Ujaali Tease

Photo credit Matt Tuteur

Ujaali

To Touch the Sun Book Trailer

Well, just popping in for today. It took me a bit, but I finally got around to having a book trailer made for To Touch the Sun. 



I think it turned out pretty cool! It's perched nicely on my YouTube channel which I hope to start populating soon with fun and interesting videos. I'll have to get to work on the trailer for the sequel, Ujaali, which is hopefully still due to be released in May or June. 

Happy Anniversary, Vampires!

Balloons to celebrate

I've been having a bit of a party on my Facebook page today. It was a bit of a special occasion. One year ago today, To Touch the Sun my vampire novel set in Chicago was published by Dagda Publishing (available on Amazon). In honor of that, Dagda is holding an ebook sale that started midnight Feb. 25 and will run through midnight Feb. 27. For .99 (cents or pence) you can order your very own ebook copy of To Touch The Sun. 

I have to admit there were times when I wasn't sure this was going to happen. As I've stated before, my writing a vampire novel was a calculated thing. I was hoping to interest an agent I was in pleasant communication with whose agency featured a vampire series. I enjoyed reading vampire novels, watching vampire movies, but I  myself never had the urge to write one. I never had a character or story I wanted to present. Since I like to try new things though this gave me the perfect chance to try my hand at a vampire novel.

Unlike past novels I've written where I had the story and characters in my head before putting pen to paper, I went into this project cold. The only thing I had to build on was "vampire chef." Slowly, as time went on, the story grew, evolving as did the characters until at last I knew where I wanted to take the story. 

Love how it looks on a library shelf.

And thus you have To Touch the Sun. You can find more posts on the process and other information regarding the novels in this series blog. I'd never written like that before and it was probably the most enjoyable writing I've ever done. Not only that, by the end of what I thought would be a one off novel, I realized that I had another story to tell. That's why the epilogue isn't so much an ending as it is a jumping off point for the next novel in the series (Ujaali, due out in a few months). 

That's right: I started with two words and I now have four novels (written while hunting for a publisher for the first one) and a spin off novel featuring two paranormal investigators that appear in the third novel. (The agent, however, did not stick around. But that's a whole other story).

The cover makes a good poster too.

I think that's why this novel is so special to me (even though I've written others). It came out of nowhere and really captured my heart. That's why it was so important for me to get it published too. And why I was so thrilled when I finally found a publisher. And why February 25 will always be a special day to me.

So come celebrate with me. I'll probably be enjoying the glow for a few more days So drop in on Facebook and say, "Hi." Visit Amazon and get your own copy of To Touch the Sun. I hope people get as much enjoyment from reading it as I had from writing it.

The Wait May Not Have Been So Bad

I make no secret of the fact that I never had an urge to write a vampire novel prior to To Touch the Sun. I liked reading the genre, I just never had a character in mind or story to tell.

That all changed with TTTS. There was a huge evolution that took place in that project. I decided to take on the project in the hopes of attracting an agent I'd been in cordial communication with, but I still didn't have a character or story in mind. Just a two word Idea: Vampire Chef. I played with plot, narrative, perspective. Eventually I came up with characters I really love and a plot that suits them. I'm sure that's why the series that grew from it is so close to my heart. It came about as such a surprise. 

Once I had the novel (and the agent was a bust--a whole other story there) I became desperate to find a publisher. The desire was stronger with this novel than any other novel I'd written. It took years to find a publisher and I'm happy with Dagda Publishing, but those were frustrating years.

Looking back on it, however, I'm kind of glad for the wait because it offered me the chance to write the next three novels in the series and get to know my characters. Now when I talk of TTTS, I can also talk of the series which lends more excitement to talking about TTTS. I understand Narain, for example, in a different way then I did right after finishing TTTS. I understand the friendship between him and Dom, or the relationship between Narain and Cassie in a much more complete way.

Actually, I do have my moments of frustration having the next three novels written. There are some surprises in the next two novels that I have to be careful not to reveal. But there's an arc to some characters that I'm extremely anxious to talk about it. 

