Nerine Dorman's Blog, page 107

Short fiction: On An Empty Shore II

They Always Ask This Question


Part I


Before the zombies ate nearly all the warmbloods, there was one question people always asked. Sometimes I'd be hanging with another vamp and he or she would be curious.


It's the thing a lot of vamps get asked. Kinda like when the warmbloods sometimes wanted to know where you went to school or what job you had. Or where you were born or where you came from.


So, Dracula, who made you?


I'm not a complicated person. I was born in Cape Town, grew up in Cape Town, and died in Cape Town. Plain and simple, and not very exciting. The way I was living at the time I should have pegged a lot sooner but some fucking demon watched over me. The smack shoulda gotten me a hundred times over.


Fuck, I ODed so many times it was a joke. And every time my buddies, other junkies, would get me breathing again. Once night they were even driving me to hospital when they got me breathing after I shot up too much smack. We turned round and went home to shoot speedballs.


So it's sorta funny, now that I think about it, that it wasn't the brown that got me dead. It was a vampire.


I remember that it was summer because there was a drought, in more ways than one, and there was a whole bunch of us smack-heads left high and dry. We were all scratching and sweating, five of us in a row by the call box there on Kloof Street. All of us waiting for The Man.


We were so damned obvious I'm surprised the pigs didn't come and pick us up and lock us away for the weekend. May as well wave a big red flag and scream "spot the druggies". We were all pretty terminal. In it for the long haul. In and out of rehab fuck knows how many times.


A car pulled up―a resprayed Honda with tinted windows like the gangsters on the Cape Flats always drive. You know, the 2 Fast 2 Furious types? Car even had those dinky blue lights in the undercarriage that I guess was supposed to make it look like a UFO or something. Really styling. Not. Even we knew this vibe was so not cool. Our dealer drove a VW Polo, gunmetal grey.


Soft music spilled out, and it was fucked-up weird. Whoever was in that car was listening to some symphonic stuff that had like this horrid eighties beat to it with a synth-pop vibe my uncle sometimes played when we were there for Sunday lunch.


The others all looked to me to go check it out, so I got up real slow to take a peek. It was almost night and the interior of the car was dark. When I leant in, I could barely make out the driver, some coloured guy. I remember he smoked one of those mini cigar things and it smelled like vanilla.


That's all I can recall.


Next thing I knew, I'd lost a chunk of time and it was almost dawn. I came to in a pile of rubbish in a side street in the Eastern City Precinct. A rat had bitten me. That's what woke me up. That and the fact that my skin was smoking and I could smell burning meat. And it was me that was cooking.


I'll never know who turned me into a vampire. Or why. The dude didn't do me a favour. I went from being a scum-of-the-earth junkie to being a bottom-of-the-pecking-order vampire. No diffs, really. I exchanged my drug problem for a blood problem.


I had nothing to offer the guys at the top unless they needed some idiot to do their dirty work and almost get killed in the process. I didn't owe them anything. They deserved what they got when the zombies came and ate nearly all the warmbloods.


Rats like me got to slip between the cracks. Guess I'm a survivor.


I should count my blessings, my mother would say. My parents are dead. All the people who said I'd turn up dead in a gutter with a needle in my vein, are dead. For all I know, the vampire who turned me is dead too.


I'm the one who's left roaming the streets like one of those starving dogs not even the walking dead will touch.


I can only laugh when I think of those vampire movies that I watched when I was still living with Ma and Pa. Tom fucking Cruise, Gary Oldman, that glittery Edward boy. It's all shit. There is no glory to this life. It's dirty and, if you're unlucky, violent and short.


In all the time since the zombiepocalypse I saw only one other vampire―a stranger. We both crossed Strand Street and it was close to dawn, and what caught my eye is that we both hurried. He kept looking over his shoulder, like me, to the east, where the sky got lighter.


Like me he was dirty, his clothes ragged. His eyes bulged slightly when he recognised me for what I was. No human would walk in the open like that. Unarmed. I knew what he was, right off.


I wanted to stop him to speak to me, to tell me his story, of where he came from but he slipped sideways into the shadows and was gone. Just like that.


I'm kak lonely. There's nothing fun about being a vampire. But I'm a survivor. Tomorrow might get better.





