Last night, I pushed publish on The Enforcers, the final book of the Blood Calling trilogy. There’s at least one more story I’ve planned out and want to tell (a prequel of sorts, which I’ll talk about in a second) but the series is at a point where I can stop and say that the tale is effectively told.
(Fans may disagree. I suspect I’m either going to get a lot of messages from people saying they love the ending, or a lot of messages from people saying, “That’s it? That CAN’T be it!”)
I could link all the books individually, but I don’t know that you want to have to hunt through a dozen links to find the books you want. So instead, I’ll link my author pages:
Kindle
nook
Smashwords
Okay, on with the show. Please be warned that while I’ve tried to tread lightly on plot points, if you’re very, very, very spoiler-averse you might want to skip reading this until after you’ve finished the series.
1. The question I get most frequently about the series is “In what order should I read the books?”
That’s not as easy to answer as it might seem. The main trilogy (Blood Calling, Misfits, and The Enforcers) need to be read in that order. But people want to know, where does Baby Teeth fall in there?
I think to have maximum impact, Baby Teeth should be read either before or after Blood Calling. The events contained in the novelette dovetail neatly with a story that gets told in Misfits, and I’m not sure if Baby Teeth is quite as enjoyable once you’ve read Misfits.
I could be wrong.
All that said, reading Baby Teeth is not essential to enjoying the rest of the series.
2. Speaking of Baby Teeth, I’m never quite sure if the story fits, tonally, with the rest of the series. When I started writing it, I hadn’t originally planned to tie it to the Blood Calling series. It was just meant to be a creepy story about a vampire baby.
(Truth be told, I was trying to do a riff on Lovecraft. I think that if you squint, you can see the influence, but Lovecraft is much, much, much more relentless than I think I’m capable of being.)
I’ve told the story elsewhere, but in the end Emma was the glue that tied the two stories together. I was stuck on both Blood Calling and Baby Teeth, and she solved problems I had in both of the books. After that, the link grew.
3. Emma was never meant to be part of the Blood Calling series. Originally it was supposed to be about Wash and Lucy. Which makes the fact that Emma is the most-loved character in the series terribly interesting to me.
4. Most interesting fact about Emma? Emma isn’t her real name. I know what her real name is, but I’ve been holding it back, hoping that I could come up with a fun way to reveal it. I will tell you that her real name starts with the letter M.
I’m pretty sure I’ve already said too much.
5. The “lost” Blood Calling story, if it ever gets written, will be about Emma’s time in Egypt. I have a decent outline, but to get it right I’ll need to do more research than I generally do (which can be surprisingly substantial). I go back and forth whether to call the story Emma Goes to Egypt or A Game of Senet.
6. Speaking of titles, Misfits and The Enforcers had those titles from the moment I started working on them until the moment I pushed publish.
Baby Teeth, however, started life as Living Dead Baby. During the writing process, I also considered calling it My Undead Baby. My wife told me both of those sounded like zombie stories. She was not wrong. A friend at WPR (my online writing group of friends) suggested Baby Teeth.
7. Blood Calling, for that matter, also had a different name for much of the time I was writing it. It was called The Kids, because I was first launched into the idea of writing a vampire novel kind-of-but-not-really based on the song The Kids are All F###ed Up, by Cobra Starship. Almost none of the ideas I envisioned while listening to the song made it into the final novel.
For that matter, I suspect the song itself has nothing to do with vampires at all.
8. I don’t think I’ve ever been great at coming up with character names. I’m not sure what the problem is, but I’m guessing it’s related to the fact that I’m terrible with names in real life, and subsequently have a hard time assigning a name to a character who isn’t fully formed in my mind yet.
I often have to pull names from other areas of my life, just to put some kind of placeholder there. Then I never remove the placeholder. So, off the top of my head:
Washing Lincoln is, of course, named for the two most well-known US Presidents. Is that Wash’s “real” name? No. I have no clue what his original name was. His backstory is, somewhat, based on Frederick Douglass.
Lucy’s first name was pulled from Dracula. Leary is actually the last name of an ex-coworker.
(Before starting Blood Calling, I actually read Dracula and one of Frederick Douglass’ autobiographies as research. That might be the only time in history anyone says that.)
Then there are the characters whose names came from Joss Whedon shows.
Nathan is named for Nathan Fillion, most famous among geeks for his work on Firefly.
Alex is named for Alexis Denisof, who worked on Buffy, Angel, and Dollhouse.
Charisma is, of course, named for Charisma Carpenter, of Buffy and Angel fame.
Then there are the names pulled from my first movie, Searching for Mr. Right.Com.
Tim and Petrina are the first names of the lead actors in that film.
Wordsworth was Tim’s character’s original last name, until it got changed in a rewrite I was not involved in.
David, on the other hand, is named for one of the primary bad vampires in the movie The Lost Boys.
Emma is named for the Jane Austen novel. Which is funny, because I’m not a fan of the author or the book. But I thought Emma would be, since she’s a reader.
9. There are two bands who named in Misfits, both of them in The Pitt. They are names of bands my brother is/was in. He’s playing the drums.
10. At 212,000 words, the complete Blood Calling series is longer than Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows, but shorter than Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix. That might change if and when I finish my Emma story.
Showing posts with label Blood Calling. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Blood Calling. Show all posts
Wednesday, February 15, 2012
Saturday, January 28, 2012
Thursday, January 26, 2012
The Enforcers: A Blood Calling Novel: An Excerpt:
What follows are the first ten pages of the third (and for now final) book in my Blood Calling series. It'll be available soon. In the meantime, you can pick up the first two books on
Kindle: http://www.amazon.com/Joshua-Grover-David-Patterson/e/B005OGX39K/ref=ntt_athr_dp_pel_1
or nook: http://www.barnesandnoble.com/c/joshua-grover-david-patterson
Please note: This slice of book three will spoil some surprises in book 1 and 2. You might want to go read those first...
CHAPTER 1
My dad was a full-on science fiction and fantasy geek.
Or rather, he still is. He’s still alive, after all.
Which is in direct contrast to me. I might be walking, and talking, and running away from mortal danger nearly all the time these days, but I’m still technically dead.
I digress.
When I was a kid, my father constantly was trying to turn me into his little geeklet. As soon as he figured I was old enough, he started handing me books with rockets and unicorns tinkling on trees on the covers. He began pulling out DVDs and VHS tapes of so-called classic sci-fi, which featured modern (when they were made, anyway) moral dilemmas moved to the distant future.
There’s probably some fifty-cent word for it, when you take radical ideas and put them in spacesuits for pop-culture consumption. Who knows?
When it came to movies, a lot of the time all I could see were the painfully outdated special effects, or the zipper on the monster’s back. In the case of the books, the technology that seemed so far out when the books were written had, by the time I read them, been left in the dust.
Not long ago I read a story that took place in a dystopian future where people are burning all the books. The only problem was, as I sat there turning the pages, I could see my mom reading a book on her smartphone.
But at their best, the flaws fell away and the stories would suck me in.
As my companions and I trudged through the New York City snow in the direction Alex’s phone’s GPS was pointing us, I thought of the situation we had left behind a little over 24 hours ago.
We had run away from a burning house, while a handful of vigilante vampires called the Enforcers slaughtered more than 100 innocent people. And possibly, a not-so-innocent vampire.
And Emma’s friend, a vampire named Bets.
For some reason, a line from one of my dad’s favorite movies kept returning to me as we walked: “The needs of the many outweigh the needs of the few. Or the one.”
I knew why that line in particular kept echoing in my brain. Many, many people were dead, and I felt responsible.
Granted, I could see, from a logical standpoint, why it wasn’t really my fault. I had not asked to become a vampire. Wash, my now-kind-of-boyfriend of less than an hour, had sired me when he thought I was about to die of blood loss, after I encountered John Smith, one of the world’s oldest and most dangerous vampires.
Not long after that, I fought Smith and defeated him in hand-to-hand combat. And by defeated, I mean I used sunlight to set fire to his head, and then watched his body turn to ash.
Before we managed to stop him, he had killed several homeless people in my city.
Then Emma took me and Wash to Pittsburgh to repay her friend Bets for multiple favors he had granted her (it’s a vampire thing) and we ended up ticking off a glam-rock-wannabe vampire named Nathan. We went to Nathan’s house to rescue Bets’ girlfriend, Charisma.
That fiasco ended with the Enforcer attack. They burned Nathan’s giant mansion to the ground. They killed the policemen who came to remove the intruders (namely, us) from the house. And they killed Nathan’s army, which was made up of down-on-their-luck men with too many tattoos and too little in the way of job offers.
As far as I know, Nathan only killed one person directly: Charisma.
Fortunately or unfortunately, depending on your viewpoint, Bets had force-fed some of his blood to Charisma a few hours earlier. So when she died, she came back as a vampire.
Speeding along the highway from Pittsburgh to New York City, Emma had gotten a phone call from David, who I gathered was one of the higher-ups in the Enforcer corps. Or gang. Or whatever they were. Corps works. Since they’re dead, they’re technically a corps of corpses. And who doesn’t love a little wordplay at a time like this?
Emma had smashed her phone, my phone, and Wash’s phone, since there was a chance that the Enforcers could use them to locate us, and we had driven the rest of the way to New York City. Now, we were headed to a place Emma knew, where we could get new IDs. And phones. And whatever else we would need to get out of the city before the Enforcers could locate and kill us.
We had other problems as well.
My parents still thought I was alive, for one, and they had no idea I had both become a vampire and was now traveling with a group of them.
A video of Emma cracking open Nathan’s skull, and Nathan healing and getting up had gone viral, and ended up on the news in Pittsburgh. Wash, Charisma, and I had cameos.
And the Enforcers, in addition to burning down Nathan’s house, had torched a goth bar called The Pitt in Pittsburgh, and the homeless shelter Wash had been running in my hometown.
Oh yeah. And I almost got caught helping a homeless man die in Denver, Colorado. We had averted that by running away from a policeman named Officer Garcia.
When we had left our hotel, our strange tale hadn’t yet penetrated the New York City news, or the national news.
That was about to change. Big time.
CHAPTER 2
Emma held up a hand, and we all stopped. We were standing in front of a decrepit apartment building, one of those kinds with a set of buttons and a little microphone/speaker outside so you can press one and tell your friend inside to buzz you up.
Emma pressed one of the buttons, but the microphone/speaker combo didn’t offer up the crackle that indicates a live connection. She pressed it a few more times, the way you push an elevator button over and over in hopes that it realizes that you need it right now, no, not in a minute, now.
Finally, she held the button down and said, “Zuki? It’s Emma. Buzz me up. I need your help.”
There was no answer. Emma pressed the button a few more times, apparently hoping she could will it back to life.
She turned to Alex. “I need to borrow your phone for a minute.” Alex handed it over, and Emma stared at the screen, eyebrows crinkled. I guess when you’ve been around since before phones were invented, it’s probably harder to remember everyone’s number.
After some thought, she tapped in a number and held the cell phone to her ear. Since being a vampire comes with super-hearing as one of the perks, I let myself hone in on the sound of the ringing.
I heard a lightly accented voice on the other end. “Who is this?”
“Zuki? It’s Emma.”
“You aren’t a safe individual to be around. You need to leave.”
As one, my traveling group looked around, as if to ask, “Did you hear that?” Except for Alex, who didn’t have super-hearing, and was going to have to wait to find out just how much trouble we were in.
