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 The Enforcers. Show all posts
Showing posts with label The Enforcers. 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.”
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