Welcome to the Blood Bathery: Like the Night blog tour with the writing team of Ari McKay! Ari is here to chat with us about the re-release of The Guardians of Gaia series, and there’s also a giveaway, so be sure to check out those details at the end.
Hi, everyone! Ari here, from Ari McKay. Thanks to the lovely people here at The Novel Approach, I’m here today to talk about our latest release, Blood Bathory: Like the Night, book 1 in the Guardians of Gaia series.
This is actually a re-release of the series, which has been out of circulation for a couple of years. We gave it a polish and a beautiful new cover (thanks to Lou Harper of coveraffairs.com) and we’re getting it back out there. This series is very near and dear to our hearts, and it has a surprising origin.
McKay and I actually met in the fanfic world — specifically in the Harry Potter fandom. Big shock, right? I know a lot of writers who bridged from Potterverse to professional, an interesting side effect of JKR being nice enough to allow writers to plan in her universe. We were both part of the Snape/Lupin ship of the Snape Slash Fleet, which meant we were reading each other’s stories before we formally “met”. To make a long (literally almost a decade long!) story short, we started writing fanfic together. One of the stories was a post-Hogwarts piece called “Another Kind of Fandom Wank” (pun intentional!), where Snape and Lupin have made new but separate lives in the Muggle world, each unknown to the other. And how do they end up getting together? Well, we created a fictional television show called “Blood Bathory”, where they, like McKay and I, meet through the online fandom.
Yet, there’s a bit of meta there, but we did something unusual with this story. We actually created blogs and websites dedicated to the fictional show, and built up a cast of characters and plotted actual episodes — in other words, we went a bit overboard for something that was only a plot device for a fanfic! But we spent so much time on the set up, the characterization, and the storyline behind this fictional show that when we decided to dip our toes into the waters of professional writing, well… write what you know, right? We’d unintentionally plotted our first novel without even knowing it!
The final product is quite a bit different from what we had started with, of course, because as we delved into the world Evan and Will find themselves thrown into, the plot became even more complex. And lest you are worried, there is nothing at all Potterverse about the story, it’s definitely its own universe, with a very different take on the shifter/vampire paradigm!
So that’s a little history about how these novels came about. Evan and Will were the first truly unique characters we ever created, and they sort of took on a life of their own. Evan is artistic, a fashion photographer with a unique eye for beauty. His best friend Will is protective, a police officer who wants to vanquish evil wherever he finds it. They’re drawn to one another, until the death of Evan’s beloved younger sister sends him running away in attempt to escape the pain.
At its heart, Like the Night is a friends-to-lovers story set in a world where a secret war between very powerful supernatural forces is being waged out of the sight of most of humanity. The world we created is one where the earth itself, in all its diversity and complexity, has taken on a life and an intellect of its own. We didn’t originate the Gaia Hypothesis, which is a fascinating theory developed by James Lovelock in the 1970s, but we used it for our own purposes, giving it a different spin by making Gaia sentient and having “her” create guardians to help deal with problems, then throwing two completely normal young men into the mix and giving the whole thing a good shake to see what would happen. The result is something we’re very proud of, and we hope that you’re now intrigued enough to step into our world and give us a chance to make you fall in love with Will and Evan. And if you do… we’d love to hear from you!
About the Book
Cover Design: Lou Harper
Length: 123,737 words
Blurb: Evan St. John, a young fashion photographer running from the pain caused by the death of his younger sister, is thrilled when he is offered a job with House of Nadasdy, a leading fashion house in Paris. What he doesn’t know is that Elizabeth Nadasdy, the elegant and powerful owner, is a centuries-old vampire with a penchant for collecting beautiful people. To Evan’s horror, he is turned into one of her “children.”
Unable to bear what he has become, Evan flees to New York and to his best friend, police officer Will Trask. For years, Evan has nursed an unrequited love for Will, but he also knows Will is the one person who might be able to help him. As Evan and Will try to deal with Evan’s condition, they are drawn into the world of the theriomorphs: shape-shifters who are guardians of life and the sworn enemies of vampires. Caught in an ancient war between two powerful supernatural forces, Evan and Will find they must choose sides – because if they are to have any chance of a future together, they must destroy Elizabeth Nadasdy before she destroys them.
About the Authors
Ari McKay is the professional pseudonym for Arionrhod and McKay, who have been writing together for over a decade. Their collaborations encompass a wide variety of romance genres, including contemporary, fantasy, science fiction, gothic, and action/adventure. Their work includes the Blood Bathory series of paranormal novels, the Herc’s Mercs series, as well as two historical Westerns: Heart of Stone and Finding Forgiveness. When not writing, they can often be found scheming over costume designs or binge watching TV shows together.
Arionrhod is a systems engineer by day who is eagerly looking forward to (hopefully) becoming a full time writer in the not-too-distant future. Now that she is an empty-nester, she has turned her attentions to finding the perfect piece of land to build a fortress in preparation for the zombie apocalypse, and baking (and eating) far too many cakes.
McKay is an English teacher who has been writing for one reason or another most of her life. She also enjoys knitting, reading, cooking, and playing video games. She has been known to knit in public. Given she has the survival skills of a gnat, she’s relying on Arionrhod to help her survive the zombie apocalypse.
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The Giveaway
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Follow the Tour
April 9 – MM Midnight Cafe
April 10 – Love Bytes
April 12 – Alpha Book Club
April 14 – MM Good Book Reviews
April 16 – Wicked Faerie’s Tales & Reviews
April 17 – The Novel Approach
April 18 – RAM PA Group, Drops Of Ink, Mirrigold, Bayou Book Junkie, Scattered Thoughts & Rogue Words, Love Bites & Silk Ties
April 19 – Diverse Reader
The Novel Approach Reviews 
Wow. That is a great story about doing what you love and loving what you do. My friend created a whole website dedicated to a music artist he admires. When the agent of the artist contacted him, he thought they were going to sue him but they really loved the website so much, they started paying him to maintain it. It’s great that your passion turned into a way to make a living. Best wishes on the rerelease.
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