ALLISON MARTIN

A New Moon spread was the kick in the ass I needed to fully embrace what I’ve been working toward for years.

It’s time to stop betraying yourself to fit others’ images of you. Trust your intuition to know if your fear of stepping into your true self is coming from you or being imposed on you. If you neglect your own voice and needs to fit arbitrary expectations, this will become a cyclical pattern (if it isn’t already).

New Moon Tarot Spread

The Journey So Far

From the moment I started writing it was always to understand myself and my place in the world. My writing has always centred around being a girl, transitioning into a woman, and how to navigate a world that constantly gaslights us into believing we are not enough, or too much.

I never read much romance growing up, but it became very clear, quite quickly that love, worth, and empowerment were huge themes in my books. The romance genre found me, and in this space I’ve tried to convey that message to my readers through flawed, complex, sometimes unlikable female characters.

“Not like other girls” has become an insult in the book review world, and rightly so. This is something I’ve grappled with my whole life because when I was little I believed all the lies that told me I was inferior, so I pushed hard against who I was. I had male friends, scoffed at anything that felt girly or could potentially put me in a position to be ridiculed for my gender. Hell, when I started writing, I wanted to write a book that my dad would deem a ‘real book’, or that my husband would enjoy—this meant it took longer than I would like to admit before I started embracing the romance aspect to my stories.

As a recovering ‘not like other girls’, it was actually my books themselves that helped me see that through this defensive conditioning, I actually desperately and wholeheartedly wished I was just like other girls. There was a hole in my soul in the shape of the divine feminine energy that I has mislabelled and mistreated throughout my youth.

The Call of the Divine Feminine

There is nothing weak about true, healthy feminine energy. It is support, patience, intuition, community, and connection. It is life. It is birth, either in the literal sense of creating humans, or the creative birth of ideas, concepts, and growth.

Note: I speak of masculine and feminine as energies, not genders. I believe all humans have vast experiences and complex relationships with their bodies, minds, and souls. I do not push my thoughts or experiences on you. If this does not feel right for you, that is okay. Your connection or disconnection to these ideas is valid.

These themes of feminine energy run through my books as well. This battle within my female identifying characters of what it means to be a woman and what conditioning from society they must shed before they can connect with themselves authentically. Even my male characters are left to figure out their own connection to the feminine and how they struggle to balance these energies within themselves.

My hope is allow my readers of any gender to also ask hard questions about what it means to take up space in this world and for them to see that they are valuable, worthy, and loved for exactly who they are.

Moving Forward Into My Truest Self

In the coming months, I will be expanding on this idea of incorporating my own spiritual practices of tarot, shadow work, meditation, movement therapy, herbalism, and how all of these concepts inform my stories.

Make sure you check out my newsletter to become a part of my A-List community. My favourite thing is getting messages from readers and hearing their own stories and how they interpret my books. I also host giveaways, contests, and give exclusive looks into my upcoming books, my tarot practice, and my adventurous northern life.

And if you are interested in seeing how my complex characters struggle to balance their energies you can check out OF DUST AND FLAME for a historical romantasy (free on Kindle Unlimited), or WILDFIRE for a contemporary romantic suspense (Free with Kobo Plus).

Both Ella and Briggs are products of their environments and dangerously close to completely unravelling if they don’t find a way to accept themselves for who they truly are.