Hopefully it won't be too long before the next book is published. In the meantime, I hope people are enjoying this first one (and looking forward to the next).

Blog Radio Appearance

I'm pretty excited because later on today (Friday, Dec. 19, 2:38 a.m. is when I type this) I'll be doing an hour long interview on the Speculative Fiction Cantina. We'll be discussing To Touch the Sun, among other things. They also asked me to do a 5-8 minute reading from the book and choosing a passage that fits in that time has been difficult but it's been fun practicing with the possible choices. 

There are a number of accents in my book: Heavy Chicago, light Chicago, Indian, British, I've always enjoyed playing with accents so playing with these (not to mention trying to pin down the male voices without it being too obvious that that I'm "husking" my voice) has been interesting.

I'll say this, I've often wondered why most authors don't read versions of their own audio books. You would think it would be perfect since they know the rhythm of the words they put down on paper. 

It can be quite a challenge, however, as I discovered when I read the prologue of TTTS so that the publisher can put something on Facebook the day it was released. It was me, in my living room with a headset and a computer, trying to accomplish the task in a hurry and luckily it was mostly prose so that I didn't have to go in and out of too many accents. Even still, I found myself having to pause frequently to attend to sinal issues, or because I had a tickle in my throat, or Oliver T. Kitty decided I was spending far too much time with that and not nearly enough praising him so he tried to steal my focus with a whiny meow. Or, and this is a huge problem, you tend to assume what the next words will be only discover you're off by a word or a tense. 





Now I know that most audio book readers are locked up in a quality studio with technicians to help them. Still, it has to be a daunting task.

If you want to hear a reader successfully attack a variety of accents in a book, listen to John Lee's exceptional reading of Ken Follett's "Century Trilogy." I have gotten through the first and half of the second book (hoping to finish it soon) and was blown away. I was made fully aware of his talent after listening to the audio versions of Follett's Pillar's of the Earth and subsequent books in that series. It was like listening to a radio play. But in the Century Trilogy, Lee is taking on a variety of British accents, a variety of American accents, German, Russian, male and female...and he does it all seemingly effortlessly. It's astounding. 

Of course the audio versions of the Harry Potter books are classics unto themselves thanks to the voice talents of Jim Dale. He doesn't have the vast amount of different ethnic accents, but he does have the male/female, adult/child accents to perform. I had a friend who made a ritual of reading the Harry Potter book and then made a ritual of listening to it on CD.

I really enjoyed Ron Perlman's reading of The Strain, the first novel in a vampire trilogy by Guillermo del Torro and Chuck Hogan. His was a measured reading, but it was perfect for the subject and added to the tension.

Recently (well, several months ago--unfortunately, with my schedule, that's recent for fiction) I finished the audio book of The Martian by Andy Weir. It was a surprisingly engrossing book (I say surprisingly because it's very subject should have left my eyes glazed over from minutia). The performance by R.C. Bray only helped to pull me into the story. 

Frequently I find myself listening to books on audio because my schedule leaves me little time to read. Popping a CD into the player driving from one thing to another is a lot easier. And if you have a great reader, it can be a fantastic experience.

If you would like to hear me take a stab at a live reading, tune into the Cantina tomorrow. And feel free to call in with any questions. I'll be on at 5 p.m. Central time. Visit http://www.blogtalkradio.com/writestream/2014/12/19/the-speculative-fiction-cantina-with-anthony-metivier-and-laura-enright

Vampires Hearts: To Beat or Not to Beat

When you write a book, you have to be ready for the reviews, both good and bad. Thankfully TTTS has been receiving generally favorable reviews so far. And even the review I'm highlighting in this post ends on a positive note (and the reviewer gave the book three stars):

"vamps have a heart beat?????? not in any other vampire stories that i have read.....slow read, all the time long explaination. i have read many and never heard the heart beat thing, most state that there is no need for one as they are dead. The ending is super great and i loved it"

Apparently, that whole heart beat thing really knocked her for a loop. And hers is a fair question if she's primarily read stories in which vampire hearts don't beat. Vampires are, after all, supposed to be dead.

