Get ready for Shirtless Bedtime Stories! First Episode is out next week! Here is a little trailer to get you excited for what’s to come!

The Infinity Diaries , written by Devin Morgan, is the story of Aris, an Immortal Vampire who has been searching through time to find Sarah, his only true love. Once Aris finds Sarah, a human living in modern-day Chicago, he realizes that not only must he convince her his love is real, but also that he must protect her from DeMarco, the Vampire King of Spain, who is vying for Sarah’s love.  DeMarco is willing to risk war between Aris’ Immortals and his own legion of Vampires to destroy his arch rival, take Sarah for himself, and finally gain control over the Immortals’ advanced powers.

Devin Morgan is not only a writer of thrilling romance novels by night, but also a practicing clinical hypnotherapist and founder and director of the Rishi Institute where she teaches hatha yoga by day. Before Devin focused on all three of these careers after she shuttered her corporate business as a printing broker, she embarked on a mid-life journey to the Middle East in a search for personal happiness.

Devin’s greatest joy, however, is derived from reading and writing books. Sharing her knowledge and stories, both real and imagined, with readers around the world allows her to touch so many more people. She began writing non-fiction books on subjects related to health and wellness. Now, she is leaping into the world of fiction with a brand new twist on vampire romance in her Infinity Diaries series, a trilogy of death, love and reincarnation.

Aris Reigns is the third (and newest) novel in the Infinity Diaries series. We caught up with author Devin Morgan to learn more about Aris, writing and her life. Here’s what we found out:

TLS: What inspired you to write the Aris series?

Devin: There are two major “events” that inspired the trilogy. The first was the “Twilight” series. When I went to the movies I saw that half the audience consisted of middle-aged women. I decided that age group deserved a grown-up vampire with a purpose to read about. The second was one of my own hypnotherapy clients named Aris. A handsome young man who has a fascination with vampires. Our conversations led me to write Aris of the Immortals. 

TLS: Tell us about the message in your books.

Devin: The message in my books is that a society can live in peace and harmony when there is no fear. Human fear of death, poverty, the unknown, any fear leads us to distrust, hate and war. To live a fearless, loving life gives one the peace and calm we all seek.

TLS:  What makes your vampires different from other vampires?

Devin: An Immortal—the offspring of blood-drinking aliens and humans–is a new bloodline of vampire only recently unveiled to humans. A scientific team of aliens arrived on Earth before the beginning of recorded human history to explore a previously uncharted planet. Here they discovered that human blood was an essential nutrient if they were to survive for any length of time on Earth. Over the centuries the aliens synthesized their venom and human blood, which allowed Immortals to adapt to Earth’s environment and the ways of humans without losing their super-human powers or needlessly taking human life. They are able to move about in sunlight, are visible in mirrors, eat garlic, enter churches, and sleep in a regular bed! Immortals have evolved over the centuries they have been on Earth due to their high intelligence.  Hidden from human view in the Catacombs, they have developed a cohesive society with clear, strict rules of ethical conduct. Any Immortal who does not follow these rules is subject to the ultimate consequence—death for all time.

Immortals no longer need to drink human blood to survive, as opposed to Vampires. Immortals experience deep feelings of love—sometimes with humans, who they respect and sometimes protect—even against other, less evolved Vampires. Immortals are closer to the Gods, while Vampires are closer to a vicious animal that kills out of pure blood lust. Vampires are blood suckers without a conscience.

TLS: Aris lived in the time of Alexander the Great and was part of the court of Henry VIII — How did you research the history in this book?

Devin: Research for my books was the easiest part of writing. History is my hobby and my passion and the Tudor era is my favorite.

TLS:  Aris is such a handsome and seemingly perfect man/Immortal, did you base this character on someone you know?

Devin: The Aris of the novels is based on my ideal man.

TLS: Is your Sarah character a lot like yourself, or is she very different from you?

Devin: Sarah is more like me than she is not like me.