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Cat Hellisen Uncovered

Today I welcome Cat Hellisen to my world. She's a close friend and writing partner, and I'm absolutely thrilled to reveal the cover art for her YA fantasy novel, When the Sea is Rising Red, which is pegged for an early 2012 release.
Can you tell us about When the Sea is Rising Red in a nutshell?
It's about a girl who fakes her own suicide in order to run away from an arranged marriage. She thinks she's choosing to finally break free of her society's constrictions and limitations, only to discover that it's not all that easy to escape her upbringing. Especially when she ends up falling for the guy who wants to destroy her family.
I think one of the hardest and scariest things about growing up isrealising that the choices you make don't have simple repercussions and that no matter what you do or how much it blows up in your face, you can't return to the safety of childhood. You have to own yourmistakes and make them work for you.
What is it about your "Hobverse" that offers something special to your readers?
As a South African I'm influenced, however obliquely, by the classism and racism I see around me. I've brought that to Felicita's universe: the casual Colonialist racism of the privileged, the human desire to somehow get a label that makes you Better Than another human, nomatter how ridiculous that concept is. But I also loved messing about with all the classic fantasy tropes and picturing them at their most unfantastical.
The Hobverse originally began as this idea of "what if fairies were just like us? What if the magical was utterly mundane and ugly?" And so I ended up building this universe where the unicorns were genetic mutant goats bred as sports for rich women, and magic was accessed bya kind of drug and rigidly controlled, where vampires, when they did appear, were lower than dogs and about as far from superhuman as you could get. I had a lot of fun playing with ideas.
When is the novel releasing?
February 28, 2012, and it's available for preorder now on Amazonhttp://www.amazon.com/When-Sea-Rising-Red-Hellisen/dp/0374364753
What was the soundtrack you had playing in the background while you wrote When the Sea is Rising Red?
The closest thing to musical inspiration was Chumbawamba's rendition of the partisan song Bella Ciao. It still manages to give me shivers. For this particular book I drifted into a fairly unmusical headspace. Odd, considering I have constructed lengthy soundtracks for other novels.
Who are some of the voices in YA literature you drawn most inspiration from?
We can sit here all day. *grin* YA is BOOMING, and right now it's filled with some of the most amazing voices. Sticking specifically to fantasy, I love what I've read of Holly Black and Lisa Mantchev's work. Some awesome titles are coming out in 2012, most of which arelisted at the apocalypsies' blog - http://apocalypsies.blogspot.com/2010/11/meet-apocalypsies.html
I also grew up reading loads of Diana Wynne Jones, Tanith Lee, Ursula le Guin, and Clive Barker, so they were a major inspiration.
Linkage
Website/blog: http://www.cathellisen.com/Twitter: http://twitter.com/#!/hellioncatGoodreads for When the Sea is Rising Red:http://www.goodreads.com/book/show/10194425-when-the-sea-is-rising-red

