Blood Sisters has a book trailer! Take a look:
So we know that sharing your writing with someone else is pretty darn scary, but sharing it with someone else means they pull out a line you wrote
… type it with a gun to her head.
and you think “Oh, wow, that’s a great one!” before remembering … you wrote it. (In my defense, I actually wrote Blood Sisters about two years ago. There’ve been a lot of other words coming out of my head since then.)
It’s also cool because it helps me think about the story in a different way. It’s not just these words and I’ve thought about and written and revised and read and edited and read again (and again …) but as a story. When you’re doing all that editing and revising, you’re examining not just every tree, but every leaf. The book trailer backed me up and made me look at the forest again.
So, while I’m taking in the view, let’s talk some themes.
Identity is a huge theme in Blood Sisters. You probably already noticed how prominent it was in Not Your Mary Sue: who am I? Who gets to say who I am? If I lose an important part of my life, what does that mean for what’s left?
Let’s take another look at the teaser summary:
A college girl notices that a serial killer’s victims look an awful lot like her, so she figures out a way to frame him and fake her death. At least that is the story her twin sister desperately clings to even as her intrusive thoughts about her sister’s supposed murder haunts her 10 years later.
Here we’ve got identical twins, Sunni Andromeda and Skye Cassiopeia Bowen. (Their parents might’ve picked a theme.) Ten years ago, Sunni was murdered, but Skye’s still floundering: who is she without her other half? Can Skye really just let Sunni go and accept that her long disappearance means she’s dead? (Hint: no.)
Skye decides to turn to Nessa with her theory of Sunni’s faked death. She’s picked Nessa because it’s Nessa’s brother who’s in prison for murdering Sunni (along with a handful of other women). So Nessa’s having some issues with identity herself. It’s been a while since someone approached her as “the serial killer’s sister,” but that wound’s close to the surface.
I also pull a bit of a Stephen King and combine those questions of identity with the theme of writing – authors creating characters, authors creating themselves. One of my characters is an author, and an author writing under a pseudonym, no less. Not Your Mary Sue started as a love letter to Misery; Blood Sisters is more like The Dark Half (the theme of twins, anyone?) or maybe “Rest Stop.” (There’s also the fact that my favorite King book was actually one initially published under his pen name – The Long Walk by Richard Bachman – and as an extra added twist, the character uses a pen name I’d debated using myself.)
We also, in good Gothic fashion, deal with isolation, power, and the way time folds in on itself and the past is never truly gone. If you isolate yourself to try to separate yourself from the past, does it always come back to bite you in the end? (I’m just saying that, in fiction, running away from everything rarely seems to work out.)
I’m also chomping at the bit for the time when I can get into more specifics.
Tell you more names. Give you more info about the twins than just their names. Go into the entire convoluted, complicated story.
127 days, but who’s counting?
Blood Sisters is out August 22, 2023, from Aesthetic Press.
Rebecca Frost 