Ari McKay's Blog, page 21

Visual inspiration

One advantage of using Evernote is that when either of us comes across an article or an image that we think might be useful either for inspiration or research, we can clip it and toss it in our planning notebook for future reference. We also have a note dedicated to an on-going list of plot bunnies in that notebook. Some of the clipped material will get used; some of it won’t, but it’s nice to have something to riffle through if we need inspiration.

Images have played a significant role in inspiring our work. For example, an image of a decrepit house inspired our 2012 Halloween story, A Hundred Lonely Halloweens. I came across the image, showed it to Ari, and we both loved it enough to make it the visual inspiration for Delaney House. I don’t remember off-hand where the house in the photo is located, but based on the terrain, we situated our fictional version in the Smoky Mountains.

We often use visual inspiration for our characters as well. I’ve mentioned before that Luke Reynolds from Heart of Stone bears a strong resemblance to Captain Tightpants from Firefly, and Luke isn’t the only character for whom I’ve had a specific actor in mind while writing.

One of Evan’s biggest problems in Blood Bathory — aside from being turned into a vampire against his will — is being judged based on his appearance. He’s described as a “pretty boy”, and Elizabeth chooses to turn him because of his looks. Evan is not and never will be the rugged, macho type, and I had a specific look in mind for him: Ian Somerhalder, who is such a ridiculously pretty man, it ought to be illegal.

I first saw him as Boone on Lost, and now he’s pretty much the only reason I’m still watching The Vampire Diaries. When it comes to vampires on TV, I’d rather watch True Blood, because the characters are adults, not teens, and there is a generous bounty of adult men who roam around in various states of undress at pretty much all times. Especially Eric. I don’t even go for blond men as a general rule, but I’ll happily make an exception for him! Then again, I have a thing for snarky badasses in general, so it’s no wonder I love him. Ari and I have that in common, actually. Give us a book/movie/TV show with a snarky badass who is the anti-hero, and that’ll be the character we both adore.

As a woman of a certain age, I appreciate the scenery and the adult-themed plotlines on True Blood  much more than the young actors and teen drama plotlines on The Vampire Diaries. Last season of TVD was particularly difficult to get through because I developed a dislike for all but a small handful of characters on the show, but as long as Ian is there, snarking away as Damon Salvatore, I’ll tune in. Same thing for the spin-off show, which I’ll probably watch only for Elijah.

ANYWAY. This right here is my Evan:

Suffice to say, researching photos to use as visual inspiration wasn’t at all a hardship for me. *cough*

 

 

History and Villainy

When we were thinking about a possible villain for Blood Bathory: Like the Night, we knew we didn’t want to use Dracula/Vlad Tepes because he’s been done to death *rimshot*. I can’t remember how we settled on using Elizabeth Bathory, but I do remember that we liked the idea of using her because while she has been used as a villain in some movies and books, she hasn’t been used nearly as much as ol’ Drac.

Mostly, she appears as the villain in B-grade 1970s horror movies like the one Evan mentions. He gets the name of the movie wrong (a deliberate mistake on our part); it’s called Daughters of Darkness (1971), and it does indeed star John Karlen, known for playing Willie Loomis on Dark Shadows.

Elizabeth’s alleged penchant for bathing in the blood of young women to preserve her beauty made her a perfect candidate for being cast as a vampire, and we didn’t see her working in the fashion industry as too much of a stretch either. She’d be surrounded by beautiful young people whom she could either turn into vampires or feed on as she pleased.

But Elizabeth isn’t the only historical figure we decided to use to our fictional advantage.  Anna is based on the historical Elizabeth’s eldest daughter by Ferenc Nadasdy, and Janos is based on Janos Ujvary, Elizabeth’s servant who was arrested as one of her accomplices and executed in 1611.  Multiple sources describe him as “dwarf-like”.

In keeping with our trend of using historical figures as villains, we’re introducing another one in the second Blood Bathory novel. Well, technically, we’re introducing three, but two of them are dead long before the action begins, and they’re only mentioned. One of them is Vlad Tepes because we couldn’t leave him out entirely, but the other two… you’ll just have to wait and see!

Evan and Will are returning for significant roles in the second novel, but they won’t be at center stage this time. Our leading men this time are Adam Carson and Tyr Gustavson, who are lost souls trying to find a place to belong after experiencing tremendous loss. Together, they face a threat even greater than Elizabeth Bathory… who is not the biggest, baddest vampire out there. After all, she may have created Evan, but someone else created her.

