Love Bites:

A Collection of Short Stories

Valeria Kogan

Genre: Romance

Publisher: Wattle Publishing

Number of pages: 134

Love Bites is the debut collection of short stories by Valeria Kogan. From heartbreak to redemption, Love Bites provides a spellbinding interpretation of love and friendship, glamour and guilt, secrets and deceit. Each story provides a captivating insight into the world of love; its profound impact and effect; and how women relate to their partners.

This cleverly constructed collection of short stories will leave you tantalized and yearning for more.

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Foreword

Creating a series of short stories seemed like the best way to write my first book, since it reassured me that I had the stamina for it, but didn't tie me to a single narrative for its duration. I enjoyed playing with the characters and seeing how they would develop, but did try to create some symmetry among the stories so that they wouldn't seem too disparate.

Without intending to, this resulted in a book of ‘could haves.’ I'm not sure that I intended some of the characters to be as tragic as they became, or for the impact of other people’s love to have such an impact on some of the protagonists, but, as I wrote, the stories themselves began to unravel and I felt it was more important to stay true to the characters than it was to pursue my own idea of what the story should be.

I examined the characters using myself and people I knew as a basis (sometimes blatantly, and other times only borrowing elements of a personality), so the book functioned as an alternate plane for relationships. In some way, I think my own relationship has elements of some of the stories without being taken to the same extremes. While I’m not entirely adverse to ‘traditional’ relationships, there don’t appear to be many in the book. This wasn’t a completely unconscious decision, but I like the idea of finding love in unexpected places. I also disagree with the notion of needing to have a particular kind of life, even if it doesn’t make you happy. I’m aware that some of my characters could be seen as morally dubious and it was not my intention to shock. These were the characters based on friends, who are wonderfully ‘normal’ people, who happen to do things that aren’t quite so normal, but are brave enough to pursue their own happiness without feeling constrained by other people’s expectations.

In the end, it is a book about love… even if it’s about leaving some loves behind to find others.