Everywhere I go I see, in the YA sector, people going, “NO MORE VAMPIRES!” and other words to that effect.
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.
When I woke up this morning, I found in my inbox an email from my beta, JK. Attached were the edited versions of the last three chapters of Blood Bound. That means the second major round of editing, and about the third or fourth round of editing altogether. This is not the rough-around-the-edges Blood Bound I had, but a much smoother, much better version of the novel.
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.
It’s not just in real life that they are not my strength.
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. ♥
