Meet Sonia Blade | Author

We had the good fortune of connecting with Sonia Blade and we’ve shared our conversation below.

Hi Sonia, why did you pursue a creative career?
I don’t think there was a version of my life that could have happened where I didn’t do something creative. Creativity is as much a part of me as the blood in my veins. If I want to relax, I create. If I want to challenge myself, I create. Rarely a day goes by where a story idea doesn’t pop into my head, or a new character rears their head in my thoughts, begging to be the main character of a new adventure. My desire to tell stories began when I was young and I did whatever I could to cultivate as I grew up. In my twenties, I realized that maybe I could be more than just a hobbyist. I woke up with the bones for a paranormal story that took place in our world and I spent the next decade building the lore, molding the characters and writing the story. The further I got, the more ideas came until I had hundreds of thousands of words worth of plot lines across multiple genres and story mediums that I planned to bring to life in a rich, immersive paranormal literary universe. My childhood self never would have imagined I’d make a career out of something creative, but here I am, starting the journey to making a pipedream my reality.

Can you open up a bit about your work and career? We’re big fans and we’d love for our community to learn more about your work.
My art is storytelling. There is so much that goes into a story to get you from “Chapter One” to “The End”. So much more than the words on the page that the reader sees when they pick up a book. All my life I loved vampire stories. There was something so interesting about a creature of the night that looked so human but had such a dark side. All the things that vampire stories represented, from their earliest iterations, resonated with me. So, when I woke up from a dream with the groundwork for a story that took what I knew about vampires and brought a unique twist to them, I couldn’t put my pen down. And that continued for over ten years. I wanted to create more than a single story that readers fell in love with. I wanted them to never want to leave the world I created. Because that world was within their own. I grew watching movies and reading books where the magical, the supernatural, the whimsical were just on the other side of the looking glass, hidden in our world. Now, I’m ready to bring that into the present. I took old world legends of vampires, new ideas of them, and my spin on their limits and abilities, even their inception, and started what I call The World Painted Crimson. From a romance to a dark thriller, maybe an action adventure. All of these stories would take place in a rich paranormal landscape in our world. Readers can learn the lore, the culture, the creatures of this Crimsonverse and take it from one story to the next. They can go from a tragic romance novel to a romantic comedy palette-cleanser and not have to spend a quarter of the book learning new terms and world building. I have over two dozen different stories ready to be put to paper in different genres, different time periods, with different casts. Some will crossover while others will stand completely on their own. The possibilities are endless and I can’t wait for readers to explore it all with me. It may be ambitious, creating a paranormal MCU for books, but I don’t doubt for a second that readers will fall in love with these stories, starting with my debut novel, Blood Of My Blood, that releases in July of this year. It is a sensual drama that takes place here in Dallas and follows a newly turned vampire as she works through the trauma of her transformation and seeks revenge for the monster that forced it on her.

Let’s say your best friend was visiting the area and you wanted to show them the best time ever. Where would you take them? Give us a little itinerary – say it was a week long trip, where would you eat, drink, visit, hang out, etc.
If my best friend were to come visit Dallas, it would be criminal not to show them around downtown, especially Deep Ellum. There are so many interesting bars and venues there, we’d have to snag tickets to a local show. As I’m more on the alternative side, the RBC would be one of our first stops as it is a staple of the alt scene in the city. Then we’d go to the Bishops Arts District and walk around and patronize all the cute shops there, try out some of the restaurants. As readers and authors, we’d go to Wild Detectives to grab and book and a drink. From there, we’d come up to Frisco and visit the interesting Video Game Museum that they have, before grabbing dinner in Legacy Hall.

Who else deserves some credit and recognition?
My grandmo, Judy. She used to ask my brother and I to write her stories or to create board games for her so we could play them, lots of stuff like that. She cultivated my creativity when I was young in a way that helped to shape how important it became to me later. She is no longer with us, but I know she’d be the first in line to buy my book. She deserves all the love and recognition in the world.

Website: https://www.campfirewriting.com/user/SoniaBlade

Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/soniabladewrites/

Other: TikTok: https://www.tiktok.com/@soniabladewrites

Image Credits
Character Art by Killer Laurent, Cover Design by Neptune Designs