Short fiction: On An Empty Shore I

For Once We Weren't the Greater Evil
Where were you when the zombiepocalypse happened? Nasty piece of work wasn't it? They didn't see it coming, the dumb fucks. One moment everyone went on like the world wasn't going to come to an end, chasing their daily lemming-grind. The next boom! neighbour ate neighbour and everything just ground to a standstill.
Me? I noticed the shit was going down when I came out at night to see the streets were all but deserted. Lots of sirens. More than usual for Cape Town by night. And, of course, the other weird factor. No street people. Doorway after doorway was empty of bodies wrapped in blankets or makeshift cardboard shelters. No easy snacks for nocturnal lurkers like me.
At the time I was doing what any self-respecting vampire would do at night—prowling and keeping an eye out. For what I wasn't quite sure. No acting like the big dude like those snooty bastards in their penthouses, who got their food brought up to them all discreet like.
Being all high and mighty didn't help them when things turned to shit. By the time the warmbloods called in the army, it was too late. Damn zombies pretty much chewed their way through everyone who put up a struggle. What a waste of perfectly good blood. Zombies were only after one thing: meat. And they weren't too picky about the condition they found it in, so long as it filled the gap.
This kinda left us vamps at a loose end. The clever warmbloods who survived were armed to the teeth and extra freaked out, which made it tricksy for the rest of us to get a meal. In the end vampire turned on vampire, and this is where it was better to be streetwise.
No one ever paid me―Joost Brink―any attention when I was alive. They paid me even less once I was undead. Small, skinny ex-junkie. Not important in the grander scheme of things, hey? This saved my bacon when the almighty papaya hit the proverbial fan. The old ones at the top were the first to go, if they weren't clever enough to go into hiding. Which they weren't.
They expected their loyal lieutenants to keep them safe. The lieutenants did what any self-serving creature of night would. They looked after number one, and number one wasn't the boss man. Who knew?
The things I saw during those first nights of fire, blood and terror I don't want to remember. I am glad vampires don't dream because if that were the case I'd have daymares. Or whatever you'd call it. Dunno.
It's kinda twisted that a monster like me would want to puke after seeing stuff like kidlets all ripped into bits, the horrible gnashing mouths chomping onto tender flesh. Lips blue in death smacked as fat dribbled between the gaps where teeth had been knocked out. Even I never killed kids, okay.
An old man made his last stand, cornered in his driveway. Armed with only a nine-millimetre pistol, he fought off a mob of walking dead. He took out one with a head shot at almost point blank range but by then it was too late―too many of the rotting things clawed and moaned at him.
The truly fucking hysterical thing about this whole drama was that the zombies simply weren't interested in other undead. Not that I claimed any relations to the shambling rotten things. As far as they were concerned, we belonged among their ranks.
The night I discovered this I would have pissed myself if I could. I'd walked straight into a pack of the beasts, and bumped into a creature that may once have been a secretary or a sales rep, had half her skin not hung off her in loose sheets. Grey meat gleamed in the low light. We bounced into each other and I staggered back half a step then froze, half expecting her and all the rest to fall upon me the same way they'd dismember warmbloods.
To my fucking disbelief they shoved past me, as though I were just a lamp post or some other obstacle in their path. They did not even pause to sniff in the air. Bully for me. I should have smelled them but there were parts of the city where the overall stench of rotted meat was so strong I sometimes overlooked the obvious. I tended to go on sight rather than smell. I wouldn't make that mistake again.
It still didn't help that my food was in short supply. And I sure as hell wasn't going to turn to zombies for a Happy Meal. Their blood, such as it was, was viscous and black, and smelled like they looked―days-old road kill.
I preyed on the lost, the hopeless, much as I had before the zombies took over, but somehow now, despite my hunger, I simply lacked the taste for the kill. I used to see myself as an angel of death, wouldn't drag out the inescapable shit. The warmbloods who cowered in their nooks and hidey-holes were even more pitiful than the dregs I used to cull. I just couldn't do it. They clung to life like kittens drowning in a bucket. Often, I slunk back to my lair hungrier than when I awoke.
Mind you, a starving vampire was about as frightening as a horde of zombies. I stalked the deserted streets, stepped around cars discarded like oversized toys. I stooped to feeding off feral dogs, of which there were many and, besides, the infernal things tried to hunt me of occasion. I may have been the runt among the vampires, but I wouldn't allow mere dogs to make me roll and show my neck.
Cape Town was weird without the cheery bright lights or the low rumble of traffic. From time to time I'd see the flicker of candles from some of the high-rise buildings, tenacious warmbloods barricaded from the gore-fest in the streets below. For the most I let them be. It's almost as if for once, they deserved a break, the poor bastards.
Warmblood or vampire, we were in this mess together. I didn't know where those zombies came from any more than the warmbloods. We were equally fucked.
The silence was louder than a siren.
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Liked this? See my Goodreads author profile here or check out my fiction at Lyrical Press.

Stuff is happening, okay?

It's been a little quiet around my blogging for the past few days and there's a very good reason for it. I'm on leave from work in the salt mines and I've been busy catching up with my editing obligations, as well as just taking time out to sit in the sun, drink tea and read. For those of you who know me in person, you'll understand why I need to do this. To give you some indication of my state of mind: I slept the whole first day of leave, I was that tired.
But stuff's been happening, okay? During the past week or so I've written a blog serial that will release in weekly installments for the next eight weeks. It's a bit of a monster mash-up but I've had good responses so far from my beta readers, who've been invaluable with regard to the advice they've given me to help fine-tune the writing. Many thanks to Carrie, as well as the ladies at ERA. I'll be releasing it every Tuesday, from this blog, so keep your eyes open.
Last week also saw the release of the Bloody Parchment anthology, which was a project that kept me busy between all the deadlines and madness for the past year. I'm crazy enough to have announced that the entries for volume two are now open. Get the download link and details for the competition here. The winner receives a full batch of edits on a novella- or novel-length work.
Other than that, I've been reading submissions, working on beta critique and catching up on Lyrical Press editing obligations. It's been absolute bliss staying at home, in my PJs mostly. This ends on Thursday but the illusion can continue until then, I reckon. Then it's back to early morning starts and doing my usual two-hour commute every day. I'll say this much, that I've knuckled under and started work in Khepera in Shadow, which is book three of my Khepera series. So far, books one and two, are available. In order they are Khepera Rising and Khepera Redeemed .
For those of you who have a fondness for cocky, foul-mouthed anti-heroes, you may want to give Jamie a try. He's a bad-ass black magician and bookshop owner in Cape Town, South Africa, and his world almost literally becomes hell on earth when stuff goes wrong in his life. I can guarantee you'll be cheering him on though at times you'd dearly love to slap him.

