From georginakiersten.com: Meet Georgina Kiersten, the master of melting hearts and bending genres! When they’re not crafting tales of love and diversity in their cozy, low-angst LGBTQ romances, they moonlight as Jasper Hyde, the enigmatic author behind some spine-tingling dark paranormal romances that keep readers on the edge of their seats—preferably with the lights on.
Under the pen name Georgina Kiersten, they serve up a delightful buffet of characters and storylines that are as comforting as a warm blanket on a chilly evening. Love knows no bounds and neither do Georgina’s narratives, celebrating diversity and inclusion. Perfect for those days when you want your drama mild and your tea hot.
Switch to Jasper Hyde, and hold onto your garlic—things get deliciously dark. From vampires in velvet to haunted heroes with harrowing histories, Jasper’s tales are not for the faint of heart. Dive into a world where the paranormal is just another part of the landscape, like a looming, foreboding castle at the edge of town.
Author Links:
Website: georginakiersten.com
Instagram: ingloriousgigi
TikTok: ingloriousgigi
Threads: ingloriousgigi
Bluesky: ingloriousgigi
Interview Transcript: Introduction
CMR: Okay, so welcome back to Eldritch Girl. And I’m really happy to have Georgina Kiersten here, who also writes as Jasper Hyde, which you may know from the book Splinter, which was number one on Amazon in – is it “Bisexual Romance”?
GK: Mm-hm!
CMR: Yeah, congratulations on that. I think that hit last week before we recorded.
GK: Thank you very much.
CMR: So really excited to have you here, and really excited to hear an extract from Splinter. Georgina, would you like to introduce yourself to everyone.
GK: Hi, my name is Georgina Kiersten, I am a trans, autistic, queer, Black person; I am an author of diverse romance that features Black people as the main characters, primarily LGBTQ+ romance, cosy romance, and dark paranormal romance. I write under the name of Jasper Hyde and Rian Fox as well, and I tend to write from a Black perspective. I’m just having so much fun writing the stories I’ve always wanted to see on the bookshelves, and I’m just so happy to be here.
CMR: It’s lovely to meet you, and it’s lovely to have you on the show. And you’re going to be reading an extract for us from Splinter, that’s really exciting. It was one of the books that we read for Romancing the Gothic Book Club, and I really enjoyed it. So I’m really happy that you could come on and share that with us. So I’ll pass over to you if you’d like to just give us a little bit of context for the extract before you start, because people may not have read it. For those of us who have read it, yeah, it’s definitely worth reading, guys. Recommend.
GK: The context is my main character, Drusilla Van Tassel, is a medical examiner, and she’s just finished going over the home of her sister’s friend. And I say home, but also like his body, because his body is all over the place. And she is bombarded with the press. And she’s like, I don’t want any comments. I don’t want to talk about an active investigation, and then someone steps forward and calls out her name. And it’s her ex-boyfriend. I wouldn’t even say ex-boyfriend, but her ex-lover, who has returned. And this is a guy that she hasn’t gotten over with right. She pretended that she was over him. She tried to make moves to get over him, but she’s never quite got over him, and so she’s met with this guy that she thought she was never going to see again, and he returns, asking for a favour.
Splinter by Jasper Hyde
BLURB:
This Is The Legend Of Sleepy Hollow Reborn…
In a small town hidden behind the hills of New York, things are far from ordinary. As Sleepy Hollow’s youngest Medical Examiner, the pressure intensifies for Dr. Drusilla Van Tassel when the headless bodies of her sister Katrina’s friends start surfacing. Meanwhile, Drusilla’s ex-lover Ichabod Crane returns to town, dredging up feelings better left buried.
Things take a turn for the worst when Drusilla comes face-to-face with the Headless Horseman, who is back to settle old scores – and she and her sister are the perfect targets. Drusilla can repel the horseman with an unknown power, but her sister isn’t so lucky, and she goes missing.
However, when Drusilla discovers Ichabod is a monster hunter, she has no other choice but to turn to him for help. Even if that means working with a man she feels an inexplicable attraction to. Will they find Katrina and banish the headless horseman once and for all?
