Wollstone was my attempt at writing a boarding school romance, which was also greatly inspired by classic Boys' Love manga I read eons ago. I also read a few gay literary fiction from the early half of the 20th century (Christ, I sound like I'm talking about ancient history), and those were more reality-based stories. In all of those litfic novels, the gay characters died (or almost all of them, anyway), which was par for the course then as the tragedy of a queer person's existence was the focal point of the story. For the manga, character death was more about doomed love stories and not queerness.
Fast-forward to the late 1990s and early 2000s when I reacquainted myself with anime and came across this amazing series:
Now granted I've only seen the first arc of Revolutionary Girl Utena's three-arc series, but that was enough to get me thoroughly hooked on fantasy-based boarding school stories or boarding school stories with heavy fantasy elements. I felt then (and still do) that boarding school romances work well with folklore influences, hence my decision to lean heavily on folklore when I came up with Wollstone.
It's supposed to read like a fairy tale -- a gothic fairy tale set in boarding school that straddles reality and the otherworldly. And me being me, I wanted to work a lot of gothic elements into the story as well. Having grown up in a conservative Catholic environment, my books tend to be heavily influenced by Catholicism, too, even though I'm an atheist (agnostic at most), so there's also lots of that in this book but presented along more fantastical lines.
I'd love to go back and write another gothic boarding school romance, and I was originally planning on doing that with Compline, but that WiP got the better of me, and it's now something else entirely.
As part of my 2025 Backlist Bonanza, Wollstone is currently 50% off at different online vendors throughout January.
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