Life’s Seductive Beauty

Is truth found in the beauty all around us? Welcome to the blog of author and editor Patricia J. Esposito.
  • Publications

    Novels: Beside the Darker Shore Universal Buy Link. Sample Short Stories: “The Escape,” December Tales anthology, November 2023. “The Rats and the M&Ms,” Flash Fiction Online, April 2023. “The Lie or the Loss,” Dark Winter magazine, 2022. “Distorted and Holy Desire,” Blurring the Line anthology, Cohesion Press. “The Blame Game,” Litro USA, online magazine. Sample…

  • The Vampire Path to Rebirth and Wonder

    “I was a newborn vampire, weeping at the beauty of the night.“ Anne Rice, Interview with a Vampire The Vampire Path to Rebirth A “newborn vampire”—when I saw this quote out of context, the term newborn struck me. Being newborn is to experience everything anew, with wonder. It’s to be present, in the moment. We…

  • Dark Vampires, Twists, and a Heart-Breaking Love Story

    TTC Books and More has reviewed Beside the Darker Shore, a vampire thriller and mm love story. “…oh wow! This is a fabulous vampire story. You have the darkness, they are evil, yet you can’t help fall for them. I was even rooting for Arturo to find what he was searching for . . .…

  • When a Vampire Interrupts an Interview

    Love Bytes Reviews posted an interview on my newly released novel Beside the Darker Shore. When asked to speak about my favorite character, the vampire Arturo de Rosa gladly took over. Read the Love Bytes Reviews Interview here! Available in ebook and print on Amazon and most online retailers. Universal Buy Link. Beside the Darker…

  • Five-Star Review for Vampire Novel

    The Paranormal Romance Guild gives a five-star review to Beside the Darker Shore, a vampire novel about love and lust, duty and responsibility, and what it means to be fallibly human. “The characters were wonderful, there were secrets, lies, betrayal and surprises. Reading this book was a view of what happens to an honest and…

  • The Risks of Love: To Be or Not to Be a Vampire

    Five-star-reviewed vampire novel explores the risks of love. What would you give to have all you desire? Beside the Darker Shore What might the ethical Governor David Gedden give up for one man’s exquisite beauty? It’s terrifying to consider when the man is a destructive blood prostitute and David is responsible for the state’s peaceful…

  • Good Characterization Requires a Little Mystery

    What makes a character in a book or a movie memorable? What makes the character interesting? Sometimes what attracts us to someone is a bit of a mystery, and good characterization requires a little mystery too. Seeking the Carnivalesque In the screenplay book I’m reading, Writing the Character-Centered Screenplay by Andrew Horton, the author uses the term…

  • Interviews with Horror Writers: Blurring the Line Anthology

    Horror can range from stories that elicit heart palpitations to cringing and nausea to an unease that won’t let go. Horror that makes me jump and then laugh at the adrenaline rush can be fun, and I can appreciate the imagery of a well-done slasher scene—both designed to shake us, give us a quick thrill?—but…

  • Commonly Misused, Misspelled Words and Phrases

    Spell check doesn’t necessarily catch words that are spelled correctly but chosen incorrectly. Here’s a list of some of the most common I’ve found in my editing experience. (Written in a certain vein, because vampires need proper grammar too.) accept/except: Of course I’ll accept (agree with, allow) your tongue at my throat. After the summer…

  • Grammar: Which vs. That

    For proper grammar, think about how you’re using the words which vs. that. Essential or NonessentialGenerally, the word which introduces a clause that is not essential to understand the meaning of the sentence (nonessential) and can be set off with commas. The word that generally introduces an essential clause, which is needed to understand the…

  • The Appeal of Vampires: a Sensual Awakening

    I’m no longer sure there is an appeal to vampires that’s any different from the appeal of other antiheroes, such as pirates or cowboys/girls or folks in uniform or witches and warlocks. One reader says the appeal of vampires is the heightened senses conveyed in their stories, another says it’s the bad boy allure, another…

