Tag: Bloodletting

Need

Ah, vampires.

I never really meant to write a vampire story. For one thing, Poppy Z. Brite and Anne Rice had already done the New Orleans vampire story and set the bar super-high for anyone else wishing to write about vampires in New Orleans; Charlaine Harris also kind of cornered the market on Louisiana supernatural novels, too. It really seemed cliché to do New Orleans vampires, and I never would have, had I not been asked, and offered a lot of money, to do so. I make no bones about writing for money; if that renders me an unreadable hack, so be it.

I was initially asked to write a New Orleans vampire novella for a collection of four to be called Midnight Thirsts, which Kensington was publishing. Once I signed the contract and got paid half the advance, I decided to adapt a vampire short story I’d written, probably in or around 1997 or 1998, called “The Nightwatchers”; the main character was a young wannabe actress with a lot of talent but a lot of insecurity, who discovers that the reason she hasn’t been getting good roles in her theater company is because the woman who does is fucking the director. The story wasn’t good–she is easy prey for a vampire looking for a companion, who kills the director and the competition actress before turning her–but there was some lovely stuff about the French Quarter in the fog and her crumbling apartment–this was when you could still get a decent enough apartment in a crumbling old building in the Quarter for a price that seems unbelievable and unrealistic today–that I thought I could use. I also like the title, and as is my wont, when I started world-building and creating, I went overboard on back story. There were two point of view characters; the main, Philip Rutledge, who works as an escort, and his best friend Rachel, an aspiring singer who works in a coffee shop on Frenchmen Street, as well as a third; an older man who is a “nightwatcher,” member of an ancient society that reins in supernatural threats to humanity all the while keeping them in the dark about the reality of supernatural creatures and beings in the world. He has followed a rogue vampire to New Orleans, who has set his sights on Philip. I left the ending open, because I thought there was more story–if not a book, if not an entire series–in this idea. I decided I was going to write the vampire novel after finishing Mardi Gras Mambo…which wound up being delayed over a year. Then Katrina happened, and by the time I was ready to write about vampires again, too much time had gone by, alas. But they were doing another collection of vampire novellas, and asked me to do a Todd Gregory story for them (they had started publishing the Todd Gregory fraternity novels by this time), and that story became the novella “Blood on the Moon.” But rather than starting fresh, I used the same structure and world I’d created with “The Nightwatchers”–and tied it into the fraternity novel world as well, making the main character a member of the fraternity’s University of Mississippi chapter, visiting New Orleans for Carnival and winding up getting turned (it’s a longer, more complicated story than that, but that’s the bottom line). I brought Rachel and the old man from “The Nightwatchers” back–and when I was doing the anthology Blood Sacraments, I wrote a short story “Bloodletting”, that basically picked up where “Blood on the Moon” left off.

So, when Kensington asked for an erotic vampire novel rather than another fraternity book, I decided to use “Bloodletting” as the first chapter and build on the story from there, also using “Blood on the Moon” as the foundational story and the supernatural world I’d created for “The Nightwatchers.” This was to serve as an introductory work to a new supernatural Todd Gregory series.

It’s working title was A Vampire’s Heart. The powers that be didn’t like that title, thinking it sounded more like a romance novel title (which wasn’t wrong), and suggested Need, which was a recurring theme in the book.

And I really loved the cover.

The damp air was thick with the scent of blood.

It had been days since I had last fed, and the desire was gnawing at my insides. I stood up, and my eyes focused on a young man walking a bicycle in front of the cathedral. He was talking on a cell phone, his face animated and agitated. He was wearing a T-shirt that read Who Dat Say They Gonna Beat Dem Saints? and a pair of ratty old paint-spattered jeans cut off at the knees. There was a tattoo of Tweetybird on his right calf, and another indistinguishable one on his left forearm. His hair was dark, combed to a peak in the center of his head, and his face was flushed. He stopped walking, his voice getting louder and louder as his face got darker.

I could smell his blood. I could almost hear his beating heart.

I could see the pulsing vein in his neck, beckoning me forward.