“I don’t know what you’re talking about,” said Emma.
“Don’t be coy. I saw the videos on YouTube. Judging by the number of hits, I’m guessing everyone in the world has seen the videos on YouTube.”
“Then you know why I need your help.”
“I know that if I buzz you in, you could get me killed.”
“And I know that if you don’t buzz me in, when the Enforcers catch up to me, the first thing I’m going to tell them is that I came to see you, and that you were living with a human.”
Charisma and I exchanged glances that mostly read, “Whoa.” Alex’s face read, “What’s going on?” Wash's visage remained neutral.
“You wouldn’t,” said Zuki.
“I would,” said Emma. “It’s not just me out here, Zuki. I’ve got four people with me who also don’t deserve to die for the horrible crime of doing the right thing.”
There was silence for what felt like forever. The wind had kicked up, and the snow along with it. We weren’t going to freeze to death any time soon, but if we didn’t start walking, someone was going to come along and question why a bunch of people were standing on a dark street in the middle of the night.
Finally, I heard Zuki’s voice again. “Wash is with you?” It curled like a question, but the firmness of her tone indicated she knew he was here.
“Yes,” said Emma.
I heard a pop that indicated that Zuki had hung up. A second later, the door buzzed. We walked inside.
CHAPTER 3
We took the stairs to the fourth floor, and Emma knocked on a door that used to have a number nailed to it. Now the number was gone, and only the lighter spot on the door where the number used to be indicated which apartment we were about to enter.
Emma knocked twice, lightly, and the door swung open.
Zuki stepped into the entrance.
Alex blinked. “Interesting. In the same week I’ve learned that both vampires and anime characters exist in real life.”
I could see his point. Zuki was a petite Japanese girl, dressed in a Catholic schoolgirl outfit consisting of a dark skirt, white shirt and a blue tie. Her hair was straight and long, and held up with barrettes with some kind of Japanese characters on them.
Her face started as neutral, but Alex’s comment twitched it towards bemused. “It’s a costume,” she said.
Wash cleared his throat. “Were you in the middle of something?”
Zuki smiled. “No. There’s a school two blocks down. I wear the outfit, and people assume I’m a student. It helps me blend in around here.” Her nose twitched. “Wait a minute. You’re human?”
Alex dropped and raised his head in a type of short bow. “Correct.”
Zuki looked at each one of us in turn, before settling on Emma. “This is like a bad joke. ‘A 2000-year-old Jewish girl, a bi-racial ex-slave, a baby vampire, a newborn vampire pin-up model and a human go to a Catholic schoolgirl ID-forging vampire.’”
I looked around at my companions, realizing for perhaps the first time what a motley bunch we were. “Amusing, but it has no rhythm. Work on the wording and we’ll talk. Can we come in now?”
Zuki backed out of the doorway and we walked into her apartment. There wasn’t much to see there. A couple of cheap, worn couches, a couple of easy chairs, a TV and a stereo were in the living room. The kitchen was visible, and I was surprised to see a plate and some utensils on the kitchen table.
Then I remembered. “You have a human here?”
Zuki nodded. “My boyfriend. Hank.”
Emma smiled. “He’s still around?”
“I’m still around,” said a gravel-filled voice behind us. We all turned. The 60-something face of Hank greeted us. “Retired, and getting old, but still around.”
Kindle: http://www.amazon.com/Joshua-Grover-David-Patterson/e/B005OGX39K/ref=ntt_athr_dp_pel_1
or nook: http://www.barnesandnoble.com/c/joshua-grover-david-patterson
Please note: This slice of book three will spoil some surprises in book 1 and 2. You might want to go read those first...
CHAPTER 1
My dad was a full-on science fiction and fantasy geek.
Or rather, he still is. He’s still alive, after all.
Which is in direct contrast to me. I might be walking, and talking, and running away from mortal danger nearly all the time these days, but I’m still technically dead.
I digress.
When I was a kid, my father constantly was trying to turn me into his little geeklet. As soon as he figured I was old enough, he started handing me books with rockets and unicorns tinkling on trees on the covers. He began pulling out DVDs and VHS tapes of so-called classic sci-fi, which featured modern (when they were made, anyway) moral dilemmas moved to the distant future.
There’s probably some fifty-cent word for it, when you take radical ideas and put them in spacesuits for pop-culture consumption. Who knows?
When it came to movies, a lot of the time all I could see were the painfully outdated special effects, or the zipper on the monster’s back. In the case of the books, the technology that seemed so far out when the books were written had, by the time I read them, been left in the dust.
Not long ago I read a story that took place in a dystopian future where people are burning all the books. The only problem was, as I sat there turning the pages, I could see my mom reading a book on her smartphone.
But at their best, the flaws fell away and the stories would suck me in.
As my companions and I trudged through the New York City snow in the direction Alex’s phone’s GPS was pointing us, I thought of the situation we had left behind a little over 24 hours ago.
We had run away from a burning house, while a handful of vigilante vampires called the Enforcers slaughtered more than 100 innocent people. And possibly, a not-so-innocent vampire.
And Emma’s friend, a vampire named Bets.
For some reason, a line from one of my dad’s favorite movies kept returning to me as we walked: “The needs of the many outweigh the needs of the few. Or the one.”
I knew why that line in particular kept echoing in my brain. Many, many people were dead, and I felt responsible.
Granted, I could see, from a logical standpoint, why it wasn’t really my fault. I had not asked to become a vampire. Wash, my now-kind-of-boyfriend of less than an hour, had sired me when he thought I was about to die of blood loss, after I encountered John Smith, one of the world’s oldest and most dangerous vampires.
Not long after that, I fought Smith and defeated him in hand-to-hand combat. And by defeated, I mean I used sunlight to set fire to his head, and then watched his body turn to ash.
Before we managed to stop him, he had killed several homeless people in my city.
Then Emma took me and Wash to Pittsburgh to repay her friend Bets for multiple favors he had granted her (it’s a vampire thing) and we ended up ticking off a glam-rock-wannabe vampire named Nathan. We went to Nathan’s house to rescue Bets’ girlfriend, Charisma.
That fiasco ended with the Enforcer attack. They burned Nathan’s giant mansion to the ground. They killed the policemen who came to remove the intruders (namely, us) from the house. And they killed Nathan’s army, which was made up of down-on-their-luck men with too many tattoos and too little in the way of job offers.
As far as I know, Nathan only killed one person directly: Charisma.
Fortunately or unfortunately, depending on your viewpoint, Bets had force-fed some of his blood to Charisma a few hours earlier. So when she died, she came back as a vampire.
Speeding along the highway from Pittsburgh to New York City, Emma had gotten a phone call from David, who I gathered was one of the higher-ups in the Enforcer corps. Or gang. Or whatever they were. Corps works. Since they’re dead, they’re technically a corps of corpses. And who doesn’t love a little wordplay at a time like this?
Emma had smashed her phone, my phone, and Wash’s phone, since there was a chance that the Enforcers could use them to locate us, and we had driven the rest of the way to New York City. Now, we were headed to a place Emma knew, where we could get new IDs. And phones. And whatever else we would need to get out of the city before the Enforcers could locate and kill us.
We had other problems as well.
My parents still thought I was alive, for one, and they had no idea I had both become a vampire and was now traveling with a group of them.
A video of Emma cracking open Nathan’s skull, and Nathan healing and getting up had gone viral, and ended up on the news in Pittsburgh. Wash, Charisma, and I had cameos.
And the Enforcers, in addition to burning down Nathan’s house, had torched a goth bar called The Pitt in Pittsburgh, and the homeless shelter Wash had been running in my hometown.
Oh yeah. And I almost got caught helping a homeless man die in Denver, Colorado. We had averted that by running away from a policeman named Officer Garcia.
When we had left our hotel, our strange tale hadn’t yet penetrated the New York City news, or the national news.
That was about to change. Big time.
CHAPTER 2
Emma held up a hand, and we all stopped. We were standing in front of a decrepit apartment building, one of those kinds with a set of buttons and a little microphone/speaker outside so you can press one and tell your friend inside to buzz you up.
Emma pressed one of the buttons, but the microphone/speaker combo didn’t offer up the crackle that indicates a live connection. She pressed it a few more times, the way you push an elevator button over and over in hopes that it realizes that you need it right now, no, not in a minute, now.
Finally, she held the button down and said, “Zuki? It’s Emma. Buzz me up. I need your help.”
There was no answer. Emma pressed the button a few more times, apparently hoping she could will it back to life.
She turned to Alex. “I need to borrow your phone for a minute.” Alex handed it over, and Emma stared at the screen, eyebrows crinkled. I guess when you’ve been around since before phones were invented, it’s probably harder to remember everyone’s number.
After some thought, she tapped in a number and held the cell phone to her ear. Since being a vampire comes with super-hearing as one of the perks, I let myself hone in on the sound of the ringing.
I heard a lightly accented voice on the other end. “Who is this?”
“Zuki? It’s Emma.”
“You aren’t a safe individual to be around. You need to leave.”
As one, my traveling group looked around, as if to ask, “Did you hear that?” Except for Alex, who didn’t have super-hearing, and was going to have to wait to find out just how much trouble we were in.
“I don’t know what you’re talking about,” said Emma.
“Don’t be coy. I saw the videos on YouTube. Judging by the number of hits, I’m guessing everyone in the world has seen the videos on YouTube.”
“Then you know why I need your help.”
“I know that if I buzz you in, you could get me killed.”
“And I know that if you don’t buzz me in, when the Enforcers catch up to me, the first thing I’m going to tell them is that I came to see you, and that you were living with a human.”
Charisma and I exchanged glances that mostly read, “Whoa.” Alex’s face read, “What’s going on?” Wash's visage remained neutral.
“You wouldn’t,” said Zuki.
“I would,” said Emma. “It’s not just me out here, Zuki. I’ve got four people with me who also don’t deserve to die for the horrible crime of doing the right thing.”
There was silence for what felt like forever. The wind had kicked up, and the snow along with it. We weren’t going to freeze to death any time soon, but if we didn’t start walking, someone was going to come along and question why a bunch of people were standing on a dark street in the middle of the night.
Finally, I heard Zuki’s voice again. “Wash is with you?” It curled like a question, but the firmness of her tone indicated she knew he was here.
“Yes,” said Emma.
I heard a pop that indicated that Zuki had hung up. A second later, the door buzzed. We walked inside.
CHAPTER 3
We took the stairs to the fourth floor, and Emma knocked on a door that used to have a number nailed to it. Now the number was gone, and only the lighter spot on the door where the number used to be indicated which apartment we were about to enter.
Emma knocked twice, lightly, and the door swung open.
Zuki stepped into the entrance.
Alex blinked. “Interesting. In the same week I’ve learned that both vampires and anime characters exist in real life.”
I could see his point. Zuki was a petite Japanese girl, dressed in a Catholic schoolgirl outfit consisting of a dark skirt, white shirt and a blue tie. Her hair was straight and long, and held up with barrettes with some kind of Japanese characters on them.
Her face started as neutral, but Alex’s comment twitched it towards bemused. “It’s a costume,” she said.
Wash cleared his throat. “Were you in the middle of something?”
Zuki smiled. “No. There’s a school two blocks down. I wear the outfit, and people assume I’m a student. It helps me blend in around here.” Her nose twitched. “Wait a minute. You’re human?”
Alex dropped and raised his head in a type of short bow. “Correct.”