Torquere Sale!

End of Summer Sale!

Summer is almost over, and we’re having a sale so you can get those last
summer reads in! We’re offering you 20% off your purchases. Just put
‘endofsummer’ in the coupon code box any time you check out at Torquere
Books (www.torquerebooks.com) before midnight on Sunday to get 20% off your
order.

Sale good now through Sunday August 18 at Midnight est.

Enjoy the rest of the summer with some books from Torquere Press today — including our works Blood Bathory: Like the Night, and the Recipe for Romance series!

Where does the time go?

I can’t believe Shore Leave has been over for a week already! McKay and I had a great time at the “Meet the Pros” event, it was so exciting to be able to talk to people and sign copies of Blood Bathory and Heart of Stone.  I hope we get to do events like that again, they are really interesting and fun.

On the writing front, I’ve been plugging away about Blood Bathory: Absence of the Sun. We finished the draft a while ago, but it’s our practice to put works of that length on the back burner for a little time before coming back and beginning the edits, just so that we can look at things with fresh eyes and pick up any flaws. I already see a few things I want to tweak in the main story line, but they aren’t major changes, mostly just additions to better explain what’s going on. Then we have to start filling in the subplots, which are sketched out but not complete, and then final edits and we should be ready to send it in to Torquere.

The other thing we have in the works is a Gothic. I won’t say too much about it, other than *SQUEE* — GOTHIC! As a huge H. P. Lovecraft fan, it’s really exciting to be doing something like this, which is different in a lot of ways from anything we’ve ever written before. I just hope it gets picked up and published.

Happy Monday! I hope everyone gets off to a great start on their week!

Southern Comfort food

“Ginger and  Gentlemen”, the third story in the Recipe for Romance series, is coming out from Torquere Press tomorrow, so I thought I’d talk a bit about cooking and recipes since those are central themes to the series. 

The series is set in South Carolina, which both Ari and I are familiar with; we aren’t South Carolinians, but we are Southerners, and we both like Southern comfort food. Okay, I admit it: I don’t like collards, a fact that has gotten me threatened with expulsion from my family more than once. But that’s my biggest “do not want” when it comes to Southern cuisine. 

Stephen’s kitchen produces more upscale dishes, but Ian Pierce’s diner is strictly food like Mama and Grandmama used to make. I can see his menu featuring collards, fried chicken, cornbread, hushpuppies, corn (on the cob and creamed), sweet potato casserole, fried green tomatoes, okra (fried and stewed), and seafood. Lots and lots of fresh seafood!

Two dishes in particular feature predominately in the story, so I thought I’d share recipes for both of them. I’ve never made a seafood boil myself, so I combed through regional cookbooks when we were writing the story to find something that sounded like Ian might make it. The recipe for Ian’s gingersnaps is actually my recipe. I’ve been making them for years during the winter and tinkered with the recipe until I got the level of “snap” I wanted. 

Seafood Boil:

Seafood seasoning (such as Old Bay or Zatarain’s) to taste
5 lbs new potatoes, cut up
3 (16 oz) packages of cooked smoked sausage
8 ears of fresh corn, halved (husks and silk removed)
5 lbs whole crab, broken into pieces
4 lbs fresh shrimp, peeled and deveined 

Heat a large pot of water over medium-high heat. Add the seasoning and bring to a boil. Add potatoes and sausage and cook for about 10 minutes. Add corn and crab and cook for 5 minutes. Add the shrimp when everything else is done and cook for about 4 minutes. 

Drain off the water and serve everything on a large table covered with newspaper. Dig in! 

This is a basic template; the beauty of the seafood boil is that you can customize it however you want. I’ve seen variations that include onions, beer, hot sauce, peppers, and other types of shellfish.

Ian’s Gingersnaps:
1 cup sugar
3/4 cup butter or margarine, softened
1/4 cup molassas
1 egg
2 1/4 cups all purpose flour
2 tsp baking soda
2 tsp cinnamon
1 tsp ginger
1/2 tsp cloves
1/4 tsp nutmeg
1/4 tsp red pepper

Beat sugar, margarine. molassas and egg. Stir in flour, soda and spices. Mix well. Cover and refridgerate for 1 hour. Bake 8-12 minutes at 350 degrees on an ungreased cookie sheet.

Giveaway! And other stuff!