The sun was setting, and the lights around Jackson Square were starting to come on. The tarot card readers were folding up their tables, ready to disappear into the night. The band playing in front of the cathedral was putting their instruments away. The artists who hung their work on the iron fence around the park were long gone, as were the living statues. The square, so teeming with life just a short hour earlier, was emptying of people, and the setting sun was taking the warmth with it as it slowly disappeared in the west. The cold breeze coming from the river ruffled my hair a bit as I watched the young man with the bicycle. He started wheeling the bicycle forward again, still talking on the phone. He reached the concrete ramp leading up to Chartres Street. He stopped just as he reached the street, and I focused my hearing as he became more agitated. What do you want me to say? You’re just being a bitch, and anything I say you’re just going to turn around on me.

I felt the burning inside.

Desire was turning into need.

I knew it was best to satisfy the desire before it became need. I could feel the knots of pain from deprivation forming behind each of my temples and knew it was almost too late. I shouldn’t have let it go this long, but I wanted to test my limits, see how long I could put off the hunger. I’d been taught to feed daily, which would keep the hunger under control and keep me out of danger.

Need was dangerous. Need led a vampire to take risks he wouldn’t take ordinarily. And risks could lead to exposure, to a painful death.

You see why they suggested we rename it Need? That opening pretty much says it all.

I had never really put a lot of thought into writing about vampires, in all honesty. To date, I have only published two novellas, one short story, and the novel, of course, but while I was writing Need that world began to expand and grow in my head as I worked on the story. I wanted to tie both “The Nightwatchers” and “Blood on the Moon” together, with Need as the continuation, so I brought back both Rachel and Nigel from the former, while keeping Cord from the latter as the main character. Cord Logan (how is that for a gay porn star name) was, despite being young in terms of being a vampire, quite powerful and growing in his power exponentially by the day. Headstrong, he’d broken away from the coven of vampires that turned him during Carnival, without learning everything he needed to learn first. What he didn’t know–and his former coven also didn’t–was that because of the circumstances involved in his own turning–when a male witch also tried to steal his power from him, he inadvertently wound up transferring his own power to Cord, who was then turned into a vampire to save his own life. This combination of witch/vampire is actually quite dangerous–as are any vampires Cord himself might create, which was the entire problem he faced in the story “Bloodletting” and didn’t understand.

The Supreme Council wants Cord summarily executed, but Nigel wants to keep him alive, to study and learn from, as well as to try teaching him how to control his powers. For me, Need was the introductory tale to a much longer story, where I’d be able to bring in vampires and shifters and witches and faeries and pretty much every kind of supernatural being. The next book was going to be called Desire, and every book was going to have a one-word title. I had a lot of fun with writing Need, and was really getting excited and writing lots of note for Desire…but the book didn’t do very well. It did okay, but not in the kind of numbers that would make a sequel a no-brained, and by then I had already moved on to writing the young adult books. The reviews weren’t great, either–but I never really care or pay much attention to them. The real problem is that there were sex scenes, and I don’t write the kind of gay sex scenes people want to read anymore. Mine are physical, lots of sweats and smells and experiencing how it feels and so on…most people want the sex scenes to be more esoteric and romantic and sweet.

I don’t think I’ve ever had sweet, romantic sex. I’ve certainly never written it.

Every once in a while, when I am writing something more along the lines of horror or with a supernatural tones, I remember my vampires and the world I created for them with a slight ping of sadness.

Maybe someday I’ll write Desire, but it’s highly unlikely at this point.

Blood on the Moon

Quite a number of years passed between the time when I wrote my first vampire novella, The Nightwatchers, and the time I was asked to write another.

