Vlad the Impaler and How Dracula’s Epic Shadow Was Made

Long before Bram Stoker wrote Dracula there was Vlad the Impaler: voivode of Wallachia, enemy of the Ottomans, ruler feared as much for his punishments as for his political cunning.

This is the Vlad who moves through the pages of When Secrets Bloom and Kate’s Letter, included in the Courage Anthology out 17 JUNE. Vlad the man, consumed by passions and hidden fears—not as a figure of legend already swallowed by bats and myth. A man still anchored in the hard geography of his own century.

30/04/202627/04/2026

I step where I am needed, even when the ground burns beneath me – When Secrets Bloom

“I step where I am needed… even when the ground burns beneath me.” I like this quote because it represents Kate Webber, the main character from When Secrets Bloom. Kate does not act because she believes she will win. She acts because not acting is unthinkable.

And her choice sets the course of everything that follows.

16/04/202617/04/2026

Even truth becomes blind when it refuses to look – When Secrets Bloom

Some stories are not built all at once. They gather in fragments. A line that refuses to loosen its grip. An image formed at the edge of thought. A truth that waits until it’s the right time to be released.

In When Secrets Bloom these fragments came first. This series of book quotes gathers those glimpses.

12/04/202612/04/2026

Are Not Two Sparrows… on Easter Day

a sparrow taking a bath in dirt, garden birds

Today we celebrate the Orthodox Easter. I was reminded of these simple words: “Are not two sparrow sold for a small coin? Yet not one of them falls to the ground apart from your Father.“(the Gospel of Matthew 10:29) – the sparrow does nor fall into emptiness, but within a world still held by God.

09/04/202608/09/2026

The White Wolf Ancestry of Romans, Genghis Khan, Turks, and Dacians

Rome, the Capitoline She-Wolf with Romulus and Remus, photographed by my daughter Lysandra Furstenberg

There are stories that refuse to stay in one place. They move through empires and forests, from the hills of Rome to the endless grasslands of the steppe, carried not in stone, but in memory and blood. Again and again, across distant peoples, the same figure appears: not crowned, not tamed, but wild: the wolf.

From the White Wolf and the Lupercal cave in Rome, to the wolfish-blood origin of the Mongols, the She-Wolf Asena ancestry of the Turks and, of course, to the fearless Zalmoxis and the Great White Wolf of the Dacians let’s follow the wolf.