The reasons are plethora, like character rendering, theme exploration, and writing in rhyme — told by Francessca Bella

When I put pen to paper, hands to keyboard, I was working on my own debut novel which I already knew the title of long before I completed it. For years I had glimpses of mazarine and a wakeless dreamer, seeing opulence, mystery, and tranquility amidst — also turbulence and peril. I envisioned both a modern and Renaissance context; she lived in and enriched my imagination years before my hands went to write her down into realness. Mazarine Dreamer is the tale of Flavia Mavaret, her awakening to her past life, a need to reach heaven, and to heal herself and two men her love infected. Putting words to the echo of her story, packaging what is infinite into a finite book, became the challenge I took on because her circumstance struck a resonant cord with me. Literary and moral complexities of divine judgement, love triangles, and time traveling between past and present lives I went forth exploring with depth, sincerity, and a sense of knowing.

This envisioning began long ago in 2008, got written in regular prose in 2015, and gained versification in 2021. Simultaneously I illustrated the story when writing the couplets. What I wanted to explore (and did) while manifesting Flavia in detail, her words, her actions, and her response to the mediatress, adversaries, Netius and Lero, was  ‘can love truly transcend all boundaries, especially death and multiple lifetimes?’ Of course, it can. I knew this every hour I interacted the psychiatrist, Flavia, the doctor, Netius, and the artist, Lero, too. Uncanny fate employed the unmet trio together at Curatio Hall five hundred years after death for their benefit of amending tragedy. The novel starts with Flavia telling from captivity how she will be forced to participate as judge, victim, and offender in a twisted divine trial.

Full of depth and impactful, her retelling invoked complications around divine judgement, life and death, morality in love, reincarnation trauma, time travel, and Latin-based magic. Since this was to be my debut novel, I was not going to write the typical, happy-go-lucky romance story; I dismissed (still do) the naysayers who preach against writing a love-triangle based novel, something Flavia should have done to the twisted clergy to begin with. All because I knew I had something different here with Flavia’s journey. Reincarnation involved, divine judgement, and her spiritual transformation, this was nothing of the typical sort. No, there would be threat of lovers’ bloodshed by novel end — a tragedy in the making— amidst the beauty of rediscovering past loves — this time as a self-bettering, smart, modern lady strives to amend the past. She obeys her heart, sifting through lies amidst misguidance from adversarial forces. I was stuck deep and deeply stayed engrossed writing this.

Then, of course, the pleasantries of romance, living in the Renaissance, and being privy to secret knowledge, fueled me to explore the light side of Flavia’s romantical journey between the present and the Renaissance. She needed to make it to heaven with her best man, any other ruinous, and this is all because I understood the timelessness of a blue-rose love. I dared test it against competition, a second suitor, who for Flavia proved invaluable for showing the true loving nature of her soul and its boundlessness for, not just one man, but both through reincarnation. Naturally I found it fanciful to write her discovering the men’s identities, shared loves, follies, and triumphs; detailing each curiosity and blissful scene was pure fuel for this novel. It was doubly fun and four times amusing because she got to meet and discover them in two eras in the most magical and blessed of ways. Planning their outings, the words, the nuances that made connective points in the love triangle and the creation of a forever-couple at the end was a big deal for me as an author who still writes romantasies to no end.

All of this I saw and more before I knew this would become a novel. And taking it from pieces of vision, to words, to chapters, to a full book, and then versifying that, immeasurably more difficult (rhyming is unreal) was a big challenge. But I wanted it, I really did. I wanted to give this story my all. Truth is I could not give up the ending in a mere work of 50,000 words, not 100,000 words, but over 200,000 words which gains this novel mentionability as the longest work in rhyming couplets in the English language at release in 2021. This notable length was both a goal and a natural consequence of versification. It is literally five tales in one, Flavia and Netius of the Renaissance, Flavia and Seron of back then, plus them each in the present day, and then the overarching tale Flavia tells of her experience, framing the book from canticle one to thirty three.

However, the tale of Flavia is not just a love story, at least not in regards to a man and a woman. Caught between love for two men, she must learn to love herself amidst them, and gain entry to heaven with just one, not two, for that was how she was meant to live to begin with. They say heaven is with the one one loves for a reason. This concept fascinated me as I wrote this tale. The mediatress did all she could, her truest adversary from the side of divinity, to help her along the way with making the difficult decision.

Exploration of old times, personalities, and the darkness in the quest for enlightenment made this novel mine. Be it coincidence that Flavia comes from the Renaissance? No, I think not, for she sprung from my imagination, and is not derived nor based on anyone. I chose of course my favorite era in history, the Renaissance (its beginning), when humans were becoming better rationalizers. Romance in the novel plays on enchantment and mystery as she is swooned by both a first-of-the-kind scientist and a clever, charming magician, where both science and magic compete as they do too for her love. The two men could not be further different and yet totally equal in a time when people would believe in magic as much as science. Flavia as a modern woman would be able to see through all the smoke and mirrors and know fact from fiction, right from wrong, and be shed her own ignorance of an era that ironically, much like the corrupted clergy, would turn her away, being a woman, from enlightenment.

When I wrote this, it was not my first manuscript, and to be quite honest, I did not want it to be like anything else in the bookstores also when it came to style. My natural fascination with using rhyming words within sentences later evolved into an obsession to rhyme more and more, thus necessitating the evolvement of a novel forged fully from couplets. After writing the original story in prose, keeping it unpublished, I boldly decided to versify it from front to back. Only a creative work that befitted my own taste for rariora would satisfy me. So rhymed, hence published, my novel became. Brilliant, thoughtful, and creative, and 100% unique — a rhyming novel is the kind of novel the world needs more of. It is the same with the illustrations I hand drew myself to accompany the text and provide readers with a visual sense.

Mazarine Dreamer is not just another novel; it’s rare, rhyming, and illustrated, and my debut novel with Bella Rariora. Featuring Flavia Mavaret, it showcases the complications and triumphs of a love triangle that tests the boundaries of death and five hundred years of separation. A love-challenged woman must choose in their second life together which man she will marry and be at one with herself, reaching heaven, and appeasing divinity. This was not a novel of a flying fancy, but a tale that evolved in over a decade of imagining, writing, and rhyming. As my debut work, it was born to fulfill these criterion and is here for the reading. Get Mazarine Dreamer now and see what all the hype is about. There’s so, so much more going on in the novel than elaborated on here, including other reincarnate stories, vivisection, animal machinations and hybrids, a magical, heaven-sent pigeon, red and blue color imagery, a band of magicians, Icons of Excitatio, the War of the Roses, and then some. All which inspired me as I wrote down Flavia’s boundless tale for sharing in the finite form of a book. There’s nothing else like this rariora!

March 22, 2026

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