“Drusilla!” He called to her softly, his breath tickling the back of her neck.
She barely repressed a shudder at the way his mouth said her name, as if it was almost a physical caress.
Drusilla snapped her eyes closed, and prayed that this was just some delusion brought up by the traumatic crime scene and a lack of sleep.
“Ichabod Crane,” Drusilla said, taking a shaky breath as she finally turned around. Drusilla couldn’t believe that she hadn’t immediately recognized him when she saw him in the crowd, those damnable fox-shaped eyes cut through her with their intensity. Up close, Ichabod’s hazel eyes were gray-green, with flecks of gold. Their time apart from each other hadn’t lessened the effect those eyes had on her.
Drusilla looked away, her own eyes tracing the features of his face, sharp cheekbones, neatly trimmed moustache, and full lips, lips that she viscerally remembered the taste of.
Drusilla opened her mouth to speak, but nothing came out. What could she say to the man who had broken her heart? The man whose presence lingered long after he left, and now, 16 years later, Ichabod Crane had finally returned to Sleepy Hollow.
Interview Transcript: Discussion
CMR: Dun dun dah! I like that meeting. It’s great. So yeah, let’s have a chat about the choices that you made when you were retelling the Sleepy Hollow story and the idea of intersectional representation in fantasy stories, low fantasy stories, folktale retellings, folklore. You know. I wouldn’t call Sleepy Hollow folklore. But like, do you know what I mean? Like? It’s almost become folklore, hasn’t it?
GK: Yeah, as I’ve done my research about Sleepy Hollow, and I’ve talked to people who live in Tarrytown, which used to be a part of Sleepy Hollow, and then they detached sometime in the early, I think, early nineties, early to mid nineties, The Legend of Sleepy Hollow and Washington Irving himself has become his own legend. It’s almost visceral, especially around this time of year.
You can see the presence of that story throughout the town, especially in Sleepy Hollow, because Sleepy Hallow used to be like a historical neighborhood of Tarrytown. But, like Tarrytown has also kind of adapted that as well, so it’s a legend that has become like part of the bigger mythos of that town and of that area.
CMR: Cool. I could imagine it must be amazing in Halloween, yeah. And you kind of took inspiration more from the show than from the story, like the characters and the way that they were treated in the show, especially that well, Drusilla’s character. What’s become Drusilla’s character in your book, versus how that was all handled [in the show]. And so, yeah, can you tell us a little bit more about that and the inspirations behind those choices?
GK: Well, I really did love the show. It was one of my favourite shows of the 2010s. Especially when you had like stuff like Supernatural going on, and – not Lost, that was before that, but you know, around that time where we had Vampire Diaries, stuff like that. For me, what brought me to Sleepy Hollow – Fox’s Sleepy Hollow – was Nicole Beharie who played the lead, Abby Mills, and that she was a Black woman, a dark-skinned Black woman, playing lead on a paranormal show, and I’ve never saw that before, and I think I haven’t seen one like that since.
I think the closest like The Walking Dead, I think, might be like the closest you get to that, because she’s a lead, but she’s not like the lead. She’s not like the second person in the cast line-up. So, to have a Black woman as lead in a paranormal series was huge for a lot of Black people, especially Black women, especially Black, queer women, and my fiction tends to speak to Black, queer women.
And I saw a lot of Abby in myself in my own experiences, because I’m the oldest child. I thought, you know, they clearly don’t know, as I was rewatching it (because I decided to rewatch it, and that’s how I got the idea to go and get my own closure by writing this book). So, I decided to rewatch the show from the beginning, and I realized that Abby’s character is clearly not being written by a person with that lived experience who is Black, who’s a woman? Right? Especially because when they talk about sisterhood, and in particular with Abby and her sister Jenny, and the way that Black sisterhood is a little bit different than white sisterhood, and there’s nuances there that clearly the showrunners did not pick up.