TLS: Tell us about the Catacombs and what they mean to the story.

Devin: The Catacombs is the kingdom of the Immortals, a civilization residing deep beneath the ground in England. The Catacombs is a place of peace and learning. The greatest minds of the Immortal race live in the kingdom under the rule of Queen Akira and King Khansu. The King and Queen chose to remain on earth when the alien explorers from their planet returned to their own galaxy thousands of years in the past. Akira and Khansu were more than interested in the human race and chose to stay behind to study them. After many millennia and many earthly cataclysmic events, the society founded and built their place of solitude and safety beneath London. The Catacombs is the seat of government for the Immortals and the scientific stronghold of the race.

TLS:  You are a hypnotherapist and in the novel, the main character, Sarah Hagan, is a psychologist who uses hypnotherapy on her patient Carlos to try to understand why he has such anger issues. This is a great device to get to your vampire Aris. Can you tell us a little bit about hypnotherapy and what it can do for people?

Devin: Hypnotherapy is not an exact science. It varies from one subject to another. Basically, it is a state of extreme relaxation of the body and mind, a state where positive suggestion stated by the hypnotherapist is taken in by the sub-conscious mind and acted on by the conscious. Hypnotherapy can be a great help in issues of pain management, weight loss, low self-esteem and PTSS. In the qualified hands of a trained hypnotherapist, issues and barriers that conventional talk therapy have a hard time reaching, can be confronted and changed.

TLS:  What was your biggest fear about writing these books?

Devin: This is pure passion, I had no fear in about writing my books. It was nothing but great fun!

TLS: What was the hardest part of writing the series?

Devin: The most difficult part of writing the series was writing the sex scenes. 

TLS:  Any advice for other writers who are thinking about writing a novel?

Devin: Advice to writers who want to create a novel . . . sit down and write and write and write. Going to Starbucks with your laptop and staring into space, telling everyone you have writers block simply won’t get you anywhere. You must write word by word to accomplish your goal. Whether you are writing great things or things you end up deleting, writing is the only way to ever reach “The End.”

TLS: What are your writing rituals?

Devin: I write something every day be it work on a novel or in my journal or in letters. Writing is a way of life for me.

TLS:  Tell us about your favorite authors and why you love them.

Devin: I love Margaret George for her historical novels (The Autobiography of Henry VIII, Mary, Queen of Scotland and the Isles, The Memoirs of Cleopatra, and more). Her research is above and beyond, and her choice of words and phrases cause me to read passages over and over.

Deepak Chopra, M.D. (the poet-prophet of alternative medicine, author of 80 books including Super Brain and founder of The Chopra Foundation) for his ability to put spiritual concepts into easy to understand language. And his ability to teach about health and well-being in the same easy to comprehend manner.

Ann Rice (author of over 30 books, including Interview with a Vampire and most recently the Toby O’Dare novels Of Love and Evil, and Angel Time)for her amazing ability to create pictures with words.

Rosalind Miles (I, Elizabeth, Isolde, Queen of the Western Isle) for her ability to look inside her historical characters and present them as real people that readers of today can understand and relate to.

Dan Brown (The Da Vinci Code, Inferno) for his ability to make it impossible to put down his books.

TLS: How did your interest in writing originate?

Devin: I have made up stories since I was a very small child. Once I began to read, I fell in love with disappearing into another world created for me by the books I read. Once I learned to hold a pencil in my hand, I began to write my own worlds. I am a child of imagination and fairy tales.

TLS: What’s next for you?

Devin: I have begun a novel about the Catacombs and the Immortals who live there.

TLS: Can you tell us a little about your hobbies/other interests?

Devin: My hobbies and other interests include cooking, yoga and reading, reading, reading. I don’t even own a TV because books are my favorite entertainment.

The public’s thirst for vampires seems as endless as vampires’ thirst for blood. Modern writers of vampire fiction, including Stephenie Meyer, Anne Rice, Stephen King and countless others, have a rich vein of vampire lore to draw from. But where did the vampires come from?