I also hadn’t intended to use Todd Gregory, but that was the name I was publishing under with Kensington at the time, and so they wanted me to use it for the novella–and you know me: they were paying me well so I didn’t care. The fraternity books I was writing for them under that name were doing well, and so they wanted some kind of tie into the fraternity stuff. I didn’t want to write a vampire story set in fictional Polk, California; I wanted to write about New Orleans–I’m sorry, I know it’s a cliche, but vampires and New Orleans just go together in my head. What I actually wanted to do was go back to the mythology I’d created for The Nightwatchers, and at first worried that using my “other” name precluded me doing just that…but then I reminded myself you’re both the same person, dumbass and so that’s precisely what I did. For the fraternity connection, I decided to bring four college students from the University of Mississippi to visit New Orleans for Carnival (one of them was from New Orleans), and have them all be brothers from the same fictitious fraternity I used for the fraternity stories: Beta Kappa. (I first used Beta Kappa in Murder in the Rue Dauphine; it’s the same fraternity Chanse belonged to at LSU, so whenever I need a fraternity that’s my go-to; I even used it in my story “This Town” for the anthology Murder-a-Go-Go’s), and of course, one of the boys gets turned over the course of the weekend.

After all, shouldn’t everyone be afraid of coming to big, bad, dangerous New Orleans?

“Happy Mardi Gras!”

The woman was obviously drunk as she threw her arms around Cord Logan and pulled him close and tight to her soft breasts. She pressed her mouth on his before he had time to react and push her away. His entire body stiffened and he winced. Her mouth had the nauseating taste of sour rum and stale cigarettes. He pushed her arms away from him.  Repulsed, he pulled his head backward and took a step back, almost bumping into a weaving guy in an LSU sweatshirt carrying a huge cup of beer. She stood there in the middle of Bourbon Street, grinning at him. She looked to be in her mid-thirties, and heavy strands of beads hung around her neck dipping down into her cleavage. Her lipstick was smeared, making her look kind of like a drunken clown.  Her hair was bleached blonde with about three inches of dark roots growing out of her scalp, and was disheveled and messy—her hairspray had given up on it hours ago. Her bloodshot eyes were half-shut, and she tilted her head to one side as she looked at him, her sloppy smile fading. She was wearing a low-rise denim mini-skirt over stout legs and teetering heels. Her red half-shirt with Throw me something mister written on it in gold glitter revealed a roll of flab around her middle, and a fading sunburst tattoo around her pierced navel. She tried to grab his head and kiss him again, but he deflected her arms.

She narrowed her eyes, going from ‘happy drunk’ to ‘mean bitch’ in a quarter second. “What’s a matter? Don’t you like girls?” she jeered at him, weaving a bit on her heels. She put one hand on her hip, replacing the smile with a sneer.

What? He stared at her, and froze for a moment as horror filled him.

For that instant, everything seemed to stand still. The dull roar of marching bands in the distance, the rock music blaring out into the street from the bars lining Bourbon Street, the shouting and yelling of the revelers, all faded away as he stood staring at her squinting eyes.

Don’t be stupid, Cord, no one can tell just by looking at you.

The spell was broken when a strand of purple bands flew between them, hitting the pavement with a clatter. Cord involuntarily took another step back. The woman squealed with excitement and bent over, her T-shirt falling open  at the neck to reveal a cavernous blue-veined cleavage. She stood up clutching the beads in her fist, a look of triumph on her face. She turned around, Cord forgotten, and lifted her shirt, showing her bare breasts to the crowd of men holding beads on the balcony. She shook her shoulders, making the large breasts sway from side to side, and she started yelling up at the men on the balcony. They all began whistling and cat-calling. The beads began to fly—Cord grabbed a strand of gold ones just before they hit him in the face. He slipped them over his head and moved on down the street before she remembered him and tried to kiss him again.

Something like this actually happened to me at my first ever Carnival, when I flew in from Tampa for it in 1995. I was walking with a friend up Bourbon Street to the gay bars (“running the straight gauntlet” is what we used to call it) when this woman stepped directly in front of me and went through this entire song-and-dance that I later adapted into the opening of Blood on the Moon.