I really wanted to take a turn at writing it. I love the thought of a diverse, (because the first season of Sleepy Hollow is very diverse), a truly diverse Sleepy Hollow. And then I sort of took my cues from that. Personality-wise, character-wise, I did take a lot from Tom Mison’s Ichabod Crane, because I love the nuances in his character. I love the twists in his character. I think he added more depth than, like, the Johnny Depp character of Sleepy Hollow (1999).
CMR: Yeah, for sure. Yeah.
GK: When it comes to character creation, I like to go deep, right? Because that’s my wheelhouse is character creation. So when you’re creating a character, you like to go deep, you like to go deep into their psychology, and I think that show really went deeper into what makes Ichabod, Ichabod. So it took a lot from Tom Mison’s Ichabod. Not only did I read the short story which is somewhere over here in my office – I read the short story at least twice – I listened to the audio book. There’s an audio drama on Youtube I listened to, and then I found out that Tom Mison himself narrated an audio book of Sleepy Hollow, and I listened to that as well. And so yeah, so I just like layered like, I took a little. This took a little of that, and then I just layered, and that’s how I got what I got.
CMR: Yeah, that’s yeah. That’s really cool. I love listening to how people come up with their characters, and then the influences and the inspiration. And then how you get that final polished sort of – I don’t like calling them products, but you know what I mean, like when they’re out there, and they’re done, and they don’t really belong to you anymore. And that’s the character that the readers are introduced to. And what has the reader response been to those characters that you’ve lovingly put out there into the world?
GK: Well, 1st of all, like Ichabod is Filipino, and that’s something that surprises a lot of people are like, why would you make this white character into a Asian man, a South Asian man, and I was like, because, first of all, I like to decenter whiteness when it comes to my interracial romance. I know that some writers prefer, like, a white male/Black woman thing, and that’s fine. I will read happily read that. But for me, I wanted to decenter whiteness, and I felt like I had a story to tell about his race, right, the struggles of being Filipino, but also white, and feeling like you’re not enough, and especially because I have biracial kids myself. So even though I don’t live that experience, I have had front row seats for those experiences. And so that speaks to me.
And also like, Black people and Asian people have a really great synergy already right off the bat. There’s something that our cultures just click. With that I thought I thought would fit well within the story.
I marketed this without any sort of shame to IckyAbby, Ichabod/Abby Mills, fans. And those fans tend to again run Black and queer. And so they loved it, because this is finally giving them the closure of a story that they were heavily invested in for like 10 years, because it’s been 10 years since the show has premiered. So it’s been a very long time, and so they could finally see themselves empowered in Drusilla’s fight and her struggles, and also get her see her get the happily ever after in the respect that she absolutely deserved. And I say she, Abby, but also Drusilla as well.
CMR: Yeah, a hundred percent. It was. Yeah, I think that’s I think that’s really cool. And I think there’s also like that intersection of sexuality; bisexuality, demisexuality, the asexual spectrum that doesn’t really get a lot of rep I think, is fair to say, in especially not in queer romance, right like. There are queer romance books with asexual characters — and aromantic characters as well in romances of people who are on the aro spectrum, but it was really cool as well to see that Ichabod Crane is demisexual, which is one of the more misunderstood labels, I think. Can you tell us about why you kind of developed that or chose that for him? Was that something you always knew about his character, and from the layers that you’d picked up, or something that you added in for another reason?
GK: A lot of Ichabod’s character and personality and his mannerisms come straight from Tom Mison’s Ichabod Crane, and I immediately pegged him [clicks] like that, as a-spec.
CMR: YES!
GK: And people are like, Yeah, he has a wife. How’s he a-spec? And I’m like, because he doesn’t date often, he doesn’t fall often. He doesn’t. He doesn’t have sexual intercourse often on screen, or he doesn’t talk about his attraction, or he doesn’t check out a woman very often. He’s very like, I don’t see you until I feel something, and I see that so much through his story, through those seasons.
He reminds me a little bit of a more cooler version, and I say more cool, I mean, like temper wise, a more temperate, more low key version of like Batman in that way that he’s not dating. He’s not thinking about romance at all until it slaps him in the face, and that’s such a very demisexual experience where it has to be literally slapped in your face for you to sort of like, Oh, this is what that is. This is what this is.