Artslink award!

Well, I interrupt your blog-reading pleasure with a small announcement. I kinda won the June Artslink award for my article on Leon Botha. I'm very stoked about this.
And for those of you here in South Africa, do buy the Weekend Argus on Saturday or Sunday, and read my article about Kersefontein. Photographs taken by my dearly beloved.
Then go and buy a copy of the Sunday Independent and page to the life section, 'cos I've got an article about Sam Shearon appearing that day.
Double whammy of editorial goodness for the weekend, folks! Now go forth and buy the papers!

What the readers have to say

Well, I'm quite stoked to see how people have taken to Just My Blood Type, a short work of collaborative fiction between myself and Carrie Clevenger. And today I'm going to do something different by letting the readers who so graciously reviewed our piece have their say.
"I have a fondness for bad-mouthed female leads. This one made me grin while reading through the dialogue." – Rikki K, Smashwords
"The story switches back and forth between the two in a sultry give and take building to a climax that gives the title its name's sake. For the price of only intoxicating your senses, Carrie Clevenger and Nerine Dorman deliver one hell of a story." – Jodi MacArthur, Smashwords
"This is Gothic Romance but at the cutting edge. If you're looking for Twilight fan fiction then you better go look somewhere else." – Noor A Jahangir, Smashwords
"I'm in awe of the way they've woven their own book characters and personas into this story of vampire meets romance novelist. That it seems real and gritty and as if the reader is having a conversation down at their local bar or cafe is a tribute to their skills." – Cari Silverwood, Goodreads
"Absolutely loved this read! I felt as if I were sitting in the bar eavesdropping on the goings on of Therese and Xan and enjoying every moment of it." – Ava Riley, Goodreads
"Loved this short story! It's got a great concept and terrific writing from both authors. I look forward to more of Xan when Crooked Fang is released." – Sonya Clark
"Xan is a force to be reckoned with and I cannot wait for his book! This story was so adorable. Just a taste... a small glimpse into Xan's world." – Wookiesgirl, Goodreads
Haven't read it yet? Well, go on, what are you waiting for?
Free download here.
And catch Xan, Carrie or me on Twitter, when you're around.