“Ginger and Gentlemen”, the third novella in the Recipe for Romance series, is coming out next week! It’ll be out July 24 from Torquere Press, and we’re hosting a chance to win a free digital copy here. Enter to win between now and July 24!

Some of our readers have mentioned their fondness for our snarky executive chef, Stephen Pierce, so his fans may be glad to know that while this isn’t his and Robert’s story (that’s “Cinnamon and Seduction”, which will be coming out November 6), Stephen plays a larger role in this story than he has in the previous two.

In “Ginger and Gentlemen”, Stephen is filming a special for the Gourmet Network with Max Boyd as his director, and he’s suggested featuring his little brother’s restaurant. Ian Pierce owns his own diner, The Filling Station, in Hickory Bend, SC, which specializes in classic Southern comfort food like chicken and pastry, collards, and seafood boils. The food and the setting are both perfect for Stephen’s show, but unfortunately, the brothers haven’t been on good terms since… Well, ever.

Nine years apart, they had little in common while growing up, and their father drove a wedge between them when he focused all of his time and attention on molding Stephen into the perfect chef to continue the Pierce legacy and ignored Ian. Now Ian has to try to put aside all of his anger, jealousy, and resentment in order to work with Stephen because he’s in danger of losing his diner, and he desperately needs the money that doing the show will bring.

For Ian, the diner represents more than a means of earning a living. It’s his lifelong dream, and it’s his way of thumbing his nose at his father and brother. After a lifetime of being compared to Stephen and found lacking, he’s desperate to prove he’s capable of emerging from under Stephen’s shadow and succeeding as a chef in his own right.

Meanwhile, Ian’s best friend, Matt Davis, is working his own angle, convincing Max to add a bonus to Ian’s contract and putting up the money for it himself because he’ll do anything to help Ian avoid losing his diner. But Ian is fiercely proud and independent, determined to succeed on his own, and if he finds out that Matt has gone behind his back like this, it could spell the end of their friendship — and Matt will lose the man he loves.

For this story, I wrote Ian, and I have to say, he’s one of the most fun characters I’ve ever written. Ian is snarky and outspoken, and he constantly surprised me with the uninhibited dialogue that popped out of his mouth. That may sound weird, but I’m sure there are plenty of writers out there who know exactly what I mean when I say Ian is one of those characters who has a mind of his own, and I didn’t so much write him as hand over the keys, sit quietly in the passenger seat, and hold on while he took over the ride.

This boy knew what he wanted, and he made sure to tell me as well as the other characters in the story. Fortunately, Matt is much more easy-going, and he didn’t mind Ian’s forcefulness. Like Stephen and Robert, they’re very much a yin-yang match, but even if Matt had balked, Ian knows all he has to do is whip up a batch of gingersnaps using his own secret recipe, designed and perfected just for Matt, to make Matt come running.

As an aside, I’d like to point to our various social media accounts. Some of them see more use than others, because hours in the day, etc. but we do try to keep fairly involved!

Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/pages/Ari-Mckay/266185570179748

Twitter: https://twitter.com/AriMcKay1

Goodreads: http://www.goodreads.com/author/show/6153630.Ari_McKay

Amazon: http://www.amazon.com/Ari-McKay/e/B00CHBT3NA

Pinterest: http://pinterest.com/arimckay/boards/

I’ve also added widgets from Goodreads on our short stories, novellas, and novels pages so that each individual entry has a button that will let you add that story/novella/novel to your Goodreads shelf right from our site!

The evolution of a novel

I believe I’ve mentioned before that we originally developed the concept for Blood Bathory when we were writing a fanfiction story back in 2007; we wanted the main characters to be involved in an online fandom, but we didn’t want to use a real fandom in case someone took offense and thought we were poking fun at it. We hadn’t planned to do as much world-building as we did, but it seemed that once we got started, we got on a roll and ended up creating much more for the imaginary fandom than we intended.

In the original story, Blood Bathory was intentionally over the top, cheesy, and campy. I had the original Dark Shadows in mind, and when we were brainstorming, we agreed we wanted it to be something we could have fun with and geek out over. I wrote a couple of journal entries about our writing/thought process when we were doing all the world-building here and here, if anyone is interested in more specific info.

