We must play our lives like soldiers in the field
The life is short, I'm running faster all the time
Strength and beauty destined to decay
So cut the rose in full bloom

Till the fearless come and the act is done
A love like blood, a love like blood
Till the fearless come and the act is done
A love like blood, a love like blood

Everyday through all frustration and despair
Love and hate fight with burning hearts
Till legends live and man is God again
And self-preservation rules the day no more

Oh, we must dream of promised lands and fields
That's never fade in season
As we move towards no end we learn to die
Red tears are shed on gray

Till the fearless come and the act is done
A love like blood, a love like blood
Till the fearless come and the act is done
A love like blood, a love like blood

Till the fearless come and the act is done
A love like blood, a love like blood
Till the fearless come and the act is done
A love like blood, a love like blood

Songwriters
COLEMAN, JEREMY / FERGUSON, PAUL / RAVEN, PAUL VINCENT / WALKER, KEVIN

I knew the title for my short story must have come from something I'd heard or read but I didn't actually realize that there would end up being a sort of parallel to the meaning of the song and the message of the story. Love Like Blood is still in progress but I have enough done and know enough about how it will end to find this interesting. Love Like Blood is a story about a Skinwalker (the picture I thought of most for my interpretation is above but feel free to picture him anyway you like) and a woman who makes a bargain with it to try and save what she holds dear. Determined to fight for what she's lost she endures a lot of hardships, involves herself in horrible acts and literally thrives on the barest knowledge that there is something left to hope for, something worth fighting to keep. 

Love Like Blood also has a few parallels to Wendy Won't Go in that they both have a lot to say about endurance through adversity, the terrible weight of loss and the human heart's desire to fight for what belongs to it. There are differences between the two however. Wendy Won't Go is a larger story because it needed detail to express the enormity of the tale but Love Like Blood is much more streamlined and imagery based in order to express the protagonists focus and skewed way of thinking. The streamlines style has made it just as challenging to write as WWG despite it only being about half it's size. 

Looking over the stories I've written for Apocrypha quite a few of them really are about the sort of things that concern parents. Am I good enough at this? Am I strong enough to endure if things don't go the way I expect them to? What would I do if something happened to my children? Why did this happen to us and how will we survive as a family? Most of the ideas for these stories came to me while I was pregnant with Sasha and shortly after she was born and I suppose that has a lot to do with it.