Howl--a Meeting with Silke Juppenlatz

I'd like to congratulate Silke on the release of Howl, a tale about wolves of the shifting kind I had the pleasure of working on with her. So, without further ado, I'm handing you over to Silke for a little Q&A...
Welcome, Silke, and tell us a little about the types of stories you enjoy reading.
Well, now. That's a loaded question, since I read absolutely everything. Back of cornflakes packets, shampoo bottles, the lot.
I enjoy a good yarn, no matter what genre it is. I predominantly read paranormal, but I dig out the odd historical and contemporary too. Futuristics are another favorite. I like a strong hero who is not afraid to look like a wuss sometimes. The ones I really enjoy are Gena Showalter's heroes. Grumpy and cranky, but oh-so-sexy. There has to be action in the stories, and it has to be plausible. I don't really read first person books. They go straight back on the shelf. It's just not my thing, and I can't get into first person.
When did you know you had to write Howl? Were there any events that sparked the story off?
I took a week off work, wanted to slouch and watch TV, and do nothing. That worked for about a day.
Then I listened to some music, came across Howl by Florence and the Machine--and next thing I knew, there was a wolf in my head. And he was noisy. Persistent. Annoying.
The odd thing about Howl was that I knew all of the story from the moment it popped into my head. It was also the fastest story I've ever written--one week. Sleep is overrated. Ask Zalin.
Why do you think wolf shifters remain popular? Would you ever populate your stories with other types of shifters?
I think they still hold mystery, and the wild animal appeals to people. Taming the beast, so to speak. I actually have a cheetah shifter sitting on my harddrive, begging to be finished. Oddly, lion shifters don't appeal to me. I don't know why. They do hold a fascination for others, however.
Tell us about Zalin. What makes him tick?
Zalin is really a loner who likes company. A bit of an odd duck, to be sure. He's Alpha, but he defers to another Alpha. Grudgingly. He moves from pack to pack and is never really home anywhere. I think if there is one thing that defines him, it's that he has a massive protective streak. He just can't help helping and protecting people. If there's someone in need, he'll be there. He's also big on promises. If you make one, you keep it. People tend to use that against him, or take advantage of it. He's had his share of hard luck, and he understands rejection and betrayal, which is why doesn't like what happens to Lucia.
Do you have any other published works?
I have a novella named Smitten out, which is part of an anthology, but it's a standalone book. It's about an angel on probation, who has to contend with the woman who caused the loss of his halo, coming to him for help. Ash so doesn't like that. He'd rather never set eyes on her again. After all, how is an angel supposed to redeem himself, when his nemesis tempts him at every turn?
Which authors get your creative nod of approval and are the ones you return to time and again?
Gena Showalter and Kresley Cole. I like their books a lot. Sherrilyn Kenyon's League Series is a very old favorite of mine, having read Born of Fire way back in 1999. I find my tastes have changed a lot over the years, and old favorites are still keepers, but I don't read them again. The first romance I ever read was Shanna, by Kathleen E Woodiwiss--but I can't read her books anymore. The way they are written turns me off now, and I'd rather remember them from when I first read them, or I'd spoil the memory.
If you had no financial limitations, describe your ideal writing/living environment.
Ohhh.... I would likely have a huge battery of computers and monitors (check out Terry Pratchett's setup some time, it's awesome.), and I'd set them up in a conservatory. Or maybe have a proper computer room and a superfast laptop I can use in the conservatory or outside. I'd have a nice comfortable chair and an old-style writing desk with room to write letters. (I write letters by hand, with a fountain pen. And post them to people. Even if they have email. It's nice to get a letter in the mail, you know? I'm probably weird, because I send handwritten thank you letters--for rejections.)
There would not be a TV in the room (I don't have a TV in the room now, either. Hate that. Too distracting.) Most of all, I would have the room entirely to myself. The where doesn't really matter to me, as long as there is greenery outside, not a built-up area. (Yeah, I like nature.) I don't want a huge mansion or a castle. A farm would be nice, but the house itself needs to be manageable. We don't need sixty rooms to rattle around in. Enough to have people over and entertain comfortably, room for a horse and a dog and whatever other animal I drag in. Somewhere in the countryside. I'd love to live in the US, but I think if pushed, we'd probably end up in New Zealand.
If I really had the money... I'd buy a house in the UK, a ranch in the US, and an island in the Maldives for holidays. :)
Maybe throw in a lodge somewhere in Africa, just to keep my dad happy, who would like to go back there some time. (I've never been.)
Okay. Anyone got the (winning!) lottery numbers handy?
And I'd have air-conditioning in that computer room!!! (I'm in the UK, we open the windows, you know?)
Are you planning any follow-ups to your setting in Howl?
Oh yeah. It's actually almost finished. I've got about 3-5k more to write, then have a good read through to catch inconsistencies and typos and stuff--then it'll be sent out. (By the time the post is live it'll probably be finished.)
It's Tiffy's story and starts off about seven months after Howl ends. It's not a young adult novel (although Tiffy is just past 17 at the beginning of the book), but the first meeting with the hero happens when she's still jailbait. Not that she cares, but it scares the dickens out of Keric, who doesn't want to end up in jail!
Link it!
Well, there is Querytracker (http://querytracker.net/), of course. I use it a lot to check out trends, agents and publishers. Their forums are pretty good too.
Goodreads (http://goodreads.com) is a great place if you like to read (and great for authors too.)My own blog, Evilauthor (http://www.evilauthor.com), has a ton of stuff which can be useful to authors.
If you're looking for a great critique group, check out Passionate Critters (http://www.passionatecritters.org)--although we are currently closed for new people, you can still apply--just be prepared to be on a waiting list while we're closed. (New members are voted on.)
Another I go to infrequently is Novel Publicity (http://www.novelpublicity.com/)
Cindy Myer's Market News (http://cindimyersmarketnews.wordpress.com/) is a valuable source, too. Subscribe to her newsletter or RSS this one. :)
Thanks for having me, Nerine!
Bio: Silke grew up in Germany and is used to things going bump in the night--and it wasn't always the acrophobic cat, or someone hitting their head on a low beam on the ceiling.
She writes paranormal romance, usually at night, and blames Anne Stuart to this day for all her ambitions and strange stories, after reading one of her books.
These days the only thing going bump at "oh-dark-thirty" is her--usually when she smacks into the sofa while creeping to the kitchen for another cup of coffee.
Silke likes to hear from her readers. Feel free to contact her via her blog at http://www.evilauthor.com, follow her on Twitter, or become a friend on Facebook.You can get Howl here: Amazon US | Amazon UK | Lyrical Press or at any other ebook store.