I don’t remember if I’d ever written about a young gay man slowly beginning to take baby steps out of the closet before, or i Cord was the first–I think he may not have been the first; Jeff in Every Frat Boy Wants It I think was probably the first–but I really liked the idea of him coming to New Orleans for Carnival with some of his fraternity brothers, and that his best friend in the fraternity is the only other person who knows about his true sexuality–and suggests, in fact, that Cord lose the group during a parade and head to the gay end of the Quarter to explore and be free. Unfortunately for Cord, he runs into Jean-Paul, an incredibly hot older man and his group of really hot older gay men…but the next morning, Cord has some issues with the sun and other things. That evening Cord heads back down to the Quarter to see if he can find Jean-Paul, and instead runs into a Creole named Sebastian; and Sebastian is a male witch with an ulterior motive: he wants to drink from Cord’s blood–Cord is infected, but hasn’t completely succumbed to transitioning into a vampire yet, and Sebastian thinks vampiric-infected blood will make his own witchcraft powers even stronger.

I liked the character of Cord a lot, and I liked that he didn’t really transition into becoming a young gay vampire by any choice–Jean-Paul selected him as a plaything for the night, that’s all, and had no intentions of turning him, until Sebastian got involved–and while this story ended with a definite resolution–I also saw not only how the story could continue, but how I could also weave The Nightwatchers and the mythology I created for that novella into this new story. I eventually wrote another short story about Cord–“Bloodletting”, which was in Blood Sacraments, and when my editor asked me to write an actual vampire novel, I made “Bloodletting” the first chapter and continued it from there…and that became the novel Need–which is a tale for another time.

Sometimes

Tuesday morning and so far so good. Yesterday was a relatively easy day at the office, really; a lovely way to start off the week, actually. I felt rested for most of the day, and had a relatively easy time getting home as well, which I wasn’t expecting; traffic lights in the Central Business District are still out or blinking, including the one at Poydras, which is the main artery of the district–which makes the drive a bit challenging. There wasn’t much traffic yesterday on my way home, so that intersection where I cross Poydras (Loyola) wasn’t as horrific as it has been in the past.

And tomorrow is payday; I had quite literally forgotten! Paying off the car has changed my life so dramatically for the better, Constant Reader, you have no idea. Before paying off the car, I would have been counting down the days to pay day, wondering how much I’d have left to buy food with, wondering if I would have enough to pay for everything. Not having that kind of extreme financial stress, like I’ve been experiencing for the last four years plus, has been literally absolutely lovely for me. I don’t know how people do it–and then buy another car right on top of paying off the old one, or trading one in before its completely paid for and…yeah, I will never understand the joys of having all that extra debt hanging over my head. It’s one of the reasons I’ve never wanted to buy a house or a condo or anything; the thought of being saddled with debt for the rest of my life like that absolutely curdles my blood.

And yes, I am quite aware that I still have to pay for housing anyway, that I am essentially throwing the rent money away every month that I could be “investing” in property, and all the rest of those financial security memes I’ve been told since I was a child. But I am not a fan of debt of any kind, quite frankly. I hate debt, hate it hate it hate it, and my next financial goal is to pay off the rest of the debt I am still carrying, which has become a bit easier since the car has been paid for. I don’t regret buying the car–I still love the car, and will for a long time, no doubt–but I am not sorry the debt is gone.

I didn’t think I slept very well last night–it seemed to take forever for me to fall asleep–and yet I still feel rested this morning. My Fitbit tells me that the majority of my sleep last night was “light” sleep, and I didn’t get the correct percentages of “REM sleep” or “deep sleep”. I imagine what this means is this afternoon I will run out of steam and get tired; that seems to be the case once the caffeine wears off. Ah, caffeine; such a harsh mistress you are.

Today is the official release day for Bury Me in Shadows (or it was yesterday; I’m really not sure how I still have a career, honestly) so there’s one more Blatant Self-Promotion post to come; I’ve been working on it since the weekend, and I hope to get it right and posted today. Tomorrow night I have the launch event at Murder by the Book in Houston (virtual), and I am doing a diversity panel for a library through Sisters in Crime (chessie chapter) this coming Monday. I know, two virtual events in less than a week, who am I? I also realized yesterday I had never posted the BSP post I’d written Sunday morning, so it went up yesterday instead.

I’m really not very good at this blatant self-promotion thing, and sometimes I wonder if it’s a mental thing; defeating myself before I have a chance to be defeated by the rest of the world. It would make sense, wouldn’t it?

