The Ultimate Vampire Resource and Directory

I do get asked, more often than I'll normally admit, when the sequel to my novel will be finished. This question is usually posed by folks who've read the first book and have offered kind words about it. They are usually quite shocked to realize I wrote that a dozen years ago and am STILL working on the sequel.



But this is misleading. See, my first novel was written very much in a panic. I hardly ever remember my dreams. And when this is your normaility for 20-some years, and WHAM a sexy red-headed vampiress seduces your dreams, one tends to take notice.



It took me a year to turn the visions of my dreams into a manuscript. There were fevered nights waking to turn on my computer and type, and there were also months between pages.



One also tends to notice the return to normality after the muse passes. Inspiration will hit and I'm compelled again to use words in a futile attempt to convey what I see. But these are fewer and farther between than I'd like.



Especially when coerced. See, I fooled myself into believing I was a writer simply because I'd written a book. So I tried writing a sequel. But everytime I try to craft something, it would fail. The sequel gets put away until the inspiration hits and the story leads me on again.



I'm come to accept this as how I write, and not the normality of an author.



Then, I just read an interview with one of my FAVORITE writers, Neil Gaiman. The interview was about his working again with Dave McKean on the new film MirrorMask which hits theaters THIS friday. His new book, Anansi Boys, was released last week and is ALREADY #1 on the NYT list. I am already halfway through it.



The interviewer asked him an excellent question about the book, and I delight in his answer. I'm not Neil Gaiman by any stretch. But I know EXACTLY what he means here.

AVC: At the same time, on a macro level, it's an Anansi trickster story, a form of traditional tale, albeit in a more modern format. Do you consider the structures of fables when you're writing?



NG: It's more unconscious. Especially in Anansi Boys, it was incredibly frustrating to write, in a good way. I always say that if you're a novelist, the challenge is not writing what you think ought to happen, but trying in some way to write what did happen in a world that doesn't necessarily exist. Everything should feel right; nothing should ever feel strained or forced. In Anansi Boys, I was chugging along writing my book. Then I got to this point in the middle where suddenly I'm looking at one character who's in a lift, and I'm thinking, "If you go up, if you keep doing what I think you're going to do, then in two pages' time, you will get killed. And I'm not sure what that does to the book that I plotted." The thing that I thought I was writing certainly didn't have a murder in the middle. I wrote the next two pages, the murder happened, and I stopped writing the book for four months.



I wanted to compost it. I tried to figure out what I was doing, and eventually I decided that I could still keep it a comedy. It was sort of figuring out that weird line between horror and comedy. I came to the conclusion that in comedy, everybody gets what they need, whereas in horror, everybody gets what they deserve. I decided that at the end of the day, I was going to give everybody what they needed.

As a Pennsylvania court becomes embroiled in the latest battle over teaching "intelligent design" in schools along side of Darwinian evolution, The New Yorker published a satirical look by Paul Rudnick.



Here's a quote...

Day No. 6:



"Today I'm really going out there," said the Lord God. "And I know it won't be popular at first, and you're all gonna be saying, 'Earth to Lord God,' but in a few million years it's going to be timeless. I'm going to design a man."



And everyone looked upon the man that the Lord God designed.



"It has your eyes," Zeus told the Lord God.



"Does it stack?" inquired Allah.



"It has a naïve, folk-artsy, I-made-it-myself vibe," said Buddha. The Inca sun god, however, only scoffed. "Been there. Evolution," he said. "It's called a shaved monkey."



"I like it," protested Buddha. "But it can't work a strapless dress." Everyone agreed on this point, so the Lord God announced, "Well, what if I give it nice round breasts and lose the penis?"



"Yes," the gods said immediately.



"Now it's intelligent," said Aphrodite.



"But what if I made it blond?" giggled the Lord God.



"And what if I made you a booming offscreen voice in a lot of bad movies?" asked Aphrodite.

Empress is dead. Long live Brandy. I for one will miss Brandy.



Empress made lots of enemies. She had her opinions of herself and others that tweaked the majority of the membership. Most evidently my fellow Master Vampires and our Prince.



She pushed the envelope of tolerance too far and the Prince did what he not only had to do, but what he said he would do. His limit was reached and down came the Holy Roman Empress.



But for those who bothered to get to know Brandy, underneath her beauty-is-only-skin-deep-masques, lay the heart of a poet, a fine storyteller, and someone I dared call a friend.



Part of what I'm going to miss are her writings in her journal. I'm not talking about her Musings, fun though they were to read, I mean her stories and poetry. Now that she's suspended, they're either deleted or locked up. Not sure by whom.



Empress should stay dead and buried, though any good vampiress worth her salt won't stay down long.



But, if you're out there Brandy, take care.