Vampire origins

The most famous vampire is, of course, Bram Stoker’s Dracula, though those looking for a historical “real” Dracula often cite Romanian prince Vlad Tepes (1431-1476), after whom Stoker is said to have modeled some aspects of his Dracula character. The characterization of Tepes as a vampire, however, is a distinctly Western one; in Romania, he is viewed not as a blood-drinking sadist but as a national hero. He is also known as Vlad Dracula (“son of the dragon”), a name that comes from his father’s membership in the Order of the Dragon, knights who upheld Christianity and defended the empire from the Ottoman Turks.

The vampires most people are familiar with (such as Dracula) are revenants — human corpses that are said to return from the grave to harm the living; these vampires have Slavic origins only a few hundred years old. But other, older, versions of the vampire were not thought to be human at all but instead supernatural, possibly demonic, entities that did not take human form.

Matthew Beresford, author of “From Demons to Dracula: The Creation of the Modern Vampire Myth” notes that “There are clear foundations for the vampire in the ancient world, and it is impossible to prove when the myth first arose. There are suggestions that the vampire was born out of sorcery in ancient Egypt, a demon summoned into this world from some other.” There are many variations of vampires from around the world. There are Asian vampires, such as the Chinese jianshi, evil spirits that attack people and drain their life energy; the blood-drinking Wrathful Deities that appear in the “Tibetan Book of the Dead,” and many others.

Creating vampires

Interest and belief in revenants surged in the Middle Ages in Europe. Though in most modern stories the classic way to become a vampire is to be bitten by one, that is a relatively new twist. In his book “Vampires, Burial, and Death: Folklore and Reality,” folklorist Paul Barber noted that centuries ago, “Often potential revenants can be identified at birth, usually by some abnormality, some defect, as when a child is born with teeth. Similarly suspicious are children born with an extra nipple (in Romania, for example); with a lack of cartilage in the nose, or a split lower lip (in Russia) … When a child is born with a red caul, or amniotic membrane, covering its head, this was regarded throughout much of Europe as presumptive evidence that it is destined to return from the dead.” Such minor deformities were looked upon as evil omens, and it is likely that many infants were killed immediately when these signs were discovered; those who survived grew up bearing the burden of public suspicion.

The belief in vampires stems from superstition and mistaken assumptions about post-mortem decay. The first recorded accounts of vampires follow a consistent pattern: Some unexplained misfortune would befall a person, family, or town — perhaps a drought dried up crops, or an infectious disease struck. Before science could explain weather patterns and germ theory, any bad event for which there was not an obvious cause might be blamed on a vampire. Vampires were one easy answer to the age-old question of why bad things happen to good people.

Villagers combined their belief that something had cursed them with fear of the dead, and concluded that perhaps the recently deceased might be responsible, having come back from the graves with evil intent. Graves were unearthed, and surprised villagers often mistook ordinary decomposition processes for supernatural phenomenon. For example, though laypeople might assume that a body would decompose immediately, if the coffin is well sealed and buried in winter, putrefaction might be delayed by weeks or months; intestinal decomposition creates bloating which can force blood up into the mouth, making it look like a dead body has recently sucked blood. These processes are well understood by modern doctors and morticians, but in medieval Europe were taken as unmistakable signs that vampires were real and existed among them.

Vampire protection

In some traditions the best way to stop a vampire is to carry a small bag of salt with you. If you are being chased, you need only to spill the salt on the ground behind you, at which point the vampire is obligated to stop and count each and every grain before continuing the pursuit. If you don’t have salt handy, some say that any small granules will do, including birdseed or sand. Others say that there’s an unwritten rule of vampire etiquette that they cannot enter a home unless formally invited in.

Centuries ago, it was not uncommon for suspected vampires to be staked in their graves. The idea was to physically pin the vampire to the earth, and the chest was chosen because it’s the trunk of the body, not because of any particular symbolic connection to the heart. Other traditional methods of preventing vampires included burying (or re-burying) the bodies face-down and decapitation, which often included stuffing the severed head’s mouth with garlic or bricks.