I rewatched Scream 2 last night while I was waiting for Paul to finish working and come downstairs, and rather than switching to something else when he came down about halfway through the movie he was fine with just watching it through to the end–we’re both big Scream fans–and oddly enough, no matter how many times I’ve seen these movies they still work and are enjoyable. Greater horror minds than mine have dissected these films, how meta they are, and so forth to death; nothing I could say could possibly lend anything to the discourse already. But I do enjoy them more than most slasher/horror movies, it seemed fairly appropriate for Halloween, and since I have Peacock, which has all the Halloween movies streaming available, I may spend the rest of the month watching every Halloween movie; there are actually some I’ve not seen. And what better films for the Halloween Horror Film Festival than the Halloween series? (And if I can squeeze in a Scream or two, why not?) I didn’t write very much of anything yesterday and am not terribly happy about that, to be honest. I felt a bit tired when I came home from work yesterday–I stopped to pick up a few things on the way home–and tonight I have to go to the gym, since I can’t tomorrow. I did pull up Never Kiss a Stranger and started revising and re-ordering the story somewhat–beginning with the removal of about 2000 words at the beginning that might not be as necessary as I had originally thought; they can go further back in the manuscript than where they were originally placed, if used at all–so that was something, but I was tired and Scooter really wanted to nap in my lap in the easy chair and it was all so much easier to just give into the tired and relax with a purring kitty in my lap…yeah, it’s a wonder I get anything done around here at all.

And yesterday the current Superman–Jonathon Kent, son of Clark and Lois–came OUT. Superman is gay! * (That sound you just heard was any number of homophobes screaming about their childhoods being ruined.) I didn’t see it yesterday–I just saw the piece in the New York Times shared on Twitter–and will read it later this morning between clients. But this is quite thrilling, and that they timed the announcement for National Coming Out Day? Thank you thank you thank you, DC Comics.

Yesterday I also got a PDF file from an anthology I contributed a reprint story to; I had literally completely forgotten about it (my memory is completely worthless these days) and I never recorded it on my “out for submission” spreadsheet either; so my system completely failed. It happens, of course, and more regularly than I would prefer, to be completely honest. Anyway, it’s a gay erotic vampire anthology from Lethe Press called Blood on His Hands, and the story I gave them to reprint is my old “Bloodletting” story; which was originally written as a sequel story to my novella Blood on the Moon, and eventually became the first chapter of my Todd Gregory novel Need. I’ve not reread any of my vampire stuff over the years, and so last night, while I was trying to figure out to watch before settling on Scream 2 I spent some time revisiting this story. It isn’t bad, actually; I was very pleasantly surprised. (I often am pleasantly surprised to read something old of mine and see that it’s not terrible, or a steaming pile of shit…I really do need to stop being so hard on myself when it comes to writing; even as I started moving bits and pieces of Never Kiss a Stranger around last night I found myself thinking, “oh, this is good” or “this needs to be punched up some”–but “this is good” thoughts far outnumbered “fix this”, which was most pleasing to me. I have another story in another anthology coming out later this year–the story is “A Whisper from the Graveyard,” but I cannot think of the name of the anthology; I think it’s Pink Triangle Rhapsody? It really is a wonder I have a career of any kind in this business….

And on that note, I am heading into the spice mines for the day. Have a lovely Tuesday, Constant Reader, and I will see you tomorrow on Pay-the-Bills-Day.

*Well, bisexual anyway, but he has sex with men and that’s more than enough for me. It’s a huge step for DC Comics and super-heroes in general; it’s fucking Superman, not some supporting cast super-hero most people have never heard of who only appears in some team-up books; it’s SUPERMAN!

All You Had to Do Was Stay

Ironically, yesterday when I was talking about vampires, I buried my own lede; I actually have done some vampire fiction myself. (Clearly, I am terrible at this self-promotion/marketing thing.)