Uncovering Hell's Music

Those of you who read Just My Blood Type this past week would have read about Therese von Willegen, intrepid romance author. Well, folks, that's me, my other half who writes dirty books.
Last year this time I wrote and sold my first erotic romance novel, entitled Tainted Love , which released through Siren. This was more an experiment than anything else, to see if I could write and sell contemporary erotic romance. I discovered two things: not only did I write this well enough to sell to a publisher other than my existing one, but I also enjoyed the genre very much. Enough to write Hell's Music , which I've homed with Lyrical Press.
Why back at Lyrical Press? Because Lyrical gave me my foot in the door, and have allowed me to experiment with my writing and flex my muscles. Another reason: because behind the scenes there's a well-oiled machine and a support staff of fellow authors, content editors, line editors and, lastly, I must thank people like Stef, Mary, Piper and Renee for just being absolutely the best team I've worked with. Ever.
So, without further ado, I'd like to thank Renee for the wonderful cover art for Hell's Music. This was pretty much spot-on what I was looking for when I briefed her with regard to the artwork.
Hell's Music releases early in September and I'm already very excited with how things are looking.
And, if you're on Facebook, do swing by my author page.

Giveaway! The Mall by SL Grey

Well, I've got something sweet to pass onto a lucky reader--a copy of The Mall by SL Grey--that I'll mail to the first lucky sod who tells me in which country the novel is set.
Read more about The Mall here: http://slgrey.book.co.za/
Then mail me with your answer at nerinedorman@gmail.com and put "The Mall Giveaway" in the subject line of your email. Remember to include your full name and postal address. The competition closes on Friday, June 24, 2011.

In conversation with SL Schmitz

It's not often that an author catches my fancy on such a visceral level as SL Schmitz has with her novel, Let it Bleed. Maybe it's because I'm the last of a dying breed of eldergoth, and can reference the subcultural references Schmitz paints in her novel.
I'll be straight, Let it Bleed is not an easy novel to read. If you're expecting straight narrative, you're not going to get it here. Instead Schmitz offers readers a Ginsberg-esque threnody of word-pictures and textures that act together to create a three-dimensional tapestry.
Once I adjusted to her writing style, I couldn't put the book down. The story read like an acid trip, rife with symbolism, narrative poetry and mythology, all wrapped together in a fever dream.
This is the kind of book I want to own in print, that I will take down from my bookshelf every now and then so I can read passages out loud, for it is only when the words are spoken out loud that they will live.
So, while this is no easy read, this retelling of the story of the Nativity has a raw beauty in its brokeness, its narcotic daze... Let it Bleed is a brave offering from this author, and has definitely succeeded in making me sit up and notice SL Schmitz.
Today I'd like to welcome SL Schmitz to my world for a little Q&A.