I tend to see a lot more a-spec possible a-spec characters in fandom! And that’s where that comes from, like I could talk all day how I think Bruce Wayne is demisexual, and I’ve actually written him that way in fanfiction, or I’ll think, like Tony Stark is like demiromantic because of the way that he acts, and that comes from not only me being aroace myself, but being around people constantly with those labels who act in this manner. And so yeah, it was organic for me to just like watch Ichabod on the show and be like, oh, he’s totally like demisexual. And since they didn’t play with that, because apparently asexuals don’t exist in the world, I was able to take that and do something with that.
And the one thing I will get angry about, and I have gotten angry about, is that they will see Ichabod, and they will see Drusilla and say, hey, this is a cis-het couple. And I’m like, how is that a cishet couple?? Because — and I’ve had this happen, where I’ve been cut out of opportunities for Splinter, because they will just immediately clock them as a cishet couple when they’re clearly a queer couple, just you know, one is allosexual, and one is not.
Because the nuance of sexuality, and the talk about sexuality in the world beyond my bubble — because we talk about it in my bubble, in my friend groups in my online spaces. We talk about sexuality all the time. But once I leave, I forget how limited sexuality is still in the mainstream world.
CMR: Yeah, yeah, for sure. It’s especially, I think, because a-spec and arospec are often conflated. And so it’s like, if you’re aromantic, people assume that means you don’t want to have sex, when the opposite could be true or like, if you’re asexual, it means that you’ll never fall in love, when in fact you can. You just don’t want to have sex with them. Perhaps you know, like, that’s very simplistic. But like, I’m somewhere on both spectrums. And it’s a fluid experience for me in many ways compared to like people who know who always, you know, like no, I definitely don’t do this ever, and I definitely don’t do that ever. And for me it’s a bit more like I’m much more of demi of both, or grey, or something, or but but yeah, and it’s fascinating how little that’s represented. And I think it’s kind of because people don’t know what to do with us? Do you know what I mean? And they they don’t know how to fit you into a story, because and I think that just shows how narrow, sometimes, the boxes of ‘what you can tell stories about’ actually are.
And I wondered if we could talk a little bit more about that, because obviously Splinter is self-published right?
GK: Yeah.
CMR: And I was thinking about where to find these queer stories. And it’s the self-published and the independent publisher, small press markets. It’s not like I’ve so rarely. I can’t think of many at all like big traditional names or publishers, or like who goes for those kinds of intersectional stories at all, do you know what I mean? And so why do you think small presses and self-published authors are so important for the kind of the intersectional rep, and where do you see this going, as we go on?
GK: For me, when I was making the decision between querying and being self published, I realized that the stories that I wanted to tell would not be accepted easily, and I didn’t want to fight that fight. I wanted to tell the stories. I didn’t want to spend most of my time fighting the fight to have those stories on the shelves.
Also, on top of that, I think that this is a decision that most authors have to make; the easy way or the hard way. And I’m not saying self publishing is easy, but it’s easier to just hit publish, and not have to like. Consult.
I think self publishing is so important to people who don’t fit within these mainstream parameters of what it is to be gay or straight, or cis or binary is because, you know, you’re challenging the status quo, and and people are not ready for change or not even, like, they’re not embracing change. And so the only avenues for a lot of us is through indie publishing, because, you know, publishing is a gatekeeper of what is acceptable, what is not acceptable.
And a lot of times, like, Black stories have to follow a guideline, they cannot like – they have to fall into assimilating into white culture to be accepted. And so that is something a price. That is a price that a lot of authors are not willing to pay. I myself am not willing to pay, and I’m not saying this as a way to dig on my trad published authors, because there are some authors who we who were able to bypass that and give us, like, The Hate U Give [by Angie Thomas] or The Poisons We Drink by Bethany Baptiste.
CMR: Yeah.