When I first moved to New Orleans, the city was somehow synonymous in my mind with vampires, which was primarily due to Anne Rice’s novels. This doesn’t, on its face, make that much sense; the novels are, for the most part, set in various other places around the world more so than in New Orleans. Louis, the main character of Interview with the Vampire, is from Louisiana, and he encounters Lestat and is turned originally in New Orleans–and while there are passages in the book set here and in Louisiana, the story itself is being told to the reporter in San Francisco. The Vampire Chronicles themselves occasionally return to New Orleans; but for the most part the stories themselves rarely take place here. (It would actually make more sense for me to have had that association from Anne Rice’s work made between New Orleans and witches; as most of The Witching Hour takes place in New Orleans.) After moving here I also discovered local author Poppy Z. Brite; his novel Lost Souls might actually be the definitive New Orleans vampire story. Since that well–New Orleans vampires–had been drawn from so often, so well, and so memorably by other authors already, I never really thought about writing vampire stories set in New Orleans. How could I compete with either Rice (with her legions of adoring fans) or Brite (with his smaller but equally adoring fan base)?

I was writing the Scotty series for Kensington when my editor there suggested I write a vampire novella for a collection they were doing called Midnight Thirsts; they had already done one volume of gay-themed erotic vampire stories that did very well for them, and I was enormously flattered to be asked to write one. As is my wont, when I started writing “The Nightwatchers” I began to slowly create an entire universe of supernatural beings, with rules; it actually grew from an original story I had written several years earlier with a female main character that was set in a theater group; more talented than the woman who always got the lead roles, she and her other actors believed that the woman getting the leads was sleeping with the director; one night at rehearsal a mysterious man shows up in the back of the theater, later approaches the main character and somehow–I don’t remember this part–shows her that her suspicions are true, and promises her eternity; she accepts his gift and then uses her new power to kill the director and the lead actress. It wasn’t a very good story, frankly, and was poorly thought out and poorly written, but it contained a structure that I wanted to use for “The Nightwatchers.” Several thousand words into the rewrite/adaptation I realized it didn’t work, so I got rid of the theater company and turned my gay male lead into a hustler who lived in one of those wonderful old decaying buildings in the Quarter, where you used to be able to get cheap rent if you didn’t mind rotting and tilted floors, insects, poor insulation, cracks in the walls, gaps around the windows, and staircases on the verge of collapse. His best friend, Rachel, lived in the same building in the apartment across the landing from his; she worked at a coffee shop on Frenchmen Street in the Marigny. One night while Rachel is working–one of those wonderful foggy winter nights in the city–an older man with a foreign accent is in the shop and she’s waiting for him to leave so she can close. Philip, meantime, is off to a regular client in Uptown New Orleans. Philip is, unbeknownst to him, being stalked by a vampire; the old man is a “Nightwatcher,” who is aware the vampire is after Philip and is enlisting Rachel’s help to save him.

It’s actually not a bad story, really; (I was rereading it because I couldn’t remember many of the details, like character names and so forth) I had even considered writing an entire novel based on the premise, in which this would serve as the introduction..but I never got around to it. Life has a habit of interrupting my plans.

A few years later, when I was asked to write another novella, this time using the Todd Gregory name, for Midnight Hunger, I wrote “Blood on the Moon,” and used a lot of the same concepts I had originally used for “The Nightwatchers.” (I had originally planned on having Philip, who was turned in “The Nightwatchers,” be the vampire my main character encountered in the Quarter during Carnival; but since I was using a different name, didn’t see any point in trying to link them other than using that same universe.) And since I was writing the “fratboy” books as Todd Gregory, I made the guys down in New Orleans for Carnival fratboys from my fictional fraternity’s Ole Miss chapter. Cord Logan was the main character, and he falls in with a fraternity of vampires when he “gets separated” from his buddies and explores the gay end of Bourbon Street. He also winds up getting targeted by a male witch, having to be rescued, etc etc etc, and the story ended with Cord being completely turned, and joining his new brotherhood. I brought Cord and his best buddy from the actual fraternity back in the story, “Bloodletting,” which eventually became the first chapter of my one and only vampire novel, Need–which I’d hoped to be the first in a series of supernatural erotic gay novels; the next was going to be Desire, and I was going to get deeper into the mythology I had created with that one, as well as bring in the rest of the characters from “The Nightwatchers” (Rachel and the old man were a part of Need).

