Kiss of Tragedy

I don't always insert poetry into my novels, but I did this once. The image supplied is a copy of the first edition audiobook.

Kiss of Tragedy by Stephanie Van Orman (excerpt from the novel Kiss of Tragedy by Stephanie Van Orman)

Midnight waves wake my senses - Confused

The water burns me to my eyes - Suffused

The dreams haunt my mind - Disintegration

I can’t battle my dreams - Formulation

The First Dream

I’m young while she’s beautiful - Bemused

Untouchable and irrevocably touched - Defused

The pool of blood I laid in at road’s end - Surprised

Death’s white fingers like love - Realized

The Second Dream

I’m angry while she’s patient - Placate

Provoked by her lover to knife’s point - Aggravate

Brown eyes triggered bloody red - Amused

Lose my body in the violent fray - Refused

The Third Dream

Like an injured monster lost in water - Rescue

Like a broken man waiting by the window - Withdrew

Still feigning while dreaming - Conventionalize

The morn will be bright after the hardest night - Cruel Lies

Author's Notes: I don't believe in spoilers. I think that if something is interesting, it's interesting regardless of how the information is distributed. In my novel, Kiss of Tragedy, the book is organized like Songs of Innocence and Experience by William Blake. That means that for the first 18 chapters of the book, the main character, Juliet, does not know what is going on (Songs of Innocence). She finds this poem on Seth's computer when she's locked in his bedroom in chapter ten, Den of Darkness. It's an outline of what is happening and an impressive foreshadowing tool. She doesn't know that the three bite marks down his neck are not the three bite marks that turn a human into a vampire, but instead a unit of measurement to show how many times he's been alive. Each dream represents that lifetime. When Juliet starts recollecting what happened in those lifetimes, we enter the second half of the book (Songs of Experience).

This book is special to me because when I was 15, I read the back of every book in the library and every book in the bookstore, and I couldn't find this book or anything like it. It's completion was one of the highlights of my writing career, because it was my 15th completed book, and I was finally able to write a book exactly the way I envisioned it instead of the book turning out differently than I'd hoped. Now, it's been 18 years since I finished it, and you might think I'd be bored with the aging book I'd written, but I'm not. When I read it, I'm that 15 year old again. I love it so much. I've put up a poster of the bookcover in my bedroom. There's another one like it on the door to my locker. I'm telling everyone they should read it and my copy of the book is falling apart because I've read it so many times.

Kiss of Tragedy is also notable because it is longer than any of my other books. It sits at a grand 142,000 words. These days, if a novel is going to be over 100k, I like to slice it in half. However, there is no place to slice Kiss of Tragedy in half. It can't stop for a new volume. It can't pause anywhere. You can't stop to breathe between innocence and experience. That moment is just too sudden... for all of us.

Kiss of Tragedy by Stephanie Van Orman is available on Amazon, Google, Apple, Spotify, Barnes and Noble, KOBO, DriveThru Fiction, and more. It is available in ebook and audiobook. There is a paid version and a free version on most sites. Books should be free for anyone who want to read them. This is one of the joys of being a writer in the first place, being able to share my books with the whole world. Cheers!