Flying Fingers

CHAPTER TWENTY-FOUR
The clock on the mantle announced the hour of one a.m. with a delicate bong.

Seated on one of the more comfortable silk-covered Regency couches, Phil gazed down the hallway. How many times had he and his friend, Herb Rubin, encountered the undead's evil? Too many to recall. Nearly ten years worth, he guessed off the top of his head. During that time they had kept close vigil on odd occurrences of cluster disappearances, monitored anemic victims in hospitals, learned of strange stories of corpses vanishing from morgues and mortuaries, and of the freakish phenomenons of instantaneous combustion mostly by newspaper accounts and through their covert investigations, which usually turned up vampiric attacks on a whole community. Some of these attacks had been on acquaintances, and they could operate with the victim's blessings. Others, and there had been many, were on people who didn't even know them, and yet they had been successful in snuffing out the lair--either quietly, or in a big way--and had to flee the area in order to keep themselves out of jail and continue to do their important work to fight this evil. They hoped to, someday (along with others doing the same work all over the world), eradicate this terrible plague from the world, once and for all. 
~from Vampire Legacy 2005, by Lorelei Bell

Hello, my pretties. The above is a sample paragraph from the older mss., which I'm working from. I've renamed it Dhampire Legacy. As I go through I am editing out things/characters/scenes, and deciding where, if at all, any portion of a chapter (or all), I can use in the new version, and where it will go. The "edited out" pile is pretty large. The "entered" pile is large, but then, I had two or three drafts to look through and choose what I wanted to use.

I've run across a number of files where I've written notes for it. This thing took on gigantic proportions at one time. I've mentioned to you that at one point it was over 800 pages, and I honed it down to 400 in a month's time. I can see now, as I go through and discard certain chapters, where this thing got out of hand. The need to "kill" my darlings has become like a slaughter, in this case.

Nevertheless, I have just reached over 60k words--yesterday it came to 62,350 words and 191 pages. I'm nearly at the 200th page and I'm working to get my mss to the climax point of the book. It's easier if you have a diagram of a plot and know how to implement it. (If you need one, just ask. I have something I can send you via email.) It was something I discovered through the various places I go to learn how to write and plot.

As you may have guessed this is a slightly different sort of vampire book, it is more on the order of a police procedural, mystery, and supernatural suspense sort of novel. It is pretty much the opposite of what my other books are like, and borrows from novels such as those written in the 1980's, before vampires became sexy and got into the bedroom and became objects of women's sexual fantasies. I used to read novels such as 'Salems' Lot by Stephen King, They Thirst by Robert R. McCammon, and various others which had vampires seeking human doctors to either explain their condition, asks for help or tell the true story of their existence (before Anne Rice), like Vampyr by Jan Jennings, and By Blood Alone by Bernhardt J. Hurwood, and there was The Dracula Tape by Fred Saberhagen, among the few I'd read. Some I wasn't too impressed with, but these weren't too bad. They Thirst being among the better of these for suspense and action where the vampire was strictly evil and blood thirsty--which as it should be! I'd have to re-read 'Salem's Lot, however, as I keep getting it confused with the ridiculous movie rendition. They simply could not keep from messing with, and changing (screwing up), King's books on the screen.

With this post, we are looking on a brand new year and I hope to get two brand new books out in 2014. The first one will be #4 of the Sabrina Strong series, and I'm working on the edits while beta readers are still working along, chapter by chapter. And I am definitely slating Dhampire Legacy for a 2014 release! Hopefully with nothing else on my slate, I should be able to get these two books out next year.

Until next time, my pretties!