Happy Birthday BMRH! Official site launch day. Not completely cooked, but like all newborns they have some growing to do. So, to begin this blog properly let me give you a ‘lil backstory on the book and writing.
I first attempted to write a novel in my late teens/early twenties. My aunt let me use her computer after I had bought a Brother Word Processor. The Processor turned out to be more of a chore than anything else and, in total, I do not think that I even wrote a full page on it. I worked on that book for almost a year or so, on and off, but ultimately college, girlfriends, work, and plain ignorance killed it.
Over the next couple of decades, I tried several other times, with other ideas, but they all petered out for one reason or another. The idea for my current Vamp romp came to me in January 1995, while I and my then galpal, Tara, were visiting her father in Washington state. Outside of me reading, and loving, Anne Rice’s Vampire Chronicles at the end of the 80′s and beginning of the 90′s, there was nothing going on in my life to lead me toward any kind of inspiration to move me to create an epic vampire series.
I was studying art, playing music in a cool Baltimore band, was a performing poet, and had recently started a design company that produced embrazened T-shirts, caps, dresses, and pimped a national newspaper magazine. If anything, my dreams we all tilted toward writing action-oriented comicbooks. But I was even too busy for that.
All of it changed at 5 a.m. one morning when I awoke from a dream, panting and excited. I felt afire. The dream was simple. My character Cornelius, who was not a character yet in the dream and who had not been named yet, was hovering a few inches over my face staring at me, intently. That was it. That was the sum total of the dream that started it. I began writing that morning. Notes mostly. A few lines. I remember talking about it all fast to Tara when she got up, and I immediately started writing, what I assumed would become the first novel, when we returned home. But life had other intentions.
I had gotten my brother’s old computer from my parent’s house and was working diligently on every idea as they came. Though, within two weeks the computer crashed. All data was lost. Except for my original handwritten notes. At the time, I didn’t know that this was the beginning of a cycle. I then re-started on Tara’s computer. Upon returning home one day after taking a floppy disk with me to get some pages printed I discovered that the disk was no where to be found and my folder on her computer had mysteriously vanished. Within a week, the printed pages that I had made also vanished.
Attempts three thru seven to write that first book were all met with weird fates that were similar to the above, and through it all, I was doing research at the library at UMBC and the main branch in Baltimore, MD. To say that I had gotten frustrated with life taking back what it had apparently gave me would be an understatement. I remember at one point vowing to never start again, ranting to God, but ultimately those were hollow promises.
The thing that did worked through those first years and first attempts at writing was the research. Cornelius looked different than any other vampire that I had ever read about or seen on TV or in a movie. I kept asking why. And I kept receiving answers. I followed every single thread, and in the days before the Internet, it was hard work. Physical. And it required reading massive tomes. So naturally…it took time.
In ’97 I moved to Albuquerque, NM and carried with me all of my amassed notes and the books that I had bought for researching Cornelius, his time frame, and geography. In ‘Burque I was attending UNM and had discovered their map room. This was where I learned how we humans migrated across the globe, and by so doing, figured out the ancient history and migration of the Omjadda.
I wasn’t writing a whole lot during this period. Off and on. I was leery about amounting pages. I was afraid that if I started to write the book again that life would find some way to rip it out of my hands. So mostly, I wrote notes. Then the big story break came when Francine came out for a holiday visit and we went to San Francisco. (Francine is the mother of my children.) She and I went to San Fran so I could delve into the vibe of the city and workout the remainder of Cornelius’s story. It was a strange trip. I let my characters walk within me and followed them to some pretty grimy and seedy places. It got to be too much after awhile – to may independent voices clamoring around inside. The characters started to create a blanket of noise. But I got what I needed.
Since then I’ve learned to place limits when I go for a walk with my characters so I don’t become emotionally overloaded. Heh…its all a learning process when figuring out one’s process, you know. But back in the Duke City, I was writing again. I had a complete book outline. In fact, it grew to two book outlines and I was clocking pages, again mostly notes, in each chapter heading. And the work was frustrating. My dialogue was not merely wood, it was a national forest.
So, I joined the play writing program at UNM.
My first play, Redline, was awarded entry into the Writer’s on the Edge Festival. It was put into production and had a successful, local run. I wrote one other play that also saw the stage and wrote scenes for another play based on the work of e.e.cummings. Satan, my then college laptop, was stolen one evening by a drunk Indian when I wouldn’t let him draw on a painting I was doing, and with it went my third play (the one I liked) and all my writings on the vamp books. Though, this time around I still had, in my possession, older versions of the work saved to disk. So, only the newer materials were gone. And through all of this I was writing and performing my own poetry around town.
In ’98, I took another chance with the vamp universe and wrote a complete comicbook script based off of all my work on the two Cornelius stories. While writing it, I was sure fate was going to intervene and screw it up, by making it disappear, but it didn’t. Fran & I went to ComiCon and I pimped the script with some success. Had I been able to secure an illustrator at that point and time, I would have launched the whole series back in ’99 through Image. But here fate did intervene, and all of the connections that I made at ComiCon were never utilized because I could never secure an illustrator who had enough confidence in their own work and abilities to keep going.
In 2001, after UNM, I proposed to Francine that I could go in either direction: A). Start working on the Cornelius book, get a regular job now that I am out of school to afford advertising for an illustrator-to-hire OR B). Start Poetry Television. We went with option B, as that felt right, and we had no option C. Writing – anything – took a back seat to Ptv as I had to learn how to edit film. I was already a pretty good shooter and photographer, having spent all those years working w/ After Thought Productions back in the 90′s. I converted the studio space I had and began doing regular photo and film shoots.