Zuki looked at each one of us in turn, before settling on Emma. “This is like a bad joke. ‘A 2000-year-old Jewish girl, a bi-racial ex-slave, a baby vampire, a newborn vampire pin-up model and a human go to a Catholic schoolgirl ID-forging vampire.’”
I looked around at my companions, realizing for perhaps the first time what a motley bunch we were. “Amusing, but it has no rhythm. Work on the wording and we’ll talk. Can we come in now?”
Zuki backed out of the doorway and we walked into her apartment. There wasn’t much to see there. A couple of cheap, worn couches, a couple of easy chairs, a TV and a stereo were in the living room. The kitchen was visible, and I was surprised to see a plate and some utensils on the kitchen table.
Then I remembered. “You have a human here?”
Zuki nodded. “My boyfriend. Hank.”
Emma smiled. “He’s still around?”
“I’m still around,” said a gravel-filled voice behind us. We all turned. The 60-something face of Hank greeted us. “Retired, and getting old, but still around.”
Wednesday, November 9, 2011
Misfits Cover - Plus a Surprise!
Here's the Misfits cover. Fun!
And here's the slightly altered Baby Teeth cover...
And here's the slightly altered Baby Teeth cover...
Wednesday, November 2, 2011
Coming Soon: Misfits: A Blood Calling Novel
CHAPTER 1
Being a vampire sounds awesome, but a lot of the time it’s a pain in the neck.
I’m sorry, that was terrible. Let me try again.
Being a vampire isn’t nearly as awesome as people make it out to be.
Let’s consider the life of the average college student for a second. We’ll make up a name. Let’s go with Fred.
Fred wakes up with fifteen minutes to get to class. Maybe he goes, maybe he doesn’t. We’ll say he does. He rolls out of bed, pulls on a t-shirt and heads to class in his pajamas. He takes some notes. He texts his girlfriend.
Maybe he has another class or two. Then he goes to a cafeteria and eats his lunch. No cooking, no figuring out where and what to eat.
Fred goes to another class, maybe hits the library, does a little studying. He goes back to the cafeteria and has dinner. Now it’s night. He goes to his dorm room, maybe studies a little, and then a friend calls him and tells him where the party’s at.
Fred puts on actual clothing for the first time that day. If the ladies are lucky, Fred takes a shower before he goes. Fred gets his drink on. Then he decides to stay up and play pool for a while. Suddenly it’s 2 AM and he’s getting a cheeseburger at some diner called Marv’s, and getting back to his room at 4 AM.
He goes to bed. If the next day is a weekday, he gets up and starts the process again. If it’s a weekend, he sleeps until noon, then goes down to the cafeteria and gets himself something lunch-like to eat.
In case you missed it, here are the things he didn’t have to worry about:
The blazing hot sun burning him to ashes in a matter of minutes.
Finding a human being that will allow him to drink his or her blood so that he can stay alive.
Staying out of the public eye as much as possible so as to avoid uncomfortable questions about why the sick and elderly around you always seem to end up dead and a quart low.
Figuring out what to do with the rest of forever.
Don’t get me wrong, living for all eternity is kind of nice. And I can’t complain about the almost complete lack of morning breath.
But imagine spending the rest of your existence trying to pretend it was normal that no one ever saw you during the daytime, and you’ll get a little taste of what my world is like.
On the other hand, I don’t think I’m the average vampire. In less than a month I managed to become a fugitive from both my hometown and Denver, Colorado. I have a new identity and a new phone and some new clothes, and they all fit into a large blue backpack I carry with me whenever I move to a new city.
Which I was about to do for the third time when me, Wash, and Emma got off our plane in Pittsburgh.
Wash is a lean, well-muscled African-American ex-slave. He’s also missing a hand, thanks to his evil sire, a man who went by the name of John Smith.
Emma was born just after year one, as the Gregorian calendar goes. She was also sired by John Smith.
Oh, and she met Jesus. She was the woman caught in adultery. It’s in the Bible. You should look it up.
Between the three of us, we had a lot of complicated issues, all of which I’ll talk about later.
At that moment, we only had one issue, but it was a big one.
We had gotten on a plane in my hometown in order to leave it forever and ever and ever. Mostly because I was a vampire and I needed to make sure my family and friends (well, friend) didn’t find out what really happened to me. But also because we had killed John Smith, who as far as we knew was the world’s oldest and most deadly vampire.
And we sucked all the blood out of my mom’s ex-boyfriend. And stole a gun off a police officer. But I swear, we did it all for good reasons. See above re: killing oldest and most deadly vampire.
I digress. Again.
Instead of immediately flying away, what happened was: we sat on the tarmac and didn’t get in the air for a long time. So when we landed in Pittsburgh, we had maybe 45 minutes to get off the plane, and get our rental car, and get to our hotel.
So of course we sat on the tarmac some more. And once we finally got to a gate, everyone got to stand around while we waited for someone to open the door.
We got off the plane with 15 minutes ‘til dawn.
CHAPTER 2
There was one more little wrinkle I forgot to tell you about.
When we tried to get on the plane, I was told that my bag was too big. So they took it away from me, stuck a tag on it, and set it in the little hallway that leads to the plane.
No big deal, right?
Except when I got off the plane, my bag was nowhere to be seen. It had all my clothes. And my ID. And it was just gone.
I could buy more clothes, and the ID was fake. But still, it was all the stuff I owned in the world, outside of my mega-awesome smart phone. Which now had no charger, because it was in my bag.
I stared at the place where my bag was supposed to be, but wasn’t. Emma tugged at my arm. Wash tugged at my other arm.
“We need to go. Right now,” said Emma.
“Right now,” echoed Wash.
I looked at them. “My stuff?”
“We’re millionaires. We’ll get more stuff,” said Emma. “Let’s go. Now.”
We walked out of the hallway and into the airport, and I saw immediately what the problem was. Windows. Soon-to-be-sunlight-filled, vampire-killing windows. Everywhere.
Less than 24 hours earlier, I had lost a lot of my hair and scalp to sunlight. I froze. Wash and Emma, still holding me by my arms, pulled me forward. We were walking like they were my parents and I was a lackadaisical toddler.
Which was true in a sense, even though we all looked like we were somewhere between 17 and 22. Ish.
Wash had sired me after I had been attacked and almost killed by John Smith. That means he put some of his blood in my mouth, and I swallowed it, and then I died from blood loss. Which sounds funny when I say it that way.
Later, Emma had told me that Wash loved me, but we had almost literally not stopped moving long enough for me to ask Wash about it.
And now I was pretty sure I was going to die.
The thing is, vampires have very, very low-key emotions. It has something to do with the fact that our hearts don’t beat, so we don’t kick the normal chemicals around that human beings have. If we freak out and get a shot of adrenaline, it lasts maybe a second. Then our heart stops moving and our demeanor returns to neutral.
Which is to say, after a second I unfroze and let Wash and Emma lead me instead of drag me.
I turned to Emma. “Plan?”
“Don’t get fried,” said Emma.
I decided to try Wash. “Plan?”
Wash shook his head.
Emma let go of my arm, pulled out her phone, and started tapping at Mach 5. Watching her was like observing a highly-skilled violin player performing Rachmaninoff.
Emma held out her arm, blocking my progress and bringing Wash up short. We were standing in what appeared, to me, to be a random hallway.
Emma brought her arm in front of her, extending her finger to point. She had her phone in the other hand. “Door,” she said. She turned a little bit. “Out the door, this direction, there’s a hotel. Of course, when we walk out, we’ll be in a parking garage. So we have to get through that, go that way,” she pointed a slightly different direction, “and then run across a bunch of busy airport roads.”
I grimaced. “What could go wrong?”
Wash smiled. “Everything.”
Emma glanced up at a nearby clock. “Six minutes. Give or take. We go to the door at normal speeds. Then we go, go, go.”
So we speed-walked.
A few steps before we hit the door, Wash blurred. He ran, is what he did, but the sudden change in speed was so fast that a human would have seen a strange flash of color as Wash zipped forward, jumped and jerked a cable out of the back of a camera mounted above the doorway.
Of course, to me it looked pretty normal. Vampire vision.
And then we ran.
Being a vampire sounds awesome, but a lot of the time it’s a pain in the neck.
I’m sorry, that was terrible. Let me try again.
Being a vampire isn’t nearly as awesome as people make it out to be.
Let’s consider the life of the average college student for a second. We’ll make up a name. Let’s go with Fred.
Fred wakes up with fifteen minutes to get to class. Maybe he goes, maybe he doesn’t. We’ll say he does. He rolls out of bed, pulls on a t-shirt and heads to class in his pajamas. He takes some notes. He texts his girlfriend.
Maybe he has another class or two. Then he goes to a cafeteria and eats his lunch. No cooking, no figuring out where and what to eat.
Fred goes to another class, maybe hits the library, does a little studying. He goes back to the cafeteria and has dinner. Now it’s night. He goes to his dorm room, maybe studies a little, and then a friend calls him and tells him where the party’s at.
Fred puts on actual clothing for the first time that day. If the ladies are lucky, Fred takes a shower before he goes. Fred gets his drink on. Then he decides to stay up and play pool for a while. Suddenly it’s 2 AM and he’s getting a cheeseburger at some diner called Marv’s, and getting back to his room at 4 AM.
He goes to bed. If the next day is a weekday, he gets up and starts the process again. If it’s a weekend, he sleeps until noon, then goes down to the cafeteria and gets himself something lunch-like to eat.
In case you missed it, here are the things he didn’t have to worry about:
The blazing hot sun burning him to ashes in a matter of minutes.
Finding a human being that will allow him to drink his or her blood so that he can stay alive.
Staying out of the public eye as much as possible so as to avoid uncomfortable questions about why the sick and elderly around you always seem to end up dead and a quart low.
Figuring out what to do with the rest of forever.
Don’t get me wrong, living for all eternity is kind of nice. And I can’t complain about the almost complete lack of morning breath.
But imagine spending the rest of your existence trying to pretend it was normal that no one ever saw you during the daytime, and you’ll get a little taste of what my world is like.
On the other hand, I don’t think I’m the average vampire. In less than a month I managed to become a fugitive from both my hometown and Denver, Colorado. I have a new identity and a new phone and some new clothes, and they all fit into a large blue backpack I carry with me whenever I move to a new city.
Which I was about to do for the third time when me, Wash, and Emma got off our plane in Pittsburgh.
Wash is a lean, well-muscled African-American ex-slave. He’s also missing a hand, thanks to his evil sire, a man who went by the name of John Smith.
Emma was born just after year one, as the Gregorian calendar goes. She was also sired by John Smith.
Oh, and she met Jesus. She was the woman caught in adultery. It’s in the Bible. You should look it up.
Between the three of us, we had a lot of complicated issues, all of which I’ll talk about later.
At that moment, we only had one issue, but it was a big one.
We had gotten on a plane in my hometown in order to leave it forever and ever and ever. Mostly because I was a vampire and I needed to make sure my family and friends (well, friend) didn’t find out what really happened to me. But also because we had killed John Smith, who as far as we knew was the world’s oldest and most deadly vampire.
And we sucked all the blood out of my mom’s ex-boyfriend. And stole a gun off a police officer. But I swear, we did it all for good reasons. See above re: killing oldest and most deadly vampire.
I digress. Again.
Instead of immediately flying away, what happened was: we sat on the tarmac and didn’t get in the air for a long time. So when we landed in Pittsburgh, we had maybe 45 minutes to get off the plane, and get our rental car, and get to our hotel.