Or are they? Many might say, "yes," and certainly there are many authors who write them that way. But (as I state in my book Vampires' Most Wanted) one reason I feel the creature has remained popular over the centuries is that it's so versatile. While the term "vampire" may have arisen in Eastern Europe, legends of vampiric creatures have existed in cultures around the world, their traits often taking on a style particular to that country. 

The penanggallan

There was the penanggallan of Malaysia, for example, a woman who could detatch her head and send it flying around looking for victims. Or the Mananaggal of the Philippines who could detatch her upper torso to go hunting. The jiangshi of China are basically reanimated corpses with green fungus on them that hop around and absorb life essence from people. Ashanti legends of West Africa tell of the asanbosam which waits on the branches of trees for a juicy victim to walk by. In ancient India they believed that ghoulish beings known as vetalas inhabited corpses while a chedipe was a witch vampire that also specialized in sexual pleasure. The Alp of Germany is more of an imp while Germany's blautsauger was even more frightening.

Bottom line, there are a heck of a lot of vampire legends out there and they don't all follow the same playbook. Even the current crop of romantic vampires are relatively new, the notion gaining a foothold in the mid-19th century and growing stronger in the 20th century. That a vampire could break hearts was something that most people would have found absurd prior to the that.

The key element in the vampire tale concerns the ingestion of blood stolen from another being (though one could widen the parameters and switch the word "blood" with "life force"). One person living off another to survive. But the legends and the vampires themselves all differ from each other in some way. Some are little more than zombies, some feast only on relatives, some fly, sometimes only half of them fly, some can handle the sun, some can't. And even those notions change and evolve over time. 

Count Orlock  disintegrates in the light of the rising sun

An aversion to sunlight, for example, was never a big thing in the Eastern European legends until the danger of sunlight on a vampire was introduced in the movie "Nosferatu: Symphony of Terror." After that, it was something used quite frequently as a way to combat a vampire. The past decade or so, in shows like "Moonlight" and books like Twilight, you come across more vampires immune to sunlight (albeit in Twilight, they aren't exactly immune to sunlight since it makes them sparkle, thus going out in the sunlight attracts attention to themselves...I know I didn't buy it either).

So people have often played with a legend that was never set in stone to begin with. 

It's exactly what I did when I decided to write a vampire novel. Since I didn't want to resort to the supernatural to explain my vampires (I have no problem with the supernatural, I just felt more comfortable not using it), I made vampirism a physical not a metaphysical condition. That's how it made sense to me. How is it that reanimated corpses can function?

Or to put it another way:

In a episode of the TV show "True Blood", Bill tells Sookie that he doesn't breathe. Well, why would he? Again, as a vampire, he's not alive. But then how is he able to speak those words to her. Try to speak and not inhale or release air. Nothing is said about him having magical speech so presumably he's speaking the way humans do. How is that done without the air to lift those words out of his throat?

Mina Harker feasts off Count Dracula

Or consider Dracula who accosts Mina Harker in her room one night and has her drink the blood leaking from a self inflicted wound on his chest. How is the blood able to flow if there is no circulation system powered by a beating heart? 

Authors of course can use the conceit that as creatures reanimated from the dead their vampires have no heart beats. Again that's the beauty of the genre: There are so many different takes on it. 

But for my novel, I wanted an explanation for how a "corpse" was able to move.

All life on earth has some sort of circulatory system powering it. I needed something, aside form the supernatural, to power my vampires. The human body is an amazing machine. The amount of processes happening on a cellular level is astonishing. There are processes within processes. 



Which is why I made the condition a disease. My soon-to-be vampires might be on the brink of death, but somehow the microbes infecting them can take advantage of the barest spark of electrical-chemical impulses to jump start their systems. They take a person, repair certain functions, improve or alter others, all to create a safe environment where they can thrive. 

So in my universe, vampires are alive. Their hearts beat, their organs function. But as with the legend, their lives (or the lives on the microbes keeping them alive) depend on the sustenance gained from other beings.

It's just another spin on the legend.