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R. Raeta writes slow burn love stories with splash of magic. She is a Readers’ Favorite Gold Medalist for Literary Fiction and two-time IAN Book of the Year Finalist for her debut novel, Everlong. When she isn’t agonizing over word choices, she enjoys telling the dog how handsome he is and sitting in on the nightly therapy sessions the cat so generously provides for her. She is a Trigiminal Neuralgia survivor, and believes in living your best life day by day.
As I mentioned in my review, I love the cover of Everlong. There's something almost haunting about the woman, and the black netting creates such a sense of mystery. Was this the vision you always had for the cover? How did you go about designing it?
It was not! In fact, the current cover is actually updated from the original. I learned a lot my first year of being self-published, and one of those things was that just because a cover is pretty doesn’t mean it fits the genre. The original illustrated cover is still available as an Amazon hardcover (simply because I couldn’t bear to part with it completely) but the new cover seems to be more adept at finding the right audience.
When I agreed to review Everlong, I wasn't sure if I was going to like it simply because I had never read a book with vampires in it, but I was captivated by the first sentence! What inspired you to create such a heartbreakingly beautiful story with a vampire as a main character?
For me, stories always start with a particular line or scene and everything else just grows around it. In Everlong’s case, the first lines I wrote happened to be the first lines of the book. I had lost thousands of words of writing due to a technical error a week prior and was still feeling incredibly sad over the loss when the first line and the opening scene came to me in the car. I didn’t even know what Lily was at the time, only that she was something otherworldly.
The final movie of the Twilight series had recently come out, and I was in the middle of a Buffy binge watch, at the time. So as I continued writing Lily, I saw the opportunity to explore how the story and dynamic would change when it’s the female main character who’s the paranormal monster.
SPOILER ALERT!!! I thought your ending was perfect, but I know some other readers felt gutted at the end. Did you ever toy with changing the ending and moving in a different direction?
I knew early on that Everlong was never going to have a traditional happily ever after ending. Despite having a vampire as a protagonist, at its heart Everlong is a story about what makes us human. The original planned ending involved Lily waiting for the sunrise with Sam’s ashes at her bench, but as I started writing it out, it didn’t feel right.
I realized how important it was to me to show grief in its entirety. I needed to show the after; I needed to show the healing. I didn’t want them to end in tragedy, like Romeo and Juliet. I wanted Lily to live and grow the way we all do after losing someone we love. I needed an ending that still felt real.
Lily and Sam have such a unique connection. What about Sam allows him to connect so deeply to Lily?
Sam has a very special place in my heart, because so much of who is was written for my child. I was pregnant while writing a good chunk of the original manuscript, I wanted to write him as the kind of man I would want a daughter to romanticize or a son to look up to. Sam is the empathetic partner society has taught girls to grow up to be.
Do you have a favorite scene from the book?
The scene where Lily “awakens” is one of my favorites, simply because it’s a scene I’m most proud of stylistically. There is a subtle shift in Lily’s inner voice, and I was so thrilled when I reread it. I also really enjoy the scene after, when Finn comes back to the apartment and Sam has to yell at him that “It’s Wilbur’s”. I cackled when I wrote it despite the seriousness of the scene, and to this day it still makes me laugh.
Your other books have paranormal elements as well. What is it about this genre that appeals to you?
I really enjoy using paranormal/fantasy elements to highlight very human conditions. If I write about immortals, I want to explore what makes life worth living. If I write about ghosts, I want to explore how lonely and touched-starved that existence would be. It’s a nice mix between making up the rules and being grounded in reality.
It took many years of writing before I found my voice. One day I read a short fanfic, no more than a thousand words, that was present tense and just beautiful. I distinctly remember thinking, this is how I want to write. This is how I want to sound.
I went from writing solely past tense to present, and that little change made all the difference for me. There’s something about it that encourages me to take a moment be more whimsical in my descriptions.
What can readers expect to see from you in the future?
My third book, Peaches & Honey is with betas now and will be released by the end of summer/early fall. It will be the first book of a duology, where a shapeshifting god gifts a 12th century woman an immortality granting peach. Over the next 800 years, she struggles to come to terms with the cruelty and beauty of the world… all while learning to accept the pale patches of vitiligo on her skin and falling in love with the shapeshifter that gave her immortality.
Your books have clearly been embraced by your readers. Both Everlong and Ladybirds have an Amazon star rating of 4.8 at the time of this interview. What advice do you have for other indie authors?
The age old advice to just write and continue writing is never wrong. I owe my craft to that and, more specifically, fanfiction. I definitely feel that Everlong and Ladybirds receive as much praise as they do because I’m well practiced in writing three dimensions characters. I owe that entirely to fanfiction and the community surrounding it. The practice of convincingly writing someone else’s characters has been invaluable in writing my own.
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