So of course we sat on the tarmac some more. And once we finally got to a gate, everyone got to stand around while we waited for someone to open the door.
We got off the plane with 15 minutes ‘til dawn.
CHAPTER 2
There was one more little wrinkle I forgot to tell you about.
When we tried to get on the plane, I was told that my bag was too big. So they took it away from me, stuck a tag on it, and set it in the little hallway that leads to the plane.
No big deal, right?
Except when I got off the plane, my bag was nowhere to be seen. It had all my clothes. And my ID. And it was just gone.
I could buy more clothes, and the ID was fake. But still, it was all the stuff I owned in the world, outside of my mega-awesome smart phone. Which now had no charger, because it was in my bag.
I stared at the place where my bag was supposed to be, but wasn’t. Emma tugged at my arm. Wash tugged at my other arm.
“We need to go. Right now,” said Emma.
“Right now,” echoed Wash.
I looked at them. “My stuff?”
“We’re millionaires. We’ll get more stuff,” said Emma. “Let’s go. Now.”
We walked out of the hallway and into the airport, and I saw immediately what the problem was. Windows. Soon-to-be-sunlight-filled, vampire-killing windows. Everywhere.
Less than 24 hours earlier, I had lost a lot of my hair and scalp to sunlight. I froze. Wash and Emma, still holding me by my arms, pulled me forward. We were walking like they were my parents and I was a lackadaisical toddler.
Which was true in a sense, even though we all looked like we were somewhere between 17 and 22. Ish.
Wash had sired me after I had been attacked and almost killed by John Smith. That means he put some of his blood in my mouth, and I swallowed it, and then I died from blood loss. Which sounds funny when I say it that way.
Later, Emma had told me that Wash loved me, but we had almost literally not stopped moving long enough for me to ask Wash about it.
And now I was pretty sure I was going to die.
The thing is, vampires have very, very low-key emotions. It has something to do with the fact that our hearts don’t beat, so we don’t kick the normal chemicals around that human beings have. If we freak out and get a shot of adrenaline, it lasts maybe a second. Then our heart stops moving and our demeanor returns to neutral.
Which is to say, after a second I unfroze and let Wash and Emma lead me instead of drag me.
I turned to Emma. “Plan?”
“Don’t get fried,” said Emma.
I decided to try Wash. “Plan?”
Wash shook his head.
Emma let go of my arm, pulled out her phone, and started tapping at Mach 5. Watching her was like observing a highly-skilled violin player performing Rachmaninoff.
Emma held out her arm, blocking my progress and bringing Wash up short. We were standing in what appeared, to me, to be a random hallway.
Emma brought her arm in front of her, extending her finger to point. She had her phone in the other hand. “Door,” she said. She turned a little bit. “Out the door, this direction, there’s a hotel. Of course, when we walk out, we’ll be in a parking garage. So we have to get through that, go that way,” she pointed a slightly different direction, “and then run across a bunch of busy airport roads.”
I grimaced. “What could go wrong?”
Wash smiled. “Everything.”
Emma glanced up at a nearby clock. “Six minutes. Give or take. We go to the door at normal speeds. Then we go, go, go.”
So we speed-walked.
A few steps before we hit the door, Wash blurred. He ran, is what he did, but the sudden change in speed was so fast that a human would have seen a strange flash of color as Wash zipped forward, jumped and jerked a cable out of the back of a camera mounted above the doorway.
Of course, to me it looked pretty normal. Vampire vision.
And then we ran.
Monday, September 26, 2011
How You Can Spend $0 and Raise Money for Ethiopia Reads
What is Ethiopia Reads?
You can find out more about the nonprofit here: http://www.ethiopiareads.org/
Short version: They give books to impoverished children in Ethiopia.
Why are you giving them money?
I wrote an essay about it. You can read it here.
Short version: My daughter was born in Ethiopia and I want to help the children of the country.
How can I help?
Simple. Go to Smashwords .
Download a copy of “Baby Teeth.” Smashwords will tell me you downloaded it.
(If you need an App to read the book, I highly recommend the Kindle app, which is free and easy to download and use.
Then at the end of October, I’ll send Ethiopia Reads a donation – five cents for every download, up to $500. That’s 10,000 downloads worth of books.
And that’s it.
Now, do me a favor. Go download the book. And then tell your friends on Facebook. And on Twitter. And in real life. If you see a friend with a smartphone, tell him or her to go and download the book. It will cost readers nothing, and for every 40 books people download, I’ll send enough money to Ethiopia Reads for the nonprofit to buy a book for one child.
So go! Download! And my thanks to you!
You can find out more about the nonprofit here: http://www.ethiopiareads.org/
Short version: They give books to impoverished children in Ethiopia.
Why are you giving them money?
I wrote an essay about it. You can read it here.
Short version: My daughter was born in Ethiopia and I want to help the children of the country.
How can I help?
Simple. Go to Smashwords .
Download a copy of “Baby Teeth.” Smashwords will tell me you downloaded it.
(If you need an App to read the book, I highly recommend the Kindle app, which is free and easy to download and use.
Then at the end of October, I’ll send Ethiopia Reads a donation – five cents for every download, up to $500. That’s 10,000 downloads worth of books.
And that’s it.
Now, do me a favor. Go download the book. And then tell your friends on Facebook. And on Twitter. And in real life. If you see a friend with a smartphone, tell him or her to go and download the book. It will cost readers nothing, and for every 40 books people download, I’ll send enough money to Ethiopia Reads for the nonprofit to buy a book for one child.
So go! Download! And my thanks to you!
Sunday, September 11, 2011
Blood Calling: Extended Excerpt and Links
CHAPTER 1
You want a story? Let me tell you a story.
Last August, five things happened to me:
1) I turned 18. This is important later.
2) I started my senior year of high school as a social pariah.
3) My parents got divorced, and my mom kicked my dad out of the house and let her personal trainer, Chuck, move in.
4) My grandpa died.
5) He left me a vampire-slaying kit.
Well. Kind of. That’s all jumbled up, but I’ll break it down in a minute.
Let’s start with me turning 18. When you’re born in August, before you can enter school in most places you have to take a test – are you smart enough to enter when you’re a year younger than everyone else, or are you dumb enough that you end up a year older than everyone else?
Ultimately, I fell into the dumb category, although the test I failed had more to do with me being clumsy than anything else. When I cried and told my mother that I didn’t get to go to school because I was stupid, she told me that the only reason I hadn’t gotten in was my lack of coordination.
I’m sure she chose to dumb that statement down to something I could understand.
In essence, I didn’t get into school because I couldn’t stand on one foot. That’s what held me back.
I know, right? The girl who can’t stand on one foot gets a vampire-slaying kit. I’m pretty sure they’re not going to make a TV show out of my life.
As far as the divorce goes, that had its own complications. My mom is a lawyer, so she talked to a couple of guys in her firm and got all her papers in a row, and bam, my dad’s out the door and living in an apartment, and trying to find a job.
Which sucked for him, because he let my mom work high-powered lawyer hours while he did the stay-at-home thing. Man has a college education and no work experience, unless he wants to open a daddy day care.
Which I’m guessing he didn’t. I don’t know. Haven’t talked to him recently. Been preoccupied.
But you know that.
Then there was my grandpa dying. People always ask you, when someone dies in your family: Were you close? What do you say to that? “Nah? Didn’t like him very much? Glad he’s gone?”
The real answer is, I was close with my grandpa before he started to get old. I mean, actually got old. From walking to wheelchair, deaf, can’t remember anything, muscles all loose so he can’t talk old.
I loved my grandpa. I did. But that was hard to watch, and I wasn’t ready for it. You know how they always say, “Oh, it was a blessing,” when someone like that dies?
I think it was, for him. Whatever’s next after this life, wherever he went had to be better than to be trapped in that body while it fell apart on him.
I said he gave me a vampire slaying kit, but that’s not true. Or rather, it is and it isn’t.
He was my mom’s dad, and she didn’t need the house, or anything in it. She went in, took some pictures and a few things she remembered from when she was a girl. Told me I could go in there and take whatever I wanted.
So one day last summer, I went through the whole house. All of it.
Took the candy dish he had. He always used to keep jellybeans in there. I wasn’t much of a fan of jellybeans, but I’d always have a few when I was there.
It was like candy corn at Halloween. No one really likes the stuff, but you have to have a piece or two to make the season feel right. You know?
Maybe you don’t know.
Mom already had the pictures, so I figured that was pretty much it for stuff I needed. And then I got to the coat closet.
That was one place I always loved in grandpa’s house. I don’t know what it was, maybe an old leather coat, maybe a set of boots, but I loved the way that closet smelled. I used to go in there when I was little and close the door, and just sit.
So that’s what I did. Just for a minute or two. Or that was the plan. What happened was, I was tired and needed a nap and I took one, and when I woke up all the light from outside was gone and there I was, sitting in my dead grandpa’s dark, dark, dark closet.
So I fumbled around, but I couldn’t find the doorknob. Don’t know how that happened. So I reached for the pull chain for the light, and it came on, and I realized that the reason I couldn’t find the doorknob was that I was all turned around and facing the back of the closet.
And what do you know? There’s a little wooden panel back there. Never saw it as a kid.
So I pulled at it, and there’s this glossy black box inside.
I pick up the box, and step out of the closet. The thing looked like something you’d stick jewelry into, only it was a little bit too big, and way too heavy.
I figured I’d found the family jewels or something, so I cracked it open. Didn’t even notice the big silver cross on the top of the box at first.
What’s inside? Stakes. Wooden stakes. Five of the things, all sharp and pointed. And a bunch of little crosses on necklaces. And some vials of water. Holy water, I would guess.
And this little pistol thing. With two hammers, and some powder, and a leather bag with these little balls I found out later were pure silver. Worth a few bucks. More than a few.
Now I ask you – what do you do with something like that? Sell it? Keep it? Hide it back in the closet to freak out the people who buy the house?
I know what you don’t do. You don’t tell your mom, or your dad, or anyone. Especially if you take it out of the house and stick it in your trunk.
I do recommend you go back into the closet and see if there’s anything else in that little cubbyhole, though. I thought maybe there’d be more stuff, or a letter explaining that we were part of a long line of vampire slayers, or maybe a letter from Joss Whedon, that guy who created “Buffy the Vampire Slayer.”
But no.
I mean, there was a note, but all it said was:
THEY’RE REAL. FIGHT THEM.
CHAPTER 2
So that was the start of August.
Then came the end of August, and the accident.
There’s a whole lot of stuff that went into that. Let me try to get all the details in order.
Okay, so, parents are divorced. Grandpa is dead. I’ve got a vampire slaying kit.
Chuck’s car breaks down.
Chuck, you’ll remember, was my mom’s boy-toy. I suppose it’s mean to call him that, but I didn’t ask for him to be part of my life and he didn’t pretend he was part of mine. My mom started working out a couple of years ago to “help her deal with some stress.” She said it was cheaper than riding the leather couch.
Yeah, I know how that sounds.
At any rate, Chuck was a personal trainer, which I guess means he had a lot of free time. He’d go into the gym where he worked a few hours a week and do training stuff. I guess. Like I said, I didn’t want to know anything about him.
So one day I’m sitting at home, doing nothing, because my best friend is out of the country and I’m what you call “shy” when you’re under the age of five and “someone who suffers social phobias” when you get over the age of five.