GK: Or, Cinderella Is Dead [by Kalynn Bayron]. They’re able to do that. But a lot of us, a lot of authors cannot do that do not have that power within publishing to do that. And so the only way for them to tell the stories they want to tell to get that representation they are desperately in need of, is through indie publishing, because there’s no rules. The rules are: there are no rules. You can be as out of pocket off the wall, genre breaking genre, bending as you want and largely get away with it.
So that’s why Indie publishing is important, because the gates are still closed to a lot of us. And the only way to have that representation in media is through Indie publishing, through doing it yourself. And that’s why I kind of like side-eye people who get on self-publishing people, make us do like double standards. You can’t have no typos, you can’t have no mistakes. You have to write outstanding stories. You have to have the perfect cover, and traditional published books don’t have that sometimes. Oh, and they get away with it just fine.
And what it shows me is that they don’t understand the privilege it is to have your books on the shelves, in magazines, on TV, and that not a lot of us have those opportunities or that income, because it all comes out of our pockets, to make the books that you want us to match standards with.
CMR: Yeah, yeah, completely. I was thinking about Jamison Shea as well. The YA duology that’s just come out. And that’s with a bigger publisher, I think, but I can’t remember which one it is [Henry Holt & Company, an imprint of Macmillan], but that’s and I think, like it’s really cool to see that some people are pushing the boundaries a bit in traditional publishing. And as you say, some people can do that. And there are more I think, possibly because — I don’t know if you agree with this, but I think because self-published authors and small presses have proved that the market is there for some stories.
I would really hope that that would mean more kind of publishers with more weight behind them, not even necessarily trad. you know, the top 5 or whatever, but like, bigger publishers, bigger, independent publishers, or whoever, would take a bigger risk, which it’s not. I don’t like using the word risk, but in terms of market risk it’s always a risk when they acquire something, but like that they would give those chances to more people, especially Black authors, authors of color, queer authors, people who sit on those intersections because the market is clearly there and open for these kinds of stories, because that’s what people actually really want is things that are outside of the traditional narratives that seem to get a lot of page time. So yeah, I don’t know if you’d agree with that.
GK: Actually seeing that in real time with my author friends, my friend Carmen Lee and Meka James started off as — hell, even Chencia C. Higgins, who’s my favorite, right, started off as Indies, and then were later picked up as traditional published authors. And I’m seeing, like, big publishing houses, realizing that they’re losing money by not, you know, investing in marginalized voices.
However, what infuriates me is that they’re not taking a risk on the new, really, truly, the new aspiring author who has no following, who has no clout. There’s just like, you have to prove yourself in the court of social media and in clout to actually get your foot in the door. And that’s a new paradigm that I have issues with, because that also cuts out a lot of talented authors who may not know how to market themselves on social media, who may not know how to speak up and speak out and to get themselves noticed. And then we’re losing some great talent by doing that.
CMR: Yeah, absolutely. And especially because I think in the court of social media, it’s not taken into account when social media platforms just implode. And you’re scrambling to find a new platform – like, mentioning No. X’s, but like people scrambling to make new platforms and find their old followers. And then all of that that’s kicking off right now. And I think that’s very unfair, particularly to debut authors who’ve been trying very hard to market their own books and to push their own work, and self-published authors. Because that’s all we do is market. So yeah, I think, like, social media is one of the best things, but also one of the worst things about the whole process. Yeah.
How have you found the marketing side of things?
GK: Turns out people like loud Black people. And so I’ve been very blessed that people like me like my energy, like how I talk about things. I’m also in the process of moving from Twitter to to Bluesky to Threads. I say “in the process”, I’ve been sort of moving over for months, I think, for like, 4 months, 3, 4 months I finally canceled my Twitter, finally deleted it, and now I’m only on Threads in Bluesky. But it’s been a struggle, because I had to always constantly measure. If I cut off Twitter, will I cut off my followers right? Because that’s where you know my largest following is Twitter. It was like 8,000 followers.
CMR: Oof.