  • Myths and Fairy Tales: Tell Me a Story; Now Tell Me Again

    If I Had a Nickel I wanted to write a story about a vampire guitarist. A friend scoffed: “If I had a nickel for every story about vampire guitarists…” Despite this quick dismissal of whatever need or passion was driving me to the sensuality of the vampire and the sensuality of music, I had to…

  • How Genre Influences the Story

    The instigating event: She walks with her sister down the apartment complex sidewalk. In the green, four teen boys bat a volleyball around. They look; she looks. She talks quickly to her sister about their visit. Rapid talk. And while  her mouth says things like, “She looks healthy, happy.” Her mind says, “Hot boys. Don’t…

  • Show, Don’t Tell: Another Look

    “Show, don’t tell.” All writers have heard the importance of learning this technique. But good writing isn’t as easy as following a list of ten rules. In too many blog tips and how-to lists, the concept has become oversimplified to a quick-and-easy fix, as if changing an adverb to an action fulfills the quest for…

  • Pause

    Pause By Patricia J. Esposito What is there of your black earth, your white sun above the ferns and mango where he, brown and young, works for supper, what of his hot wax dripping, leaves dipped in streams to wrap the candles taking form, the humid road where he carts them along, what in the…

  • Five-Star Review for Vampire Novel

    Tom Olbert gives a five-star-review to the vampire novel Beside the Darker Shore. “Esposito has a vivid and delicious power of imagery reminiscent of Ray Bradbury; every dewdrop sliding off every blade of grass and the crackle of every autumn leaf resonates in a narrative that flows like sweet, dark wine. The story takes us from…

  • Five-star review for vampire novel

    Five-star review of Beside the Darker Shore Excerpt: “Beside the Darker Shore is different. It is not your usual vampire tale. There is no sex in the book, per se, but it is one of the most powerfully sensual books I have read. When humans offer their blood to vampires, the eroticism of the bloodletting has…

  • A seduction

    From the peach tree, ripe fruit drops to the dark hillside. Under his cool lips, her skin is tender and ready to be pricked. Full-leafed branches tremble at the wind. With her shiver, a rain of ready fruit drums to earth, thunder in her gut, her blood ready to pour. More vampire writings at

  • Truth and Beauty, Beauty and Truth

    What Makes Beauty? The ten most beautiful women. The ten most beautiful men. We jump to leaf through the lists, knowing that, amid the ten, there might be one on which we agree. Oh, the others might be appealing, might have features we appreciate, but are they the epitome of beauty? Sometimes only one, sometimes…

  • Writing Exercises

    Writing exercise 1: Choose a photo in a magazine or online, someone you don’t know. Choose a mood (eager, excited, sad, angry, in love, in lust, vengeful). Then free-write a description of the person. Through black-rimmed glasses, his eyes squint under the tug of pure pleasure. He smiles, his high-boned cheeks a shine, hair fringed…

  • In a Present Space and Time

    We daydream when we’re driving, right, in that quiet space and time? Oh, the radio might be playing, and sometimes a song draws us in. Or sometimes the music is just a rhythm in the background of our thoughts. It’s a bit of space in the day when we’re not doing work and chores, attending…

  • Vampire Novel Wins Reviewer’s Choice Award

    I was very happy to hear that my vampire novel was chosen as Reviewer’s Choice for December at Two Lips Reviews, where the reviewer had this to say: “Beside the Darker Shore is different. It is not your usual vampire tale. There is no sex in the book, per se, but it is one of the…

  • Five-star review for new vampire novel!

    Two Lips has given my vampire novel Beside the Darker Shorea five-star review, saying “It is not your usual vampire tale. There is no sex in the book, per se, but it is one of the most powerfully sensual books I have read. When humans offer their blood to vampires, the eroticism of the bloodletting…

  • Does Beauty Make Us Vulnerable?

