What I’m finding interesting about The Circled Green is that right now I can’t get a handle on its length. When I wrote my first draft of Blood Bound I used 80k as a guide to how close I was, and when I finished it 80k was the total of that draft.

The Circled Green isn’t like that.

At first I used 70k as the guideline – nice and in the middle.

As The Circled Green went on, and things started moving faster than I originally thought, I guessed it might come down to 60k. But now that other things are happening, and I know I need to go back and add some description and further scenes etc. it looks like it might be up to 80k, same as Blood Bound.

So I guess I’ll just have to keep writing and see how this one goes.

What I have also been up to, besides working on The Circled Green, is making playlists. Helps me organise my thoughts a lot, which is cool. Right now the character focus has been on Lauren, and here’s one of the songs.

It’s Vampire by Xandria.

So would you kiss the sun goodbye
And give your life to never die?

What came out of her latest Thursday Night Write was this, a short piece from the long history of Athanasios, a character mentioned repeatedly in Blood Bound, but doesn’t actually appear until the sequel.

Not that this story is from Athanasios’s POV, of course.

He clutched the make-shift stake so hard splinters embedded themselves in his skin. His other hand was empty, held over his heart as if to keep it from bursting in fear. His lips moved in silent prayer as he tried to quietly make his way down the streets. His shoes made a shuffling sound against the stones; the sound was as deafening as the blood pounding in his ears.

Blood. That was what they wanted.

Blood. That was why they had to be stopped.

Something moved in the corner of his vision. A door opened, and a shadow appeared. Then the shadow became a man – the man he was seeking. The man who came into town, strange little boy in tow, and never left his room during the day. He was pale, and the maid reported that he was cold, and he never came to church.

While the maid never officially mentioned the bite marks on her neck he knew that was what she was hiding. That was the confirmation he had needed.

And that was why the hunted was now stalking the hunter.

The monster saw him, smiled… then turned and walked back into the house. He made a point of leaving the door open. An invitation.

He could not pass up such an invitation. Perhaps if he had not been so eager to slay the monster he would have wondered why it would have let him get this far, and so easily. But instead all his thoughts were consumed with the deed he would have to do, and the rewards he would reap after.

The monster would not touch her again. And she would be so grateful to her hero. How could she not love him after that?

Inside the room was like a tomb, even more silent than the streets outside. It was just him, the monster and the strange little boy.

The child was the first to speak. Its accent was odd, and the language one he did not hear outside of church – he knew enough of it to understand what the boy was saying. “Father.” It was the whine of an impatient child, a child told to wait by a parent. The boy looked… hungry.

The monster placed a hand on the boy’s shoulder, then nodded at the one who had come to kill him. “It seems you know what we are. I had hoped that we would leave without it having to come to this. The dead always make a mess of things.”

“Abomination!” he spat, raising the stake with both hands. He almost looked like a threat.

“You really should not have come alone,” the monster said after a moment’s consideration. “You really should not have come at all. But I suppose that cannot be helped now.”

“Father,” whined the child again. “I am hungry.” He fidgeted under the monster’s firm hold.

“Well, at least it is a good thing you are here now. A man has to feed his child one way or another.” He let go of the boy.

The boy smiled, revealing two long fangs.

The man merely sighed. After all, what good would screaming do?

1. Which for me is more Friday Morning Write, but whatever

Even before I met him I had made the choice.

You kind of have to ignore the past if you are going to ever actually work with vampires. But even so, it’s still very hard to ignore all those nagging thoughts.

Like how those hands that touch you and hold you so carefully have so often been stained with blood.

How that mouth that kisses you so softly, so sweetly, has ripped throats open and drained people dry.

I don’t really know which is scarier. Having death being in love with you.

Or being in love with death right back.

Ned and Chuck, the central couple in the prematurely deceased TV show Pushing Daisies, helped inspire me with regards to defining a few subtle traits that help key into the personalities of Delia and Daniel (the MCs of my first novel, Blood Bound). Dee and Daniel were very much formed by the time I really got into Pushing Daisies, but when I noticed vague similarities between the two sets (tall, adorkable and able to bring people into a state of second-life-ish vs short, bubbly and very much alive) another thing became defined.

I had already instinctively started to settle them into a colour scheme (Daniel in somber colours, like Ned, and Dee is brighter ones, like Chuck), but upon noticing the deliberate colour and style schemes for characters¹ I began to pay much closer to clothes and colours, and enhanced the difference in their personalities by looking to characters like Ned and Chuck (mostly Chuck) as ‘fashion models’ for Dee and Daniel.

It seems like such a simple thing, really, but until Pushing Daisies, I just didn’t see it.² So: inspiration/influence.

1. Yes, yes, I know, I was slow. I was clothes (and other stuff) dumb then.
2. Now though I have Seanne. She talks all about different things to do with filming like angles and lighting and costuming and filters it is all very very useful to hear.

LIONHEART: After he is killed and his sister kidnapped by the same magical force, Leander finds himself the champion of the force that resurrected him – the long-dead High Mage blamed for the destruction of their glorious empire – and in a battle three centuries in the making.

BONES: When Dinah Gillespie discovers that the dying can see the dead – and that there is a ghost in her attic – she makes it her mission to do one last good thing before she dies, and set him free by solving a murder that occurred over sixty years ago.

BLOOD BOUND: The only thing that sucks more than vampire boyfriends and brothers is murder.

THE CIRCLED GREEN: A woman with a mysterious past is eight years dead, the man she loved and left behind is convinced by his domineering mother to stop grieving and remarry, and their beautiful daughter is being pursued by a dark faerie determined to have her at any cost – this is what happens after a supernatural being gives up immortality in exchange for human love.