And here comes Chuck. His car is in the shop, and he needs a ride to pick it up. The conversation went like this.
Him: “I’ll give you twenty bucks to take me.”
Me: “We don’t talk.”
Him: “Fine.”
And I drive him over, in my used-but-not-too-used car, which is one of the perks of being the daughter of a high-powered lawyer.
That’s where we ran into Lindsey.
How to describe Lindsey? Imagine that you have a best friend when you’re in grade school. You have brown hair, she has red. You’re both kind of cute.
Then you hit the fifth grade, and suddenly she’s cute, and you’re, you know, Lucy. And then in middle school, she’s hot, and you’re, you know, Lucy.
Then high school… you get the idea.
That’s the long way of saying that we grew apart, and started running in different social circles. I can’t believe I talk like that sometimes.
At any rate, we weren’t friends, and we didn’t hang. And didn’t try. And then, I’m sitting around waiting to find out if Chuck can take his car home or what, and here comes Lindsey, and she says, “What are you doing Friday?”
I looked up at her. There wasn’t anyone else there, so I knew she was talking to me, but it wasn’t the kind of thing that happened to me usually. So I totally forgot that Friday was my birthday, and that I was figuring I’d be getting together with my dad, and I said, “Nothing.”
“My parents are out of town, so it’s party central at my house. You should come,” said Lindsey.
I tried not to look incredulous. “Yeah. Maybe.”
“Bring your friend,” said Lindsey, and she looked over at Chuck, and everything snapped into place. She wasn’t really inviting me, she was inviting my hot boyfriend by proxy.
Which in retrospect seems really awful. But it’s high school. People do that. And I wasn’t really going to go anyway, so what did it matter?
I sort of nodded my head, but the person who was changing Lindsey’s oil came out then with a bill and a little oil on his face and probably six-pack abs, so I didn’t exist to Lindsey any more.
Which was fine.
Until Friday, when it wasn’t fine any more. Because my mom left a note on the table that she and Chuck were going out that night, and to get myself pizza or Chinese.
And then my dad didn’t call to take me out on my birthday, or at all. So I finally called him at like eight at night, and we talked, but he didn’t remember what day it was and for some reason I didn’t want to have to tell him that his only child was turning into a legal adult because that seemed like something a kid would do.
So I got in my car around ten and went to Lindsey’s place.
When I rang the doorbell, the party was in full swing. I bumped into Lindsey almost immediately, and when she asked about “the new boyfriend” I told her that Chuck was actually mom’s new boyfriend.
Then I headed to the kitchen and grabbed a cup of what I thought was punch.
At first, the drink I was holding was just something to do with my hands as I walked from room to room.
As the night wore on, it was more like a lifeline.
The more I felt out of place, the more I drank. The more I drank, the more I felt out of place.
Finally, around one, I realized that I hated being with people who were basically strangers even more than I hated being alone, and I decided to head home. And since no one knew I was there (outside of Lindsey, who was walking around playing hostess) no one thought to see whether or not I needed a ride.
I got into my car, feeling a little dizzy. I started driving, and I realized after three or four blocks that I had already taken a wrong turn, that there was something in the punch from the booze family, that I was drunk, and that I was lost, despite having been at the party five minutes ago.
Most vampire stories start here – with the helpful stranger, or the dangerous creepy guy in the shadows.
This isn’t that kind of story.
I opened a window and sucked in some of the night air to clear my head. I thought about what I was doing, and because I was kind of drunk and also mad and a little stupid, I went, oh, I’m fine, I’ll be okay.
Then there’s a blank spot, where I crashed my car into a telephone pole.
Lucky for me, no one was hurt. I got a couple of days in the hospital while they watched me and waited to see if something was wrong with me, and then I got a court date and permission to go home.
Then school started again.
When I got up for the first day, I didn’t go right to school. I had this internship at a local printing press, where I was doing basic print jobs at less than minimum wage in order to prepare myself for my eventual career in graphic arts.
Did I mention my car was totaled, so I had to get up super-early so I could take a bus?
In the afternoon, I headed back to school, where I had two art classes, one English course, and a computer programming class I was taking because someone in administration had filed it under “math,” and I needed to raise my math GPA or suffer the perils of community college.
That kind of thing was important to me then. I wanted to get away from my life, and an out-of-state college seemed like the best way to do that.
I’ve never been the chatty type at school, generally opting to speak only when spoken to. Which might explain why I only had one good friend.
So it took me a while to realize that no one was speaking to me, and that no one was going to speak to me for a long time.
My misadventure in the car had been tracked back to the party, still fully in motion at 3 AM. The cops had shown up en masse, and nearly everyone there had been taken into custody.
A lot of parents got a phone call that night, and the punishments had been handed down harshly, as though from an angry Greek god.
I had, with one drunken driving episode, turned almost every member of the senior class against me.
Did I care? Sure, then. But now? Let me have those problems again, please.
CHAPTER 3
I guess I should stop acting like none of what happened to me affects me now. It does, but in a weird way that I’ll explain in a bit. There was one part that I thought was going to kill me at the time. Losing my best friend.
I guess I should talk about that.
There’s not a strong criminal element at my former high school.
Some places have gangs, or bullies, or whatever, that make some classmates vanish for days or weeks or months or semesters at a time, but my school doesn’t have any of that.
What we do have is a lot of people who, like me, are living at well above the poverty line. And if eighteen years of spinning around on a big blue ball have taught me anything, it’s this: Kids who don’t need to lie, cheat, or steal to get what they want still will lie, cheat and steal to get what they want.
And when you’re a kid whose parents have money, you don’t usually end up in jail. Or juvenile detention.
You get community service.
What always bugged me about kids who got community service was the fact that they would whine just as much as I imagine kids who go to jail do. Instead of spending a few months locked up, they would have to spend a few nights and weekends helping people, and more often than not the kid in question would act like they were being forced to do hard time.
I mean, for me, I had the option of community service or going to jail. So trust me, I’d much, much, much rather do something good for people than sit in a cell where people can watch me use the toilet.
Driving drunk in my state is a big deal, especially underage. Usually, your license is gone until you’re 21. If you’re lucky. If you’re REAL lucky.
But I guess the judge bought my totally true story about not knowing that the punch was spiked. Even though I’m sure he gets that one all the time.
At any rate, my punishment was handed out thusly:
I lost my license for a year.
And I was assigned four months of community service.
All of this happened incredibly quickly. My mom might not be great at maintaining relationships, but she knows a lot of excellent lawyers.
But a driver’s license? That’s nothing. That’s not as bad as what came next.
Becca had received special dispensation from the school district to start the school year a little late, because she was off with her family in Italy on what they called an “Educational Journey.” The first week of school was actually the first two days of school – a Thursday and a Friday – and Becca, a valedictorian-to-be, would have no problem missing the first couple of days and starting on Monday.
I guess you’d think that getting into a drunken driving accident would be the sort of thing to upset my parents, but mostly they blamed each other.
Kinda.
My dad thought that the divorce had taken a toll on me and suggested family counseling, and my mother, who had decided she wasn’t interested in counseling during the divorce period, said that I had been given too much freedom.
So she took away my phone privileges and called it a day.
That meant I couldn’t call Becca in Italy. And I couldn’t call her Sunday night when she got home.
And it also meant that by the time I saw her on Monday afternoon, she was already not speaking to me.
At first I didn’t realize I was being ignored. Thanks to the city bus dragging me from internship to school at limping speed, I was late getting to class, and Becca was in place and taking notes when I walked in.
Then I thought maybe she didn’t see me when she walked out the door the moment the bell rang.
Then I noticed that I couldn’t catch up to her in the hallway, because she was walking too fast.
Then I noticed that even when I called her name, she wasn’t acknowledging me.
And then I finally caught up to her, walking away from school at breakneck speed after the final bell. I called to her, and when she didn’t hear me, I ran until I was in step with her.
“How was your trip?”
No answer.
“What all did you see? Did you go on those boats in that one city, or-”
Becca turned to me. “I am not speaking to you. I was hoping you would realize that, but you don’t. So I’m telling you not to talk to me.”
“I-” I began. But she was already walking away from me. So I shouted, “Why?”
Becca turned and looked back at me, her face twisted into a grimace, her eyes glassy. I waited for words, but none came. She turned away from me and continued power-walking away while I stood there, hurt and confused and angry.
And then it slapped me in the face.
One week before we started high school, Becca confided to me that she had been having, “Like, this dream…”
In the dream, she met a brown-haired boy with totally sky-blue eyes who was the love of her life. Becca, being the artist type, even made a sketch of him using her colored pencils so I could see what he looked like.
And then, on the first day of high school, there he was. His name was James and he was brown-haired and blue-eyed and he was the love of Becca’s life.
James and Becca became, like, one person almost immediately, even though he was a junior and she a freshman. They did everything together, and went everywhere together, and neither of their parents had any problem with that, because they were both freaky-responsible. Top of their class, lots of college-impressing extracurricular activities, no pregnancies.
When James hit the end of his senior year and went away to college, no one even blinked when a reasonably priced engagement ring appeared.
And things were perfect, until James got in his car and started driving home for Christmas break that year.
There was a police report, but the important words in it were, “drunk driver,” “opposite direction,” “same lane,” and “killed instantly.”
At the funeral, I held Becca while snot and tears and grief ran down her face so hard I forgot to cry.
For a long time afterwards, she wouldn’t talk about what happened. Sometimes we did things, and sometimes we didn’t do anything at all except sit there.
And then one day she was ready to say what she had to say, and it was this: “If you ever drink and drive, you are dead to me.”
As I remembered all of this, I could feel my lungs collapse inside me. I fell down on the grass and bawled.
CHAPTER 4
Kids aged seventeen-and-364-days are under a different set of rules than “kids” aged seventeen-and-365-days. And we all know where I fall. Birthday, remember?
It blew my mind when I found a copy of my judgment on the mail pile at my house, including information about when and where I was supposed to report for my community service.
Specifically, 8 PM to 11 PM Monday through Saturday at one of the local homeless shelters.
State law designates that kids can’t work past 9 PM on a school night. Every kid who ever decided to do something stupid knows that.
But like I said – I wasn’t a kid.
Still, the hours were unusual.
I hopped online to find out more about the Sundown Shelter.
It seems that the Sundown Shelter had an ominous moniker for a very specific reason. Back when I was in Girl Scouts, we used to volunteer at shelters all the time, and most of them were, in the words of my troop leader, “Three hots and a cot.”
That’s not how Sundown works. Instead, it opens up every night at eight PM and closes again every morning at nine AM. This was according to their Website, which also boasted an address and phone number, both of which I already had on my papers.
I should amend that “opens and closes” to “opened and closed.” The place is gone now.
Still curious about the place I would be spending most of my nights for the next few months, I threw Sundown Shelter into a search engine to see what I could see. Not much. A couple of places that listed the addresses of local shelters. One in particular was interesting, because it allowed people to make comments, which ranged from, “Clean shelter, friendly staff. Recommend!” to “Don’t go there if you’re hungry, they don’t have food,” to “One of the volunteerz was totally hawt!”
Awesome.
I clicked around a bit more, looking for information and putting off calling Sundown and figuring out what day I should show up.
After something like an hour of poking around, checking email, and trying new and exciting search engines, I sighed, picked up the phone, and called the number.
There was no answer.