    Do beauty and truth leave people vulnerable? Truth As Exposure The question of vulnerability came up in a story discussion once. Being vulnerable to truth I understood. We often have to face things in others, in life, in ourselves that are scary, that leave us open to having to trust or to move on, to…

  • The Magic of Brothers

    When I was a kid growing up on a dead-end street in Hillside, factories at the top, factories at the bottom, all playing fields to us, we had an ice-cream man who served soft ice cream along with the Good Humor bars. The most expensive item on the truck was a chocolate shake. The block…

  • To Spin on a Thread, Eating the Sun and Moon

    In Romania, the Varcolaci vampires hunger, not for the red blood flow of humans, but for the light of the sun and the moon. Sometimes depicted as small animals, but also as pale and parched humans, one legend has it that they’re created at midnight if a woman spins without candlelight. They travel wherever they…

  • And the Character Says, Remember Me?

    I woke this morning thinking about favorite fictional characters, whether in books or movies or TV or any other media. The characters that first popped into mind for me ranged from crushes to heroes to soulmates. I’m beginning my list, as they first came to mind, and might keep adding if I remember more. I’d…

  • The Power of Image

    Imagine Gandalf a minute. What do you see? The first image that pops in my mind is the pointed gray hat. Not any gray wizard’s hat, but a softened hat, slightly bent, worn at the edges, a sense of not only history in him but comfort, no need for embellishments or flash. A true hat,…

  • Publishing in the 21st Century

    “The future of publishing: eighteen million authors in America, each with an average of fourteen readers, eight of whom are blood relatives. Average annual earnings: $1.75.” — Garrison Keillor

  • Meet Arturo de Rosa, Vampire

    Arturo de Rosa was born in the year 965, Cordoba, Spain. He currently resides in Potes, Spain, but is visiting Boston on the urging of his human blood prostitute, Stephen. In this scene he’s walking the street of the vampire community’s leader, envisioning Alec Marshall, whom he knew in those early years in Cordoba. Excerpt:…

  • Using Reversals to Refresh a Story

    Sometimes a story or a scene in a novel just isn’t working. Yet we can’t pin down why. Our brain, trained in the dos and don’ts of writing, can’t come up with a solution. That’s often when it helps to begin the scene over, write it fresh. But author Stuart Spencer, in The Playwright’s Guidebook,…

  • My novel Beside the Darker Shore is due out this June. Arturo and Stephen are getting antsy waiting. They’d like to say hello via a short scene. Stephen is a human blood prostitute in love with Boston’s human governor David Gedden. He wants the vampire Arturo to change David into a vampire so he can…

  • Characterization: Keeping a Little Mystery

    In the screenplay book I’m reading, Writing the Character-Centered Screenplay by Andrew Horton, the author uses the term “carnivalesque” when explaining how to develop real and memorable characters. Character is never complete, set, finished, but always glimpsed in motion from a certain perspective, he says, and quotes Seymour Chatman, “The horizon of personality always recedes before us.”…

  • You and me and I

    A vampire’s quick look at the proper use of “I” or “me” in sentences: Most everyone is accustomed now to using “I” as the subject pronoun in a sentence: “The vampire and I slipped through the city’s shadows, a chill without source.” NOT “The vampire and me slipped through the city’s shadows, a chill without…

  • What’s in a name? What’s in a title?

    Every now and then (once in ten years?), the perfect story or novel title comes to me in a flash of brilliant perfection. For all the other thousand times I need a title, I fret, I struggle. In discouragement, I settle, and then I rethink, toil again. And still it’s just not right. Titles are…

  • Commonly Misused, Misspelled Words and Phrases

    Spell check doesn’t necessarily catch words that are spelled correctly but chosen incorrectly. Here’s a list of some of the most common I’ve found in my editing experience. (Written in a certain vein, because vampires need proper grammar too.) accept/except: Of course I’ll accept (agree with, allow) your tongue at my throat. After the summer…

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Life's Seductive Beauty

Outside Chicago, IL
United States

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