Every time I see that, though, I just want to yell back, “BUT MINE AREN’T IN HIGH SCHOOL!”

 
Delia’s over eighteen for a reason people. Just as Daniel looks about twenty-five.

Definitely not in high school, y’all.

Oh, and mine also have fangs. Coz the biting is the fun bit, right? I like my vampires grey and walking penetrative sex metaphors.

It’s been an interesting journey for me, for the year and a half since I started seriously writing. To say I have learned a lot would be one heck of an understatement. I’ve learned about writing and publishing, discovered books and authors I otherwise would not have heard about. And most importantly of all, I’ve made friends.¹

It’s not all been sunshine, lollipops and rainbows, of course. I never expected it to be easy but I never appreciated how much effort it actually takes to get out the 60-80k worth of words that tells a complete story and that actually makes sense. And even then it’s not perfect first draft.² I have had to learn how to deal with concrit, and while not always easy I can handle it far better than I once did. And I have had to deal with people reacting poorly to the “V word” when they ask what I am writing about. Without hearing anything beyond that word, let alone actually reading anything I have written, I have had people call me “a[nother] hack” who’s “jumping on the [vampire] bandwagon”.³

The other thing I learned since starting writing Blood Bound back in April of last year and was so totally not a really interesting form of exam study procrastination is that I was not going to churn out Blood Bound, edit it quickly, find myself an agent and ta da. After a while I started pinching myself whenever I had that daydream as it was distracting me from my actual work. And somewhere along the line, in these past few months, once JK got through with this current edit of Blood Bound I was going to set it aside in its little folder next to the other novel .odt files and leave it there for the moment. In the meantime I am going to finish working on Lionheart and then, post NaNo, The Circled Green. I’ll keep working on Bones and The Superhero Diaries too, even as my brain keeps adding new levels of complexity, characters and world-building to Blood Bound.

And then I’ll come back to it with more experienced eyes. I’ll add news scenes, rewrite some old ones and maybe even cut some others out. Maybe by then I’ll have an agent or even a book published. And maybe by then vampires will have swung back into “fashion” again. Who knows? The only thing I do know is that I am not giving up on this story, or the stories that follow after it.

So until then, thanks to everyone who has been supporting me. Thanks to JK, Seanne and Rebekah – you in particular are the ones who put up with my ramblings on almost a daily basis. Thanks to all those people who have commented on my blogs regularly, or semi-regularly. And even thank you to those people who stop by randomly, read the snippets of BB and others and comment on how much you loved it and say how it has to be published so you can read the rest right now.⁴ You don’t know how much that brightens my day to find a comment like that in my inbox.

Thanks for the memories, guys. This ride’s been fun – but it’s nowhere near finished yet.

1. One of whom I now am friends with offline, and we’re planning on going flatting when we finally move out of home early next year. *crosses fingers*
2. I’ve also discovered just how horrible I am at spotting my own typos.
3. Which is most definitely not true. I wrote about vampires because that is what I liked and knew. I started writing my first vampire novel back in 2000, when I was 13, and, well… here’s my collection of vampire books
4. Insert “OMG” here if you wish

Sometimes it takes me forever to find that perfect name for a character, and I sometimes go through different variations and stages of names to find “the perfect one”. And until then I just have placeholders.

One example would be one who has yet to have a name, or make an appearance. I’m not really in such of a hurry to give him a name as, in the world of the Blood Bound universe, he does not appear until the third book (along with the rest of the Canadian vampire embassy… yes, BB gets into the vampire politics even more from book two onwards, and three is the big one). And so, in conversation, we simply refer to him as “Canadian Lover”, “Canadian Consort”, “Rivka’s Lover” and the like. While he is definitely not defined solely by his relationship to Rivka, the queen of vampires in Canada, (his maker, his lover, his queen and more), it’s just easiest to call him that. My beta sometimes calls him “Callum”, after the actor she insists would have to play him should there be a movie.¹

But the real character that inspired me to write this blog entry was one from The Circled Green, my upcoming NaNo project. When we meet her, in the prologue, she is young, beautiful, and dying. For the rest of the book she is just a presence, a memory, a tie to the past that keeps the husband she left behind from remarrying even though he should, and the one that follows her daughter about, for reasons both good or bad. While the names of other characters (such as Aurora, Ciar, Duncan, Emily) came pretty easily, her name was very elusive.

Eventually we started referring to her as “Dead Mother” and then “Dead Marni”² and after a while I began wishing that Marni was actually a suitable name for her, except it didn’t make sense, given her background.

But finally, after weeks and weeks of looking and wishing and referring to her as Dead Marni/Dead Mother, I found something. It fit, it was pretty, and it was perfect. She now has a name.

Sorcha. ♥

1. Why do I not just go with this name for him? Callum is the name of one of the MC’s stepbrothers in The Superhero Diaries. The other is Paul. I’m hesitant to re-use names in this fashion, although it’s not completely off the table.
2. Yes, after this Dead Marni, the one from Repo! The Genetic Opera

And it made me think, on characters, author appeal and funny.

Now, while one of my vampires (the adorkable perfumer-slash-assassin Daniel) does have a preference for brunettes, it’s more a case of a particular brunette. It’s made very clear that Charlie’s weakness is redheads, while Lauren’s current partners have leaned more towards brown/black. Rivka’s longterm³ lover (the one she turned) is a blond.

As for Jared and Athanasios… they’re like Captain Jack Harkness. Anything with a zip code.

But really, in the end the only colour that really matters is red… because when it comes to vampires, it’s what’s inside that counts.

1. One of many variations on the theme, actually
2. Correct me if I’m wrong – I’ve only read the first three once, and it was over a year and a half ago, closing in on two.
3. Think centuries