I glanced at the clock on the computer monitor and saw that it was six PM. I knew the shelter didn’t open until eight, but I figured someone had to be there. A janitor. A volunteer.
Uh-uh. Not even voice mail, or an answering machine.
I hung up the phone and dialed a second time, certain that I’d hit a bad digit. Then my mother walked in. I could tell by the look on her face that I was doing something wrong.
I cocked an eyebrow.
“I believe I removed your phone privileges.”
I looked at the receiver in my hand for a moment. Then I held up my paperwork. “Community service.”
“Oh.” My mom paused for a moment. “When do you start?”
“That’s what I’m trying to find out, but no one is answering.”
Chuck appeared in the doorway behind my mother. For the first time, I noticed that my mom was more dressed up than usual. Her impeccable business suit had been replaced by an impeccable (and also tiny) dress that I didn’t recognize. Chuck had upgraded from whatever a trainer wears when he goes out to whatever a trainer wears when he wants to go out in style.
“We about ready?” he said.
My mother ran her tongue over her teeth – her thinking face – and looked at me. “You know what? It’s Friday night. You should just head over there tonight and introduce yourself. Maybe you can get some of your hours knocked off for good behavior.”
I considered defying her. Calling her bluff, telling her that I knew she was hoping I’d be gone when she and Chuck got back from an incredibly expensive night so they could have the house to themselves for an hour. When really, all they needed was five minutes. Tops.
Instead, I sighed, and told my mom I’d figure out what the bus schedule was, and that I would see her later.
And so, two book chapters, some Googling, one reheated Chinese take-out dinner and a bus ride later, I found myself in front of Sundown Shelter.
Dusk had arrived, casting the street into various shades of black and grey and street-light orange.
Sundown sat in front of me, squat on the pavement, part of a series of shops and storefronts with large windows and merchandise artfully backlit in hopes that you’d come back to buy it at a more normal hour. Sundown’s windows, by contrast, were dark, as though thick curtains had been pulled over them.
I knocked on the door, though I was sure it was open, being a shelter.
I stood for a minute, taking in my surroundings, and was just about to try the knob when the door swung open on well-oiled hinges.
That’s how I met my very first vampire.
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You want a story? Let me tell you a story.
Last August, five things happened to me:
1) I turned 18. This is important later.
2) I started my senior year of high school as a social pariah.
3) My parents got divorced, and my mom kicked my dad out of the house and let her personal trainer, Chuck, move in.
4) My grandpa died.
5) He left me a vampire-slaying kit.
Well. Kind of. That’s all jumbled up, but I’ll break it down in a minute.
Let’s start with me turning 18. When you’re born in August, before you can enter school in most places you have to take a test – are you smart enough to enter when you’re a year younger than everyone else, or are you dumb enough that you end up a year older than everyone else?
Ultimately, I fell into the dumb category, although the test I failed had more to do with me being clumsy than anything else. When I cried and told my mother that I didn’t get to go to school because I was stupid, she told me that the only reason I hadn’t gotten in was my lack of coordination.
I’m sure she chose to dumb that statement down to something I could understand.
In essence, I didn’t get into school because I couldn’t stand on one foot. That’s what held me back.
I know, right? The girl who can’t stand on one foot gets a vampire-slaying kit. I’m pretty sure they’re not going to make a TV show out of my life.
As far as the divorce goes, that had its own complications. My mom is a lawyer, so she talked to a couple of guys in her firm and got all her papers in a row, and bam, my dad’s out the door and living in an apartment, and trying to find a job.
Which sucked for him, because he let my mom work high-powered lawyer hours while he did the stay-at-home thing. Man has a college education and no work experience, unless he wants to open a daddy day care.
Which I’m guessing he didn’t. I don’t know. Haven’t talked to him recently. Been preoccupied.
But you know that.
Then there was my grandpa dying. People always ask you, when someone dies in your family: Were you close? What do you say to that? “Nah? Didn’t like him very much? Glad he’s gone?”
The real answer is, I was close with my grandpa before he started to get old. I mean, actually got old. From walking to wheelchair, deaf, can’t remember anything, muscles all loose so he can’t talk old.
I loved my grandpa. I did. But that was hard to watch, and I wasn’t ready for it. You know how they always say, “Oh, it was a blessing,” when someone like that dies?
I think it was, for him. Whatever’s next after this life, wherever he went had to be better than to be trapped in that body while it fell apart on him.
I said he gave me a vampire slaying kit, but that’s not true. Or rather, it is and it isn’t.
He was my mom’s dad, and she didn’t need the house, or anything in it. She went in, took some pictures and a few things she remembered from when she was a girl. Told me I could go in there and take whatever I wanted.
So one day last summer, I went through the whole house. All of it.
Took the candy dish he had. He always used to keep jellybeans in there. I wasn’t much of a fan of jellybeans, but I’d always have a few when I was there.
It was like candy corn at Halloween. No one really likes the stuff, but you have to have a piece or two to make the season feel right. You know?
Maybe you don’t know.
Mom already had the pictures, so I figured that was pretty much it for stuff I needed. And then I got to the coat closet.
That was one place I always loved in grandpa’s house. I don’t know what it was, maybe an old leather coat, maybe a set of boots, but I loved the way that closet smelled. I used to go in there when I was little and close the door, and just sit.
So that’s what I did. Just for a minute or two. Or that was the plan. What happened was, I was tired and needed a nap and I took one, and when I woke up all the light from outside was gone and there I was, sitting in my dead grandpa’s dark, dark, dark closet.
So I fumbled around, but I couldn’t find the doorknob. Don’t know how that happened. So I reached for the pull chain for the light, and it came on, and I realized that the reason I couldn’t find the doorknob was that I was all turned around and facing the back of the closet.
And what do you know? There’s a little wooden panel back there. Never saw it as a kid.
So I pulled at it, and there’s this glossy black box inside.
I pick up the box, and step out of the closet. The thing looked like something you’d stick jewelry into, only it was a little bit too big, and way too heavy.
I figured I’d found the family jewels or something, so I cracked it open. Didn’t even notice the big silver cross on the top of the box at first.
What’s inside? Stakes. Wooden stakes. Five of the things, all sharp and pointed. And a bunch of little crosses on necklaces. And some vials of water. Holy water, I would guess.
And this little pistol thing. With two hammers, and some powder, and a leather bag with these little balls I found out later were pure silver. Worth a few bucks. More than a few.
Now I ask you – what do you do with something like that? Sell it? Keep it? Hide it back in the closet to freak out the people who buy the house?
I know what you don’t do. You don’t tell your mom, or your dad, or anyone. Especially if you take it out of the house and stick it in your trunk.
I do recommend you go back into the closet and see if there’s anything else in that little cubbyhole, though. I thought maybe there’d be more stuff, or a letter explaining that we were part of a long line of vampire slayers, or maybe a letter from Joss Whedon, that guy who created “Buffy the Vampire Slayer.”
But no.
I mean, there was a note, but all it said was:
THEY’RE REAL. FIGHT THEM.
CHAPTER 2
So that was the start of August.
Then came the end of August, and the accident.
There’s a whole lot of stuff that went into that. Let me try to get all the details in order.
Okay, so, parents are divorced. Grandpa is dead. I’ve got a vampire slaying kit.
Chuck’s car breaks down.
Chuck, you’ll remember, was my mom’s boy-toy. I suppose it’s mean to call him that, but I didn’t ask for him to be part of my life and he didn’t pretend he was part of mine. My mom started working out a couple of years ago to “help her deal with some stress.” She said it was cheaper than riding the leather couch.
Yeah, I know how that sounds.
At any rate, Chuck was a personal trainer, which I guess means he had a lot of free time. He’d go into the gym where he worked a few hours a week and do training stuff. I guess. Like I said, I didn’t want to know anything about him.
So one day I’m sitting at home, doing nothing, because my best friend is out of the country and I’m what you call “shy” when you’re under the age of five and “someone who suffers social phobias” when you get over the age of five.
And here comes Chuck. His car is in the shop, and he needs a ride to pick it up. The conversation went like this.
Him: “I’ll give you twenty bucks to take me.”
Me: “We don’t talk.”
Him: “Fine.”
And I drive him over, in my used-but-not-too-used car, which is one of the perks of being the daughter of a high-powered lawyer.
That’s where we ran into Lindsey.
How to describe Lindsey? Imagine that you have a best friend when you’re in grade school. You have brown hair, she has red. You’re both kind of cute.
Then you hit the fifth grade, and suddenly she’s cute, and you’re, you know, Lucy. And then in middle school, she’s hot, and you’re, you know, Lucy.
Then high school… you get the idea.
That’s the long way of saying that we grew apart, and started running in different social circles. I can’t believe I talk like that sometimes.
At any rate, we weren’t friends, and we didn’t hang. And didn’t try. And then, I’m sitting around waiting to find out if Chuck can take his car home or what, and here comes Lindsey, and she says, “What are you doing Friday?”
I looked up at her. There wasn’t anyone else there, so I knew she was talking to me, but it wasn’t the kind of thing that happened to me usually. So I totally forgot that Friday was my birthday, and that I was figuring I’d be getting together with my dad, and I said, “Nothing.”
“My parents are out of town, so it’s party central at my house. You should come,” said Lindsey.
I tried not to look incredulous. “Yeah. Maybe.”
“Bring your friend,” said Lindsey, and she looked over at Chuck, and everything snapped into place. She wasn’t really inviting me, she was inviting my hot boyfriend by proxy.
Which in retrospect seems really awful. But it’s high school. People do that. And I wasn’t really going to go anyway, so what did it matter?
I sort of nodded my head, but the person who was changing Lindsey’s oil came out then with a bill and a little oil on his face and probably six-pack abs, so I didn’t exist to Lindsey any more.
Which was fine.
Until Friday, when it wasn’t fine any more. Because my mom left a note on the table that she and Chuck were going out that night, and to get myself pizza or Chinese.
And then my dad didn’t call to take me out on my birthday, or at all. So I finally called him at like eight at night, and we talked, but he didn’t remember what day it was and for some reason I didn’t want to have to tell him that his only child was turning into a legal adult because that seemed like something a kid would do.
So I got in my car around ten and went to Lindsey’s place.
When I rang the doorbell, the party was in full swing. I bumped into Lindsey almost immediately, and when she asked about “the new boyfriend” I told her that Chuck was actually mom’s new boyfriend.
Then I headed to the kitchen and grabbed a cup of what I thought was punch.
At first, the drink I was holding was just something to do with my hands as I walked from room to room.
As the night wore on, it was more like a lifeline.
The more I felt out of place, the more I drank. The more I drank, the more I felt out of place.
Finally, around one, I realized that I hated being with people who were basically strangers even more than I hated being alone, and I decided to head home. And since no one knew I was there (outside of Lindsey, who was walking around playing hostess) no one thought to see whether or not I needed a ride.
I got into my car, feeling a little dizzy. I started driving, and I realized after three or four blocks that I had already taken a wrong turn, that there was something in the punch from the booze family, that I was drunk, and that I was lost, despite having been at the party five minutes ago.
Most vampire stories start here – with the helpful stranger, or the dangerous creepy guy in the shadows.
This isn’t that kind of story.
I opened a window and sucked in some of the night air to clear my head. I thought about what I was doing, and because I was kind of drunk and also mad and a little stupid, I went, oh, I’m fine, I’ll be okay.
Then there’s a blank spot, where I crashed my car into a telephone pole.