GK: That’s a struggle. Yeah, I’m slowly getting back on Threads. I hit 5,000 the other day, so I’m slowly getting back to those numbers, but it’s going to take time to rebuild. And then on top of that, the Jasper Hyde books are new. I only have one book under Jasper Hyde. I might expand that to some old stories, might republish some old stories and put them under Jasper Hyde. But like, that’s a new brand, and that’s me starting over from scratch. So, it’s been kind of a struggle. But the thing that has saved me as an author is my mailing list. My mailing list has grown a lot. Over the last year I went from like 300 subscribers to 500 subscribers. And that has saved me because, like, no matter what happens, I have access to my readers. No one could take that away from me, and I was blessed that I started my mailing list early in 2019 when I got started. And it’s been with me 6 years.
I’m just blessed that I have that because I know there are a lot of authors who do not and have to literally start over from scratch. And I just I’m blessed that people have stuck with me have followed me from platform to platform, and who largely have signed up for my newsletter, and just are excited about everything that I put out. I’m just blessed. I don’t take that for granted at all.
CMR: Yeah, newsletters. That is a so good, because, like, if you have that or you have your own domain name, your own website, something that people can find you on that’s not owned by somebody else. Well, I know everything is owned by somebody else. But like, you know what I mean. Yeah, that’s that’s really good advice, I think, is the newsletter in particular.
But yeah, and also because you write 3 names right? So you’ve got Jasper Hyde is your pen name for your darker fiction? And then you’ve got other kinds of fiction that you write using other pen names. How does that work for you?
GK: Okay. So I have 2 main pen names that I’m using, and will be using from here on out. One is the Georgina Kiersten books, which are cozy romance, sweet, low angst, and then I have Jasper Hyde. I have Jasper Hyde, which is my dark paranormal books much like Splinter. I also plan on writing and publishing dark romance, contemporary romance, under Jasper Hyde. Now Rian Fox is my erotica pen name, and it’s largely dormant and will stay dormant from here on out, because I much prefer to write romance than Erotica. I am a sucker for a happily ever after, and my erotica books are not always that. Like Crave, which is the first story, professional story, that I put out. It has no happily ever after, and will never have a Happily Ever After [laughs].
But I also plan on taking The Devil’s Bargain, which is my first professionally published book, and rewriting it and re-releasing it under Jasper Hyde, because it actually fits under that brand of Jasper Hyde better. I might also do some Patreon stories and polish them up, and then put them under my Jasper Hyde brand as well.
So you have your sweet and your cozy, and then you have your dark stuff, and that’s under Jasper Hyde.
CMR: Brilliant. Yeah, okay, that. Yeah, that makes a lot of sense. Yeah. Do you find that you have, like the Venn diagram of readers of people who like the really nice, sweet, cozy, contemporary stuff versus people who also like the darker paranormal stuff. I’m sure that there is quite a big overlap of of readers. Right? I think I’m one of them.
GK: Right. Yeah, there is. I’m really blessed that there is. I could have just separated it into new separate newsletters, really just separated from 2 different brands, and put them on 2 different websites, and really sort of pretended, like, Jasper Hyde was a whole other person other than myself, but I firmly believe in supporting and encouraging and in embracing both your light side and your dark side, because one can’t exist without the other.
I firmly believe that, like I am not just bright colors, sparkly eyeshadow, and a bold background. I do have a darkness, and that darkness comes out through those Jasper Hyde books, much like the sweetness and the coziness and the sort of bright colors and the stuff that you associate with my brand as Georgina Kiersten. That’s also a part of myself, so I believe in embracing it all and putting it in one place, which I know could drive a few of my readers mad sometimes, but I don’t feel like I should hide it. I don’t feel like I should run from it, I should embrace it, and because it’s a part of me, and like the sort of the darkness and the rage that came out through stuff like The Devil’s Bargain, or Splinter. Right? There’s such female rage there, especially towards the end, and I’m not going to give it away, but towards the end there’s like such rage, such female rage.
And that is a part of me, and I don’t think, especially now, after this election, I’m not going to get too political. But after this election that that is something that’s needed more now than ever, that instead of running from the darkness that we have inside of ourselves, that we embrace it wholeheartedly, as much as we embrace the good.