Cord was a special breed of vampire because he not only had become a vampire but had also drank the blood of the male witch–which to some of the other vampires made him an abomination; and he certainly was one to the witches, which meant the Council of Thirteen, which oversees all the supernatural creatures of the world, wanted him dead–as well as his fraternity brother, whom he’d had to turn. That was going to be the primary plot thread of Desire, which alas never came to be.

Here’s how “The Nightwatchers” opened:

Go home, old man, Rachel thought, tapping her black fingernails on the counter.

It was quarter till nine, fifteen minutes before she could lock the doors. Everything was clean, and the cash register was already counted down. All she really had left to do was dump the remains of the day’s coffee down the sink, lock the cash drawer in the safe, and turn everything off. She’d be gone by ten minutes after at the latest.

She glanced out the big windows fronting the coffee shop. The streetlight just outside cast a yellowish glow in the thick mist pressing against the glass. She shivered and looked back at the old man. He was sitting in one of the tables in the far corner, with the same cup of coffee he’d ordered when he came in around seven thirty. He hadn’t touched it. It was still as full as when she’d filled the cup, only no steam was coming off the black surface now. He didn’t seem to be watching for anyone, or waiting. He never glanced at his watch, which she’d spotted as a platinum Tag Heuer, nor did he ever look out the window. Every once in a while he would look up from his newspaper and catch her staring. He’d smile and nod, then go back to his reading.

Apparently, he was determined to read every word.

She stood up, bending backwards so her back cracked. The night had been really slow. The Jazz Café, even on weeknights, usually was good for at least thirty to forty dollars in tips. Tonight, when she’d counted out the tip jar, yielded less than seven dollars. Just enough to get her a pack of cigarettes and a twenty ounce diet Coke at Quartermaster Deli on her way back to her apartment. It wasn’t, she thought, wiping down the counter down yet again, even worth coming in for.

See what I mean? Not bad.

Although talking about this stuff has made me intrigued by it again; it really is amazing how many book ideas went nowhere for me. Maybe someday I will write Desire.

And now you see why I never get anything done. I call it creative ADHD.

And on that note..let me get back to work.

R.O.C.K in the USA

Happy Sunday and a good morning to all y’all.

I didn’t get as much done yesterday as I would have liked; running my errands in the pre-rain humidity literally wore me out, and then when I got going again I started cleaning and doing laundry and well, once I start doing that–as well as going through and trying to organize the books–I am pretty much done for the day….especially after I discovered Burnt Offerings was available for streaming on Prime. Oliver Reed! Karen Black! Bette Davis (who was totally wasted in her role)! I’d seen the movie years ago, I think when it first aired on television after it’s theatrical run, and while it’s still has some moments, it overall doesn’t hold up as well as I would have hoped. I read the book for the first recently in the last few years, and it was wonderful. But watching Burnt Offerings put me in mind of an essay about horror in the 1970’s; the 1970’s was a time when the suburbs really developed because of ‘white flight’ from the cities and desegregation; this was this whole movement of back to the country from the urban centers, and at the same time, there was horror that specifically focused on this phenomenon (without the racism and white flight issues); namely this book, Harvest Home by Thomas Tryon, The Stepford Wives by Ira Levin, and even Stephen King lightly touched on this in ‘salem’s Lot; the dangers of the country to people from the city.

One could even argue that James Dickey’s Deliverance also belongs in this category, and it put me in mind of an essay that I may never write. I also thought up another yesterday while running my errands, after car after car after car violated traffic rules and almost caused me to be in in accident (three times, to be exact; which might be a new record): “Right of Way,” in which I would extrapolate the American contempt for traffic rules and laws for everyone’s safety can be directly correlated to contempt for law and order, the system, taxes, everything. I made some notes, and this is one I may actually write. Essays are fun and I do enjoy writing them but I don’t very often, unless one is requested of me for something, and perhaps that’s the wrong approach.

Today I am going to go to the gym and I am going to start rereading Royal Street Reveillon and make notes for the big revision that is coming. I’m also going to start reading Jackson Square Jazz out loud for copy editing purposes, and I’d also like to work on “A Whisper from the Graveyard” today. I should at some point also work on finished “Never Kiss a Stranger,” which means I should also make a to-do list for everything I want to get done in July.