Let it Bleed, I feel, can be read on two levels. Am I off-mark suggesting the story can be read both ways? Simultaneously?
It would be interesting to hear more about your thoughts on this, Nerine. But I agree that there is a high note and an undertone to the story. On one level, this is a modern-day Joseph and Mary story with a punk rock soundtrack, complete with a savior and a martyr and a villain. It is raw and brutal and hostile, intermingling the psychotic thought processes of the Dead Girl with the apocalyptic mission of mercenary angels.
Then there is the undertone, humming deep beneath the epidermis of the main story… a tale of demons and monsters lurking under the impassive eye of a ruling god. Not sure which is more blasphemous – suggesting that God could be so taken with one of His earliest creations, the mythical Sophia, that he just lets her run around causing chaos wherever she goes, or the idea that God is not really in control of all of the worlds in the Universe.
Were you at all influenced by Allen Ginsberg's Howl? Are there any other authors who've influenced your style or who are inspirational?
Howl is brilliant – one of the greatest opening lines ever written. I have to admit that I was influenced by Jack Kerouac, Henry Miller, Charles Bukowski and all the rest of the boys on the electric acid kool-aid bus. But I also have to give props to Anais Nin and Flannery O'Conner.
Throw a little Patti Smith and Lydia Lunch/Exene Cervenka in there, and I guess I ended up with a whole liturgy of 20th-century gospels to choose from. Then there are the poetry slams from the 1980s and 1990s – I still have old cassette tapes that I bought for $5 at clubs in New York and Kansas City of poets with their voices rising and falling among cheering crowds. Words are magic, and can weave spells. I tried to capture some of that magical imagery in Let It Bleed; to raise the lead singer of a band into mythological godhood based on the adoration of Generation X and the powers of the new Madonna.
Why a Goth theme? Were there any albums you had on repeat while you wrote?
I grew up in the suburbs right outside of Chicago. The Goth scene was the coolest, darkest, most absurdly underground and desirable music in the whole world. Back then, it was all about voice, image, and tone. And make up. Lots and lots of black eye makeup.
There was the independent Blue Skies Record store in Naperville and Wax Trax in downtown Chicago – places where you could take $50 and walk out of the store with 10 new LPs or records. We would just walk in and buy the albums of bands we had never heard of, but had the best names. Back before Jarboe was a part of the Swans, Michael Gira was putting out the most hypnotic music with a hallucinatory bass line that just altered brainwaves.
We loved Bauhaus and Ministry, and as the 1980s progressed we loved the Cure and Siouxsie and Morrissey. Don't forget Ska and the influence of the Dead Kennedys! Once upon a time, that stuff was revolutionary. It seems almost quaint now, but back in the day it was uber-alternative to like these bands, and it shaped me into the person I am today.
Why names such as Razorblade Boy, Dolphin Boy or the Dead Girl?
I did a guest blog about this awhile ago, and I proudly but hesitantly admitted that I committed an author's sin by not really naming my main characters. There was this primal need in me to keep the characters in a constant state of turmoil, leave them unnamed so that just their horrible, scandalous, visionary, beautifully decadent personalities could shine through.
I think it keeps the readers guessing – if you look very very closely, I have detailed their proper names once or twice within the context of the 340 page novel – but it's kind of like an Easter egg to find them. Isn't the "Razorblade Boy" a great name? It has so many connotations – he is so jagged and sharp and self-important that he is unapproachable, and yet he is sorrowful and causes pain. I tried to match the name with the essence of the character, in a very Andy Warhol/John Waters kind of way. I think it works, because the novel is contradictory. Is everyone totally insane and hallucinating, or could this story really happen?
How long did it take you to write the story, and how challenging was the editing process?
LOL – this story took a really, really long time to get on paper. I am a painstakingly slow writer and I do constant re-writes. I am grateful to my beta readers, and to my actual editors who took a deep breath and went in with red pens poised. Could this book have been leaner and meaner, harder and more fast-paced? Of course. But the editors and beta readers viewed it as a symphony that starts out slow and then builds. You have to move with it, and not become overwhelmed by vocabulary or obscure references. It will all fall together in the end.
Are you going to continue in a similar vein with your next novel?
I have promised myself and Dark Continents Publishing, Inc., that my next two featured novels will be written like a normal human being. LOL! But seriously – I am trying to grow as a writer, and although Let It Bleed is written in a deeply stream-of-consciousness way of speaking and implying, I am seeking other, more accessible voices for future publications.
Care to spill the beans about any upcoming stories?
The Seven Ravens will be published in early 2012, and it a re-interpretation of a Grimm's Fairy Tale. There will be another novel coming out, hopefully by end of spring 2012, that will be called Crunchbone, the story of werewolves and a doomed wedding party during turn-of-the-century Russia. I will also have a story published in P is For Phobia, an anthology being edited by Dean M Drinkel for Dark Continents Publishing.
See: http://www.thedeadgirl.com/