CMR: Oh, yeah, I think that’s that’s really well put. Yeah, I was just gonna ask before we run out of time, but I wanted to ask you out of your whole journey, including the Georgina Kiersten, really nice cozy stuff, and the darker stuff as well, what’s been your favorite parts of being an indie author?
GK: : It’s learning stuff. It’s like, really, truly learning about different things. I learned something new every day. I learned stuff about myself as a person I learned stuff about. You know, sexuality. I went through a whole year where I was just reading sex education books, so I can be a better spicy writer. I learned about psychology and how to deepen my characters, and sometimes I will find stuff that will make me think about my own relationships in my personal life. So the journey that I love the most is the learning, because every day is different. Every day I sit in this chair is different. I can never really predict. I can try. I do try like to write a to-do list, but that at the end of the day means nothing, because my day is different from day to day, and I learn, and I experience things every day that is different. And so this is what I love about being an Indie author.
This is why I get up in the morning is because I am never bored. As someone who has ADHD, I could get easily bored. I am never bored. Something’s always coming up. I’m learning something about myself and about others, and about writing the stuff that I want to write like diverse characters or a different culture. So the learning curve it can sometimes feel steep at times, but the learning curve is what keeps me coming back. Truly.
CMR: That’s amazing. Yeah, I yeah, completely, completely agree with that. I think it’s it’s so much fun, because I have ADHD, too. So it’s like, it’s really fun just to kind of keep the dopamine coming with all of the new stuff, right? Yeah, I relate.
And I’m wondering as well, if you can tell us what is next for you, or for Jasper Hyde, or for your journey, what do you think the next steps will be?
GK: Well, I have did a huge pivot this year of doing serials first and then professional print on demand publishing later. So I thought I was going to do hybrid where, like Georgina Kiersten, I would do print on demand. And then, Jasper Hyde, I would do serials. Turns out I’m not good at that anymore. So I’ve done 2 serials, and then I would do print on demand where after the serial is done, I will professionally publish it, I will clean it up, and then I will put it on the market like any other book, and I’m having way too much fun doing that.
My focus right now is A Vicious Thirst, which is my diverse Dracula retelling that I am writing right now. It’s a serial. It’s a free serial. If you just sign up on my newsletter and you will get free episodes by monthly.
I’m about… because I write in like a 4 act structure, so I’m about to hit the 4th act of the 1st volume of A Vicious Thirst. And yes, there’ll be multiple volumes of it.
And you will see some of your favorite folks, especially Carmilla, the vampire, who is now Queen of the Vampire Empire, which we love, and Latina, and has a trans wife, and I plan on having her own book at some point. But like I just, I’m having way too much fun making things as diverse as possible, and fun as possible and spicy as possible.
And yeah, I’m just gonna be doing a lot more serials, a lot more dark stuff. I can’t even talk about the dark stuff – well, a lot of the stuff that I have in the works, because I don’t want to get anybody’s hopes up in case it like crashes and burns.
But I will announce here first that Georgina Kiersten will be doing cozy fantasy and paranormal stuff. Think Gilmore Girls meets Practical Magic meets The Brown Sisters by Tabitha Hibbert. So that mix in a blender you’ll be getting next year.
I’m gonna be doing a lot more of that because I was at an impasse where I was like, I want to do more fantasy. But Georgina Kirsten is contemporary, and Oh, God! I don’t want to do another pen name. And so I said, You know what I can pivot. This is my job. This is my business. I can pivot wherever I want, and so I have, and I’m having way too much fun with that. And I’ll definitely be telling y’all more about that project in January. But yes, lots of stuff is in the works.
CMR: I’m really excited for that. And this might air in January, so that might work out really well! [laughs] Yeah. It’s been honestly wonderful to listen to you to have you on, thank you so much for being here. I think that’s about all we’ve got time for, or I could go on for like, two hours, I don’t know, but thank you so much for coming on the show. It’s been great.
GK: It’s been great talking to you, too.
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