Lucky for me, no one was hurt. I got a couple of days in the hospital while they watched me and waited to see if something was wrong with me, and then I got a court date and permission to go home.
Then school started again.
When I got up for the first day, I didn’t go right to school. I had this internship at a local printing press, where I was doing basic print jobs at less than minimum wage in order to prepare myself for my eventual career in graphic arts.
Did I mention my car was totaled, so I had to get up super-early so I could take a bus?
In the afternoon, I headed back to school, where I had two art classes, one English course, and a computer programming class I was taking because someone in administration had filed it under “math,” and I needed to raise my math GPA or suffer the perils of community college.
That kind of thing was important to me then. I wanted to get away from my life, and an out-of-state college seemed like the best way to do that.
I’ve never been the chatty type at school, generally opting to speak only when spoken to. Which might explain why I only had one good friend.
So it took me a while to realize that no one was speaking to me, and that no one was going to speak to me for a long time.
My misadventure in the car had been tracked back to the party, still fully in motion at 3 AM. The cops had shown up en masse, and nearly everyone there had been taken into custody.
A lot of parents got a phone call that night, and the punishments had been handed down harshly, as though from an angry Greek god.
I had, with one drunken driving episode, turned almost every member of the senior class against me.
Did I care? Sure, then. But now? Let me have those problems again, please.
CHAPTER 3
I guess I should stop acting like none of what happened to me affects me now. It does, but in a weird way that I’ll explain in a bit. There was one part that I thought was going to kill me at the time. Losing my best friend.
I guess I should talk about that.
There’s not a strong criminal element at my former high school.
Some places have gangs, or bullies, or whatever, that make some classmates vanish for days or weeks or months or semesters at a time, but my school doesn’t have any of that.
What we do have is a lot of people who, like me, are living at well above the poverty line. And if eighteen years of spinning around on a big blue ball have taught me anything, it’s this: Kids who don’t need to lie, cheat, or steal to get what they want still will lie, cheat and steal to get what they want.
And when you’re a kid whose parents have money, you don’t usually end up in jail. Or juvenile detention.
You get community service.
What always bugged me about kids who got community service was the fact that they would whine just as much as I imagine kids who go to jail do. Instead of spending a few months locked up, they would have to spend a few nights and weekends helping people, and more often than not the kid in question would act like they were being forced to do hard time.
I mean, for me, I had the option of community service or going to jail. So trust me, I’d much, much, much rather do something good for people than sit in a cell where people can watch me use the toilet.
Driving drunk in my state is a big deal, especially underage. Usually, your license is gone until you’re 21. If you’re lucky. If you’re REAL lucky.
But I guess the judge bought my totally true story about not knowing that the punch was spiked. Even though I’m sure he gets that one all the time.
At any rate, my punishment was handed out thusly:
I lost my license for a year.
And I was assigned four months of community service.
All of this happened incredibly quickly. My mom might not be great at maintaining relationships, but she knows a lot of excellent lawyers.
But a driver’s license? That’s nothing. That’s not as bad as what came next.
Becca had received special dispensation from the school district to start the school year a little late, because she was off with her family in Italy on what they called an “Educational Journey.” The first week of school was actually the first two days of school – a Thursday and a Friday – and Becca, a valedictorian-to-be, would have no problem missing the first couple of days and starting on Monday.
I guess you’d think that getting into a drunken driving accident would be the sort of thing to upset my parents, but mostly they blamed each other.
Kinda.
My dad thought that the divorce had taken a toll on me and suggested family counseling, and my mother, who had decided she wasn’t interested in counseling during the divorce period, said that I had been given too much freedom.
So she took away my phone privileges and called it a day.
That meant I couldn’t call Becca in Italy. And I couldn’t call her Sunday night when she got home.
And it also meant that by the time I saw her on Monday afternoon, she was already not speaking to me.
At first I didn’t realize I was being ignored. Thanks to the city bus dragging me from internship to school at limping speed, I was late getting to class, and Becca was in place and taking notes when I walked in.
Then I thought maybe she didn’t see me when she walked out the door the moment the bell rang.
Then I noticed that I couldn’t catch up to her in the hallway, because she was walking too fast.
Then I noticed that even when I called her name, she wasn’t acknowledging me.
And then I finally caught up to her, walking away from school at breakneck speed after the final bell. I called to her, and when she didn’t hear me, I ran until I was in step with her.
“How was your trip?”
No answer.
“What all did you see? Did you go on those boats in that one city, or-”
Becca turned to me. “I am not speaking to you. I was hoping you would realize that, but you don’t. So I’m telling you not to talk to me.”
“I-” I began. But she was already walking away from me. So I shouted, “Why?”
Becca turned and looked back at me, her face twisted into a grimace, her eyes glassy. I waited for words, but none came. She turned away from me and continued power-walking away while I stood there, hurt and confused and angry.
And then it slapped me in the face.
One week before we started high school, Becca confided to me that she had been having, “Like, this dream…”
In the dream, she met a brown-haired boy with totally sky-blue eyes who was the love of her life. Becca, being the artist type, even made a sketch of him using her colored pencils so I could see what he looked like.
And then, on the first day of high school, there he was. His name was James and he was brown-haired and blue-eyed and he was the love of Becca’s life.
James and Becca became, like, one person almost immediately, even though he was a junior and she a freshman. They did everything together, and went everywhere together, and neither of their parents had any problem with that, because they were both freaky-responsible. Top of their class, lots of college-impressing extracurricular activities, no pregnancies.
When James hit the end of his senior year and went away to college, no one even blinked when a reasonably priced engagement ring appeared.
And things were perfect, until James got in his car and started driving home for Christmas break that year.
There was a police report, but the important words in it were, “drunk driver,” “opposite direction,” “same lane,” and “killed instantly.”
At the funeral, I held Becca while snot and tears and grief ran down her face so hard I forgot to cry.
For a long time afterwards, she wouldn’t talk about what happened. Sometimes we did things, and sometimes we didn’t do anything at all except sit there.
And then one day she was ready to say what she had to say, and it was this: “If you ever drink and drive, you are dead to me.”
As I remembered all of this, I could feel my lungs collapse inside me. I fell down on the grass and bawled.
CHAPTER 4
Kids aged seventeen-and-364-days are under a different set of rules than “kids” aged seventeen-and-365-days. And we all know where I fall. Birthday, remember?
It blew my mind when I found a copy of my judgment on the mail pile at my house, including information about when and where I was supposed to report for my community service.
Specifically, 8 PM to 11 PM Monday through Saturday at one of the local homeless shelters.
State law designates that kids can’t work past 9 PM on a school night. Every kid who ever decided to do something stupid knows that.
But like I said – I wasn’t a kid.
Still, the hours were unusual.
I hopped online to find out more about the Sundown Shelter.
It seems that the Sundown Shelter had an ominous moniker for a very specific reason. Back when I was in Girl Scouts, we used to volunteer at shelters all the time, and most of them were, in the words of my troop leader, “Three hots and a cot.”
That’s not how Sundown works. Instead, it opens up every night at eight PM and closes again every morning at nine AM. This was according to their Website, which also boasted an address and phone number, both of which I already had on my papers.
I should amend that “opens and closes” to “opened and closed.” The place is gone now.
Still curious about the place I would be spending most of my nights for the next few months, I threw Sundown Shelter into a search engine to see what I could see. Not much. A couple of places that listed the addresses of local shelters. One in particular was interesting, because it allowed people to make comments, which ranged from, “Clean shelter, friendly staff. Recommend!” to “Don’t go there if you’re hungry, they don’t have food,” to “One of the volunteerz was totally hawt!”
Awesome.
I clicked around a bit more, looking for information and putting off calling Sundown and figuring out what day I should show up.
After something like an hour of poking around, checking email, and trying new and exciting search engines, I sighed, picked up the phone, and called the number.
There was no answer.
I glanced at the clock on the computer monitor and saw that it was six PM. I knew the shelter didn’t open until eight, but I figured someone had to be there. A janitor. A volunteer.
Uh-uh. Not even voice mail, or an answering machine.
I hung up the phone and dialed a second time, certain that I’d hit a bad digit. Then my mother walked in. I could tell by the look on her face that I was doing something wrong.
I cocked an eyebrow.
“I believe I removed your phone privileges.”
I looked at the receiver in my hand for a moment. Then I held up my paperwork. “Community service.”
“Oh.” My mom paused for a moment. “When do you start?”
“That’s what I’m trying to find out, but no one is answering.”
Chuck appeared in the doorway behind my mother. For the first time, I noticed that my mom was more dressed up than usual. Her impeccable business suit had been replaced by an impeccable (and also tiny) dress that I didn’t recognize. Chuck had upgraded from whatever a trainer wears when he goes out to whatever a trainer wears when he wants to go out in style.
“We about ready?” he said.
My mother ran her tongue over her teeth – her thinking face – and looked at me. “You know what? It’s Friday night. You should just head over there tonight and introduce yourself. Maybe you can get some of your hours knocked off for good behavior.”
I considered defying her. Calling her bluff, telling her that I knew she was hoping I’d be gone when she and Chuck got back from an incredibly expensive night so they could have the house to themselves for an hour. When really, all they needed was five minutes. Tops.
Instead, I sighed, and told my mom I’d figure out what the bus schedule was, and that I would see her later.
And so, two book chapters, some Googling, one reheated Chinese take-out dinner and a bus ride later, I found myself in front of Sundown Shelter.
Dusk had arrived, casting the street into various shades of black and grey and street-light orange.
Sundown sat in front of me, squat on the pavement, part of a series of shops and storefronts with large windows and merchandise artfully backlit in hopes that you’d come back to buy it at a more normal hour. Sundown’s windows, by contrast, were dark, as though thick curtains had been pulled over them.
I knocked on the door, though I was sure it was open, being a shelter.
I stood for a minute, taking in my surroundings, and was just about to try the knob when the door swung open on well-oiled hinges.
That’s how I met my very first vampire.
Buy Blood Calling on the Kindle
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Thursday, September 1, 2011
Blood Calling: The Cover, Take Five
I'm thinking maybe a different font, but this is right out of the book... thoughts, anyone?
Tuesday, August 30, 2011
Blood Calling: More Cover Options
More cover options. Not quite sure they go with the book, but there's something about 'em... Hmmm...
Sunday, August 28, 2011
Friday, August 26, 2011
Blood Calling: An Excerpt:
Coming in 2 weeks:
CHAPTER 1
You want a story? Let me tell you a story.
Last August, five things happened to me:
1) I turned 18. This is important later.
2) I started my senior year of high school as a social pariah.
3) My parents got divorced, and my mom kicked my dad out of the house and let her personal trainer, Chuck, move in.
4) My grandpa died.
5) He left me a vampire-slaying kit.
Well. Kind of. That’s all jumbled up, but I’ll break it down in a minute.
Let’s start with me turning 18. When you’re born in August, before you can enter school in most places you have to take a test – are you smart enough to enter when you’re a year younger than everyone else, or are you dumb enough that you end up a year older than everyone else?
Ultimately, I fell into the dumb category, although the test I failed had more to do with me being clumsy than anything else. When I cried and told my mother that I didn’t get to go to school because I was stupid, she told me that the only reason I hadn’t gotten in was my lack of coordination.
I’m sure she chose to dumb that statement down to something I could understand.
In essence, I didn’t get into school because I couldn’t stand on one foot. That’s what held me back.
