Victoria Dougherty

I'm F.J. Blooding, a once USA Today bestselling author. I write urban fantasy, science fiction, epic fantasy, and epic urban fantasy with a character growth focus. I'm happiest when I'm growing people, which sounds really strange, but that's who I am and what I do. The people around me who aren't actively hiding from life, use what I do and what I give them to create amazing lives for themselves. My stories have rich characters, as long as you can read the body language tags, who don't always make the right decisions. We don't make stupid decisions for the sake of plot twists, but they're still sometimes dumb with real consequences. My earlier works were still a bit fumbly as I attempted to figure out what kind of writer I am, but my newest works deliver, and I'm hugely excited about them. I write, primarily, in three universes: Whiskey-verse where most of our urban fantasy and my one epic urban fantasy stories reside. Dreamland where my epic urban fantasies live. And, finally, Black Systems where our science fictions stories spawn. Happy reading!

I've been working in this field, helping authors, for seventeen years. My favorite thing to do for writers is a story analysis, and I love coaching. I run a small writing retreat every summer in Oregon, and I podcast with author Erick Mertz on the Writer Craft Podcast.

Full-time self-published author and sometimes podcaster, I write and publish science fiction and fantasy. I also write about the business of writing and publishing in The View From Here.

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Born in Athens, Greece as an Air Force brat, I now call the North Carolina coast home. In 2020, my husband, Bruce, and I rode a tandem bicycle across the United States from Astoria, Oregon to Washington DC, successfully raising money for Toys for Tots. My debut novel, Sunflowers Beneath the Snow, is a historical fiction set in Ukraine, and my second novel, An Enemy Like Me, is set in WWII. Learn more by signing up for my newsletter!