When we posted the story, we got several comments about the show we’d created, mostly people saying they would actually watch it if it was real, so when we started thinking seriously about moving away from writing fanfiction and toward writing original fiction, we thought maybe taking the concept of the show and working it into a premise for a novel might be a good idea. We both love the supernatural/paranormal genre, so it was a natural choice for us. However, we had to make significant changes to the overall concept and plot to make it workable. The tongue in cheek fun we’d had with the fictional TV show wouldn’t work for a more serious paranormal romance.

We kept the main characters pretty much the same. The original had a Will Trask and an Evan St. John, and there was a character named Marielle, who started out as a “Voodoo queen”. We eliminated the Voodoo element from the original and replaced it with the theriomorph concept, making them the servants of Gaia who fight Elizabeth Bathory and the rest of the Blood Cursed, i.e. vampires. Marielle ended up evolving into a shapeshifter who is thousands of years old, a former priestess of Isis who became a servant of Gaia.

We needed to create a strong supporting cast, some of whom include Elizabeth’s daughter Anna, a former California surfer dude turned shape-shifter, and an outspoken forensic specialist who enjoys needling Will and Evan every chance she gets. None of these characters existed in the original concept, so we had to develop them once we began writing the novel.

Developing the concept of Gaia required a lot of thought. How much power and influence does she have over the world? Is she a deity or not? Does she have limits? We had to think things through, especially since we decided to expand the story into a trilogy, and we wanted to be sure we could maintain consistency throughout all three books.

So basically we had to do some serious world building on our world building! But it was really fun, and we’re happy with what we’ve come up with. Instead of Voodoo queens and Evan being strapped to a sacrificial altar, we’ve got shape-shifters and a shoot out at a fashion show.

But the one thing that didn’t change is that Will and Evan are desperately attracted to each other, and their rocky road to romance plays out against the backdrop of a supernatural turf war.

Blood Bathory is now available from Torquere Press!

Guest blogging

I was drawing a blank on a topic for trivia Tuesday, so I decided to wait because we guest-blogged on the Torquere Social Livejournal community today! We took turns posting over the course of the day, covering different topics.

Ari’s intro and swag photos

McKay’s drabbles

Ari’s take on geekiness and an excerpt from Blood Bathory

McKay’s musical inspiration for Blood Bathory

 

We’re at Sid Love’s Blog!

We have a guest post and another giveaway at Sid Love’s Blog! Sid has a fabulous review site, so please check it out!

http://sidlove.wordpress.com/2013/06/30/guest-post-giveaway-ari-mckay/

Trivia Tuesday!

I’ve mentioned in a couple of previous posts about how certain characters got their names, and I freely admit that I’ll choose names entirely for my own amusement.

Readers of this blog already know that Luke Reynolds from Heart of Stone is named for Mal Reynolds from Firefly and a minor character in “Bay Leaves and Bachelors” — Peyton Wilkes — was named after Payton Place and Ashley Wilkes. Since names have been an inadvertent trend in my trivia posts, I thought I’d talk about names and how we come up with them.

Not all character names are references — just some of them. Another example of a reference name is Will Trask from our novel coming out next week, Blood Bathory: Like the Night. When we originally created the characters of Evan and Will (and that backstory is a whole ‘nother trivia post), it was because we were trying to create a fake television show for a fake fandom. The show was intended to be cheesy, over the top camp, and I had the original Dark Shadows in the back of my mind in terms of tone and feel.

In our novel, Will isn’t my character; I wrote Evan. But I’m the one who came up with Will’s name, and I took it from the original Dark Shadows, based on a “love to hate” character called Reverend Trask, who was played to melodramatic, glorious perfection by Jerry Lacy. (Have I mentioned I love Dark Shadows? Because I love it to little minty balls.)

In One the Rocks, Aidan Grimm got his last name because Ari and I are both fans of the TV show, Grimm (and of the delectable , whom Aidan is physically based on).

In Fennel and Forgiveness, Darius Cooper got his last name (and his appearance) from character in Red. Ari LOVES this movie; I haven’t seen it yet, but considering the cast, it’s pretty high on my “to watch” list. Right after I get to all the movies and shows on my iTunes and DVR. >.>

There are probably other characters who have reference-based names, but I can’t pull them up off the top of my head, and some I just don’t remember. I’m not sure that we named Agnes from Heart of Stone after Agnes Gooch, for example, but I wouldn’t be surprised.

In short, we frequently include things in our writing because we’re geeks and it amuses us, so I’m sure I’ll have more easter eggs to share down the road.