.
I also have Instagram.
I also have BlueSky.
[@JelenaWrites is the handle for most social media – scroll up to the Author Links.]
I’m pretty easy to find, so if you want to support me, please buy my books.
Thank you very much.
CMR: Yes, please buy Jelena’s books. I will put all the links in the transcript, so you have no excuse. Thank you for listening. I hope that you have a really good week, and I will see you next week [time!] for more Eldritch Girl.
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