From ’98 to ’08, I did attempt to write that first novel, telling the beginning of Cornelius’s journey, many…many times. But, all I was ever able to produce was two chapters. And I rewrote those two chapters so many times that even now, after writing two whole books – a film script – and a fourteen webisode serial all based within my vamp world, the thought of re-writing them to fit into what I’m beginning w/ Blood Junky curdles my stomach and makes me ill. But that is what I’m going to have to do one day. Because in 2007 things took another unforeseen turn.
Frustrated with work on Committing Poetry in Times of War (my award-winning documentary film which was released later that same year) I wanted to start a photo project utilizing my condition of vampirism, which I had developed for the Cornelius novels. I collected 3 wonderful female models and together we brainstorm shoot ideas. But fate intervene yet again, and nothing was ever shot. One model moved to Connecticut, another to Florida, and the third got into a bar fight and received a stunning black eye. So instead of becoming more frustrated at not being able to have a side project to vent my CP frustrations I decided to take those photo shoot ideas and write a screenplay. I called this script Bite Me Really Hard and Lin and Z were born.
And if you look at my picture in the back of the book and the film poster for CP you’ll notice that they are the same image, and my plaque for my Mug Shot said to bite me really hard. That’s because, at the time, in my heart, I knew what my next film project was going to be…and it had teeth! But after CP I went to work on two different independent films. One, in Baltimore, and the other in St. Petersburg, FL. Both films crashed when the director spazzed, and ironically enough, I wound up working on both screenplays for those film projects. The producers of the films loved my writing. And so, I figured that if I could make it possible for other people to get a producer and money to shoot that I could definitely do it for myself.
But the script for BMRH was still incomplete and so in the summer ’08 I got busy. I completed the screenplay, got a website, and made a short text-based, blood splatter trailer. My buddy Dan wrote a cool guitar line for the piece and my other buddy Dan, in New Jersey, started pimping the film script.
Nothing happened. I wrote a 68 page business plan, re-edited the script, took notes on a possible comicbook prequel, re-edited the script, and started writing the web serial Firefly’s Kiss…and then re-wrote the business plan.
by 2009, still nothing had happened.
So…I began writing the comicbook notes into a book and that became the first draft of Blood Junky. I then changed the name on the BMRH screenplay to Love in Vein (LIV), re-wrote Blood Junky 4 more times, edited Firfly’s Kiss, transcribed the LIV screenplay into a full novel, made an outline of Blood in Vein (the series’s third novel), re-edited BJ for a fifth time and found two editors for it; and as the end of 2009 exited with many nibbles, but no takers, I took down the first version of the BMRH website, and archived the ‘lil promo trailer.
At the top of 2010, I and the entertainment lawyers finalized the business plan, which is a small book in and of itself, and edited BJ into what I thought was going to be a final form from the notes that I had gotten from the two editors. I began editing the LIV novel, but stopped after fixing the first chapter and returned to BJ when my proof reader couldn’t even get through the first page. It was still riddled with grammatical and story errors. So…I joined the Bayhill Writers Group. With their help, I fixed a good portion of those errors and found Carol. My Editor. Carol began editing BJ, sending me pages, and I finalized the draft.
It was during this time with the writing group that I decided to start my own publishing company. So, I resurrected Crazy Duck Press from my Chapbook printing days. When I reconnected w/ Lisa back in March – she’s an old high school flame where the fire still burns brightly – she liked the idea of working with me to create a small press and so the modern incarnation of CDP was formed.
Blood Junky was edited two more times before it was sent to the printers. Once, after the Proof Readers read it and again when I had the print mock-up of the book. The reason I go into so much detail in how many times I edited this book is because I want any and all writers out there to know that there is no magical far-off someday where the book will be all done. If yer expecting that, then you are deluding yourself. Delusions do not help one to create art. If you are a writer, learn this verse: “Editing is the Process”. It took me exactly 3 1/2 months to write BJ and exactly 3 1/2 months to write LIV when I finally got down to it. But I edited BJ for almost two years. So, edit at every opportunity. And yes…it will make you sick of your own words. That’s part of the point. One can not effectively judge a piece of writing or a painting or a photo without gaining some distance and perspective. Time, repetition, and monotony will aid you in your endeavor.
It is always easier to edit than it is to write. Writing…you have to create everything. Once it’s there, on the page, in whatever form, you can continuously work on it and edit. But in order to complete a novel you have to know when to call it done. Theoretically, one could edit forever. But where’s the joy in that? I’ll tell ya right now, Blood Junky is not done. I could still find something, somewhere in the book, to edit. But, I’ll tell you this…I am done. Books are never finished…they are abandoned to print.
So………..what of ‘lil ole Cornelius, who started me on this wild 15 year journey? He’ll show up. Right now, he is slated to make is debut in the 4th book of the Song of the Vam Pŷr story line. The book-to-be is currently called Blood Relations©. It’ll be the opening book in Volume II of the line. Cornelius then hops over to a self titled little number, in a completely different story line arc, that comprises the original 4 book ideas that came about through all of my years of research and efforts at writing. All in all, there are 4 main story line arcs…but, I’ll leave that for another blog. This one here, is by far, way too long.
Thank You for joining me on this journey!
s.