I know, right? The girl who can’t stand on one foot gets a vampire-slaying kit. I’m pretty sure they’re not going to make a TV show out of my life.
As far as the divorce goes, that had its own complications. My mom is actually a lawyer, so she talked to a couple of guys in her firm and got all her papers in a row, and bam, my dad’s out the door and living in an apartment, and trying to find a job.
Which sucked for him, because he let my mom work high-powered lawyer hours while he did the stay-at-home thing. Man has a college education and no work experience, unless he wants to open a daddy day care.
Which I’m guessing he didn’t. I don’t know. Haven’t talked to him in a few months. Been preoccupied.
But you know that.
Then there was my grandpa dying. People always ask you, when someone dies in your family: Were you close? What do you say to that? “Nah? Didn’t like him very much? Glad he’s gone?”
The real answer is, I was close with my grandpa before started to get old. I mean, actually got old. From walking to wheelchair, deaf, can’t remember anything, muscles all loose so he can’t talk old.
I loved my grandpa. I did. But that was hard to watch, and I wasn’t ready for it. You know how they always say, “Oh, it was a blessing,” when someone like that dies?
I think it was, for him. Whatever’s next after this life thing, wherever he went had to be better than to be trapped in that body while it fell apart on him.
I said he gave me a vampire slaying kit, but that’s not true. Or rather, it is and it isn’t.
He was my mom’s dad, and she didn’t need the house, or anything in it. She went in, took some pictures and a few things she remembered from when she was a girl. Told me I could go in there and take whatever I wanted.
So one day last summer, I went through the whole house. All of it.
Took the candy dish he had. He always used to keep jellybeans in there. I wasn’t much of a fan of jellybeans, but I’d always have a few when I was there.
It was like candy corn at Halloween. No one really likes the stuff, you have to have a piece or two to make the season feel right. You know?
Maybe you don’t know.
Mom already had the pictures, so I figured that was pretty much it for stuff I needed. And then I got to the coat closet.
That was one place I always loved in grandpa’s house. I don’t know what it was, maybe an old leather coat, maybe a set of boots, but I loved the way that closet smelled. I used to go in there when I was little and close the door, and just sit.
So that’s what I did. Just for a minute or two. Or that was the plan. What happened was, I was tired and needed a nap and I took one, and when I woke up all the light from outside was gone and there I was, sitting in my dead grandpa’s dark, dark, dark closet.
So I fumbled around, but I couldn’t find the doorknob. Don’t know how that happened. So I reached for the pull chain for the light, and it came on, and I realized that the reason I couldn’t find the doorknob was that I was all turned around and facing the back of the closet.
And what do you know? There’s a little wooden panel back there. Never saw it as a kid.
So I pulled at it, and there’s this glossy black box inside.
I pick up the box, and step out of the closet. The thing looked like something you’d stick jewelry into, only it was a little bit too big, and way too heavy.
I figured I’d found the family jewels or something, so I cracked it open. Didn’t even notice the big silver cross on the top of the box at first.
What’s inside? Stakes. Wooden stakes. Five of the things, all sharp and pointed. And a bunch of little crosses on necklaces. And some vials of water. Holy water, I would guess.
And this little pistol thing. With two hammers, and some powder, and a leather bag with these little balls I found out later were pure silver. Worth a few bucks. More than a few.
Now I ask you – what do you do with something like that? Sell it? Keep it? Hide it back in the closet to freak out the people who buy the house?
I know what you don’t do. You don’t tell your mom, or your dad, or anyone. Especially if you take it out of the house and stick it in your trunk.
I do recommend you go back into the closet and see if there’s anything else in that little cubbyhole, though. I thought maybe there’d be more stuff, or a letter explaining that we were part of a long line of vampire slayers, or maybe a letter from Joss Whedon, that guy who created “Buffy the Vampire Slayer.”
But no.
I mean, there was a note, but all it said was:
THEY’RE REAL. FIGHT THEM.
CHAPTER 1
You want a story? Let me tell you a story.
Last August, five things happened to me:
1) I turned 18. This is important later.
2) I started my senior year of high school as a social pariah.
3) My parents got divorced, and my mom kicked my dad out of the house and let her personal trainer, Chuck, move in.
4) My grandpa died.
5) He left me a vampire-slaying kit.
Well. Kind of. That’s all jumbled up, but I’ll break it down in a minute.
Let’s start with me turning 18. When you’re born in August, before you can enter school in most places you have to take a test – are you smart enough to enter when you’re a year younger than everyone else, or are you dumb enough that you end up a year older than everyone else?
Ultimately, I fell into the dumb category, although the test I failed had more to do with me being clumsy than anything else. When I cried and told my mother that I didn’t get to go to school because I was stupid, she told me that the only reason I hadn’t gotten in was my lack of coordination.
I’m sure she chose to dumb that statement down to something I could understand.
In essence, I didn’t get into school because I couldn’t stand on one foot. That’s what held me back.
I know, right? The girl who can’t stand on one foot gets a vampire-slaying kit. I’m pretty sure they’re not going to make a TV show out of my life.
As far as the divorce goes, that had its own complications. My mom is actually a lawyer, so she talked to a couple of guys in her firm and got all her papers in a row, and bam, my dad’s out the door and living in an apartment, and trying to find a job.
Which sucked for him, because he let my mom work high-powered lawyer hours while he did the stay-at-home thing. Man has a college education and no work experience, unless he wants to open a daddy day care.
Which I’m guessing he didn’t. I don’t know. Haven’t talked to him in a few months. Been preoccupied.
But you know that.
Then there was my grandpa dying. People always ask you, when someone dies in your family: Were you close? What do you say to that? “Nah? Didn’t like him very much? Glad he’s gone?”
The real answer is, I was close with my grandpa before started to get old. I mean, actually got old. From walking to wheelchair, deaf, can’t remember anything, muscles all loose so he can’t talk old.
I loved my grandpa. I did. But that was hard to watch, and I wasn’t ready for it. You know how they always say, “Oh, it was a blessing,” when someone like that dies?
I think it was, for him. Whatever’s next after this life thing, wherever he went had to be better than to be trapped in that body while it fell apart on him.
I said he gave me a vampire slaying kit, but that’s not true. Or rather, it is and it isn’t.
He was my mom’s dad, and she didn’t need the house, or anything in it. She went in, took some pictures and a few things she remembered from when she was a girl. Told me I could go in there and take whatever I wanted.
So one day last summer, I went through the whole house. All of it.
Took the candy dish he had. He always used to keep jellybeans in there. I wasn’t much of a fan of jellybeans, but I’d always have a few when I was there.
It was like candy corn at Halloween. No one really likes the stuff, you have to have a piece or two to make the season feel right. You know?
Maybe you don’t know.
Mom already had the pictures, so I figured that was pretty much it for stuff I needed. And then I got to the coat closet.
That was one place I always loved in grandpa’s house. I don’t know what it was, maybe an old leather coat, maybe a set of boots, but I loved the way that closet smelled. I used to go in there when I was little and close the door, and just sit.
So that’s what I did. Just for a minute or two. Or that was the plan. What happened was, I was tired and needed a nap and I took one, and when I woke up all the light from outside was gone and there I was, sitting in my dead grandpa’s dark, dark, dark closet.
So I fumbled around, but I couldn’t find the doorknob. Don’t know how that happened. So I reached for the pull chain for the light, and it came on, and I realized that the reason I couldn’t find the doorknob was that I was all turned around and facing the back of the closet.
And what do you know? There’s a little wooden panel back there. Never saw it as a kid.
So I pulled at it, and there’s this glossy black box inside.
I pick up the box, and step out of the closet. The thing looked like something you’d stick jewelry into, only it was a little bit too big, and way too heavy.
I figured I’d found the family jewels or something, so I cracked it open. Didn’t even notice the big silver cross on the top of the box at first.
What’s inside? Stakes. Wooden stakes. Five of the things, all sharp and pointed. And a bunch of little crosses on necklaces. And some vials of water. Holy water, I would guess.
And this little pistol thing. With two hammers, and some powder, and a leather bag with these little balls I found out later were pure silver. Worth a few bucks. More than a few.
Now I ask you – what do you do with something like that? Sell it? Keep it? Hide it back in the closet to freak out the people who buy the house?
I know what you don’t do. You don’t tell your mom, or your dad, or anyone. Especially if you take it out of the house and stick it in your trunk.
I do recommend you go back into the closet and see if there’s anything else in that little cubbyhole, though. I thought maybe there’d be more stuff, or a letter explaining that we were part of a long line of vampire slayers, or maybe a letter from Joss Whedon, that guy who created “Buffy the Vampire Slayer.”
But no.
I mean, there was a note, but all it said was:
THEY’RE REAL. FIGHT THEM.
Monday, July 11, 2011
Some Good News, Some Okay News, and More Good News
I got in touch with Ethiopia Reads about my plan to give them 10% of my book sales, and was met with kindly approval.
I’d quote directly from the email they sent me, but that’s generally considered a little uncouth. Suffice to say, they’ve worked with other folks who’ve done similar things. I’m pretty stoked to know that they’re stoked.
As for the okay news, I got another review of “Mercy:”
For the majority of this book I had no idea how Georgina’s daughter Mercy plays into the all of this except for Georgina writing about her adopted daughter and giving examples of what she had to do to integrate her daughter into society and how one of the survivors, Tracy, reminds her of Mercy. In the end it does make sense and shows a mother’s undying love for her child who she doesn't know is dead or alive. That love is what keeps Georgina going.
Three stars. You know, you can’t win ‘em all, and I’m deeply grateful for every review I get. So, you know… still a win!
Finally, a long-awaited review finally goes live – this time for “Baby Teeth: A Blood Calling Novelette:”
This is the third work of his that I’ve read, and I’m absolutely in love with his writing style and imaginative storylines.
And speaking of “Blood Calling,” the book that shares a character with “Baby Teeth,” the book is written. It needs editing, and some copyediting, but the book is now 90-95% of what it’s going to be. And it really will be coming out in August.
Also, after talking to friends and a couple fans, I’ve decided to release my very first novella, “Pedestrian Wolves” (which may or may not have a new title when I’m done editing it).
So, yeah. Things are good.
I’d quote directly from the email they sent me, but that’s generally considered a little uncouth. Suffice to say, they’ve worked with other folks who’ve done similar things. I’m pretty stoked to know that they’re stoked.
As for the okay news, I got another review of “Mercy:”
For the majority of this book I had no idea how Georgina’s daughter Mercy plays into the all of this except for Georgina writing about her adopted daughter and giving examples of what she had to do to integrate her daughter into society and how one of the survivors, Tracy, reminds her of Mercy. In the end it does make sense and shows a mother’s undying love for her child who she doesn't know is dead or alive. That love is what keeps Georgina going.
Three stars. You know, you can’t win ‘em all, and I’m deeply grateful for every review I get. So, you know… still a win!
Finally, a long-awaited review finally goes live – this time for “Baby Teeth: A Blood Calling Novelette:”
This is the third work of his that I’ve read, and I’m absolutely in love with his writing style and imaginative storylines.
And speaking of “Blood Calling,” the book that shares a character with “Baby Teeth,” the book is written. It needs editing, and some copyediting, but the book is now 90-95% of what it’s going to be. And it really will be coming out in August.
Also, after talking to friends and a couple fans, I’ve decided to release my very first novella, “Pedestrian Wolves” (which may or may not have a new title when I’m done editing it).
So, yeah. Things are good.
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