About the creation of the Darkhour Vampires

In March of 1998, my computer died. I had just finished a couple months of grueling work on a project and was desperate for some escape, some creativity to nourish my soul, and very frustrated that my outlet for that creativity, writing, was closed. So off I send the computer to the repairman and prepared to go cold-turkey. Yes, I readily admit I am a computer and writing addict. A few days without either and I go into withdrawal. I had learned when my computer died once before that a typewriter just didn't work to give me my fix. Not like the computer with its free-form approach to writing that allowed for quick changes, deletions, back spacing, revisions. The closest was the old-fashioned pen and paper. So I decided to spend my time plotting and brainstorming while I waited for the computer repairman to restore me to reality.

For a few days I played around with new ideas, looked at old stories I had never found time to finish, and practiced world building, trying to figure out what to write about next.

Then it happened!

Nothing in all my writing career had ever been like this.

Wade, a character in a short story Mother's Love about a mother of two teenagers who happens to be a vampire, stepped out of the story and demanded that I write the tale of how he was first bitten when he was sixteen. Wade's story just flowed from my pen, and I quickly outlined the action. Next, came the story of how Prane, my vampire mother, had come to take her two children and go into hiding to protect them from their father, Stefan. Third was the story I had already told in Mother's Love, which is set seventeen years later, when a murder draws Prane and Wade together. I was in the middle of outlining a fourth book about what happens when Stefan finds Prane and turns Wade into a vampire, when my computer was returned.

I sat down that day and started writing.

Words just poured out of me. Twelve days later I had completed a 54,000 word rough draft in a marathon session of 11 and 14 hour writing days. But I didn't stop, couldn't stop. I immediately started work on the first book, the story of how Wade was bitten.

These books were sensual, erotic like nothing I had ever written. It was a wild ride filled with passion, a half-crazed time when I lived more in the world of my vampires than in the real world. April, May, June, July, August, and finally in September it slowed. I had completed four rough drafts and started the fifth. All were over 50,000 words. Those of you who are writers will understand what I had accomplished. The most frightening part was that when I read the stories I kept finding myself thinking, Damn these are good, these are almost done.

That never happens to me. I'm an evolutionary writer. I write and rewrite and rewrite adding layers to a story. My novel The Murder Game took me ten years before I was satisfied that I had the story right, that the book was done.

I thought, I must be too close to see the flaws. It can't have been that easy. So I put the books away for almost a year, but when I reread them, they still touched me. I started again on the fifth book, the one I had stopped writing because I just couldn't make it work. Now it did. I found myself caught up in the passion and the pleasure, maybe not the heady frenzy of those first days when Wade and Prane had stepped into my life, but still the all encompassing need.

At last I knew what I wanted to spent maybe years writing about.

When I was first writing, I took a class from Science Fiction writer Ray Faraday Nelson. One of our assignments was to figure out our passion, our obsession, the thing we kept writing about over and over. What was underlying all our stories? He explained that our best stories would always be about that passion. We needed to tap deep into our obsessions to be good writers.

I realized that all the stories I was writing were about characters with hidden aspects to their character, a secret past, and the conflict of trying to integrate these two disparaged aspects of the personality. Wade has a horrifying past, a past he doesn't even remember; the series is about his dealing with the conflicts that arise when he does learn about that past, what he is, and what he is capable of. Prane was made a vampire against her will. She must hide what she is for her children's sake.

But there was one more duality that I needed to deal with, my own. These stories are of an adult nature, they include explicit sex. I could have written them just for myself, a secret fantasy, but they won't let them be that. They challenge me to come to terms with my own sexuality, with that part of me that is not quite the person the world outside me sees and expects. For you see my husband was a minister. I was a minister's wife. I had to decide how I really felt, to come to terms with myself. No matter what you write, you are sharing with the world an aspect of yourself that is not readily visible. You are letting people see you in a different light. Whenever a writer writes something of an erotic nature, even if it is just a steamy category romance novel, they must wonder what others will think. Will it change their opinion of you as a person? What if my daughter reads it, what would she think? What if my husband reads it? The members of my church? The writers in my writing class? What will they think of me when they look at me? I am an ordinary, very overweight, past middle-age woman, who wants to spend her time plotting murder and writing about vampires, sexy vampires at that.

It would be a lot easier to write about safe things. But it doesn't work.

You have to write about your passion.

Recently I came across a quote from Joyce Carol Oates that validates what I have learned.

"Never be ashamed of your subject, and of your passion for your subject. You 'forbidden' passions are likely to be the fuel for your writing . . .Your struggle with your buried self, or selves, yields your art."