Hmmm. Perhaps not a bad idea, at that.

I also remembered I have notes on a short story I need to read and decide what revisions I need to be make.

It never truly ends, does it? But I am looking forward to Sharp Objects tonight on HBO; I actually liked this book by Gillian Flynn better than Gone Girl, which of course made her hugely famous and hopefully hugely rich. I still haven’t read her Dark Places, but that’s because I still subscribe to the “if I don’t read all the canon then I still have something by her to read” mentality, which is partly why I still have not read the entire canon of either Daphne du Maurier or Shirley Jackson or Patricia Highsmith.

So, I have a lot to do today–only one more day after today before I return to the office, but at least it’s only a four day work week–and so I should probably get back to the spice mines.

The next story up in Promises in Every Star and Other Stories is “Bloodletting”:

The damp air was thick with the scent of blood.

It had been days since I had last fed, and the desire was gnawing at my insides. I stood up, and my eyes focused on a young man walking a bicycle in front of the cathedral. He was talking on a cell phone, his face animated and agitated. He was wearing a T-shirt that read Who Dat Say They Gonna Beat Dem Saints? and a pair of ratty old paint-spattered jeans cut off at the knees. There was a tattoo of Tweetybird on his right calf, and another indistinguishable one on his left forearm. His hair was dark, combed to a peak in the center of his head, and his face was flushed. He stopped walking, his voice getting louder and louder as his face got darker.

I could smell his blood. I could almost hear his beating heart.

I could see the pulsing vein in his neck, beckoning me forward.

The sun was setting, and the lights around Jackson Square were starting to come on. The tarot card readers were folding up their tables, ready to disappear into the night. The band playing in front of the cathedral was putting their instruments away. The artists who hung their work on the iron fence around the park were long gone, as were the living statues. The square, so teeming with life just a short hour earlier, was emptying of people, and the setting sun was taking the warmth with it as it slowly disappeared in the west. The cold breeze coming from the river ruffled my hair a bit as I watched the young man with the bicycle. He started wheeling the bicycle forward again, still talking on the phone. He reached the concrete ramp leading up to Chartres Street. He stopped just as he reached the street, and I focused my hearing as he became more agitated. What do you want me to say? You’re just being a bitch, and anything I say you’re just going to turn around on me.

I felt the burning inside.

Desire was turning into need.

I knew it was best to satisfy the desire before it became need. I could feel the knots of pain from deprivation forming behind each of my temples and knew it was almost too late. I shouldn’t have let it go this long, but I wanted to test my limits, see how long I could put off the hunger. I’d been taught to feed daily, which would keep the hunger under control and keep me out of danger.

Need was dangerous. Need led a vampire to take risks he wouldn’t take ordinarily. And risks could lead to exposure, to a painful death.

The first lesson I’d learned was to always satiate the hunger while it was still desire, to never ever let it become need.

I had waited too long.

“Bloodletting” is an unusual story for me in that it’s actually a short story that bridges the gap between my novella “Blood on the Moon” and the novel Need; I eventually used it as the book’s first chapter. I have always wanted to give vampire fiction a try; I created an entire world that I first wrote about in the novella “The Nightwatchers,” which I always intended to develop into a series. I still would like to develop that series, and when the opportunity came to write “Blood on the Moon” I realized I could simply still use the world I’d created for “The Nightwatchers” and move on to different characters. The second book in the series, the one that was to follow Need, Desire, was going to tie the two story-lines together but Need didn’t sell as well as the publisher would have liked and so Desire died in the water. I may still go back and write it, of course, but I have no publisher for it and I am not particularly interested in self-publishing that much. But…I never say never. I wrote “Bloodletting” for Blood Sacraments, and only had to change the original concept a little bit; in the original idea Cord, my vampire, was actually sitting on the roof of St. Louis Cathedral watching the crowd for his next victim. I still love that image, and may use it sometime, but I did eventually change it to how it reads now.

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