Tag: robin schadel

  • The Heroine’s Journey: A Powerful Alternative to the Traditional Hero’s Arc

    From ancient epics like Beowulf to modern myths featuring Link or Luke Skywalker, heroes have long dominated storytelling. You might be familiar with the Hero’s Journey—the classic narrative where a lone hero battles monsters, claims a prize, and returns transformed. But what about stories where victory isn’t about conquest, but about connection, healing, and integration?…

  • The Casquette Rose is Available

    My latest book, a Louisiana gothic thriller/faustian tragedy is now available for purchase across the web (and in select Louisiana bookstores). This is a much darker book than anything I have written, and it is, in many ways, the most personal book I have written.  It’s the second novel I’ve written that connects to the…

  • Faust in the French Quarter

    The semester has gotten off to a rousing but exhausting start, so I’ve been a bit lax in updating. For that, I do apologize. However, we are one month and two days away from the release of my new Louisiana gothic novel, The Casquette Rose. And the more I look back at the manuscript, the…

  • Soundtracking The Casquette Rose

    In a previous post, Soundtracking a Work in Progress, I introduced the soundtrack to my upcoming Louisiana Gothic novel, The Casquette Rose. Now that the novel is finished, I want to revisit this and talk about some more of the songs. Here’s the soundtrack: Vive la Rose – Nana Mouskouri Harvester of Eyes – Blue Oyster Cult…

  • Sins and Tragedies: The Darkness of The Casquette Rose

    On the 1st of September, I will reveal the cover of The Casquette Rose, my second Louisiana Gothic novel. This one will be far darker than my last novel, Wolf in the Sanctuary. Both focus on the interplay of history and its unconfessed, unatoned-for sins with the struggles of the present. However, while Wolf focused…

  • Gothic Romance x Genre Romance: Two Takes on the Same Pairing

    So, as I’m working on my current manuscript, a Louisiana Gothic novel tentatively titled The Casquette Rose, it’s come to my attention that I’ve done something similar before… in Carmilla’s Ghost, my second novel in The Adventures of Sam Hain. And what is it that I’ve done? Write Louisiana Gothic in both? No. What I’ve…

  • Soundtracking a Novel

    A lot of authors, especially indie authors, post mood boards and/or soundtracks for each of the novels. I don’t. My brain doesn’t work that way for some reason. Usually, a singular image is all I have in mind when I start working, and I don’t have the patience with myself to go searching for images…

  • When Writing Gets Personal

    This isn’t the type of post I ever thought I would make as a writer. When I was a child and even through the early stages of my writing career, I thought I would tell stories about other people, using the “write what you know” maxim as a way to share things I had researched…

  • Destiny’s Gambit: The Book that Almost Was

    Destiny’s Gambit: The Book that Almost Was

    So, today I want to muse about a book I almost wrote as the seventh installment in The Adventures of Sam Hain: Destiny’s Gambit. That’s right, the original plan for the book that became Carmilla’s Gambit was to focus on Destiny’s mental and emotional struggles with her past as she returns to the field to…

  • Unexpected Inspiration for Wolf in the Sanctuary

    Wolf in the Sanctuary, my Louisiana Gothic novel about a popular romance novelist seeking a career pivot into gothic fiction, features a lot of expected and unexpected inspiration. Given that there is a Rougarou, many would expect the old Cajun legends surrounding this werewolf-like creature to have been inspiration, and they were. The same goes…