Real vampires

There are, of course, a few truly vampiric animals, including leeches, lampreys and vampire bats. And in all these cases the vampire’s intent is to draw enough blood for sustenance, but not enough to kill the host. But what about human vampires? There are certainly many self-identified vampires who participate in gothic-inspired subcultures. Some host vampire-themed book clubs or secret bloodletting rituals; others wear capes or get vampire fang dental implants. But blood drinking is another matter entirely. The problem is that blood is toxic; because it is so rich in iron — and because the human body has difficulty excreting excess iron — anyone who consumes blood regularly runs a real risk of haemochromatosis (iron overdose), which can cause a wide variety of diseases and problems, including liver and nervous system damage.

Vampires have been part of human culture and folklore in different forms for millennia, and the bloodsuckers show no signs of going away any time soon. Unless, of course, the zombie apocalypse wipes them out.

Written by Benjamin Radford at livescience.com 

By Katherine Sharma

I’ve noticed that new best-selling food/cooking books have become less focused on tasty recipes and more on healthy “lifestyle” diets. But it really hit home when I went shopping for holiday gift books for “foodie” friends in September. I started my research with The New York Times best sellers, only to find the food category dominated by books like Grain Brain, Wheat Belly, Practical Paleo, The Doctor’s Diet, Eat to Live Cookbook (plant-based) and so on. I don’t want to offend true believers in gluten-free, weight-loss, vegan or Paleo diet regimes; I don’t know enough to comment. But I wonder whether these diet trends have done more to improve the profits of the food industry and weight-loss firms than the health of their followers. Consider the new gluten-free popularity. According to a 2013 report by Mintel, a leading market research firm, “some 24% of consumers currently eat, or have someone in their household who eats, gluten-free foods,” although “75% of consumers who do not have celiac disease or sensitivity to gluten eat these foods because they believe they are healthier, despite the lack of any scientific research confirming the validity of this theory.” Mintel goes on to predict that “the gluten-free food and beverage market will grow 48% from 2013-16, to $15.6 billion, at current prices.” And what about all the weight-loss schemes? Even if they work, Americans apparently can’t or won’t follow them because our obesity epidemic is only getting worse. In 1980, 25% of adults in the United States were considered overweight; by 2001, over 66% of adults were classified as overweight. Over a third of the adult population (35.7%) was in the obese (very overweight) category by 2010. Since my gourmet friends prefer books to please the palate, and trying to preach a diet lifestyle is probably not a way to keep them as friends, I went from the best-seller list to Bon Appetit magazine’s recommendations for mouth-watering cookbook releases this fall, including: A Boat, a Whale & a Walrus by Renee Erickson (a Seattle chef’s seasonal menu); Heritage by Sean Brock (Southern Low Country delights); and Relæ by Christian Puglisi (inspiration from the noted Copenhagen restaurant). For those who do want to stress healthy eating in their book buys, I would recommend first checking out the 2014 U.S. News & World Report experts’ ranking of the best diets among weight loss, diabetes control, plant-based, heart health, commercial dieting, healthy eating, or easy-to-follow plans: http://health.usnews.com/best-diet

ABOUT  KATHERINE SHARMA

Katherine Sharma’s family roots are in Louisiana, Oklahoma and Texas. But after her early childhood in Texas, she has moved around the country and lived in seven other states, from Virginia to Hawaii. She currently resides in California with her husband and three children. She has also traveled extensively in Europe, Africa and Asia, and makes regular visits to family in India. After receiving her bachelor’s degree. in economics and her master’s degree in journalism from the University of Michigan, Katherine worked as a newspaper and magazine writer and editor for more than 15 years. She then shifted into management and marketing roles for firms in industries ranging from outdoor recreation to insurance to direct marketing. Although Katherine still works as a marketing consultant, she is now focused on creative writing.