Clark Hays's Blog, page 4
November 21, 2013
Hanford: Reflections on a visit to history’s graveyard
On August 9, 1945, the U.S. detonated a nuclear bomb over the Japanese city of Nagasaki.
The bomb killed an estimated 75,000 people, injured as many more — not counting the death and sickness that would linger for decades — and devastated much of the city. By most accounts, the bombing of Nagasaki, following closely on the heels of the bombing of Hiroshima, brought to an end World War Two. When faced with a level of destruction never before dreamed of, the Japanese leaders opted for preservation in the face of certain extinction.
Both Hiroshima and Nagasaki were turned into scorched graveyards, but would emerge from the ashes.
The bomb that landed on Nagasaki, known affectionately as Fat Man — rendering its deadly intent almost comical — was powered by plutonium. Plutonium, though harder to make than uranium (which was used in Little Boy, the bomb that landed on Hiroshima) had a greater probability of initiating the chain reaction necessary to produce the desired mushroom cloud of death now forever scorched into our collective subconscious. Making plutonium requires chain-reacting uranium and then extracting plutonium from it; that process was perfected, on the fly and under great pressure, on the sprawling Hanford Nuclear Reservation located near Richland, Washington.
Now decommissioned, Hanford is a 580-square mile nuclear graveyard that, like all graveyards, serves as a monument to the aspirations and successes of humans, and as a constant reminder that all of our efforts ultimately end in the grave. And in this case, that grave leaks radioactive contaminants that endanger the safety of all those who live in its shadow.
Hanford is located just a few hundred miles from our home in Portland, and they offer public tours throughout the summer. The tours book up quickly. Interest is high.
This summer, Kathleen and I finally made it onto the list and we had the opportunity spend a day on a bus touring the Hanford Nuclear Complex. No one is allowed to take photos. Apparently, the disposal of nuclear waste is just as sensitive as the process of nuclear enrichment.
Even seen through the filter of the tragic end use of the plutonium, the most striking thing about Hanford is how so many people came together for a monumental and purely, at that point, theoretical effort to enrich plutonium. It had never been done before, other than on a tiny scale. When it became clear the Nazis were pursuing nuclear capabilities, the race was on.
Some of the brightest minds in physics were assembled and given the full support of the military and the federal government. Failure meant a changed world, though success — as we would all find out — would mean the same.
The first step was to find a place to build the complex, the experiment, the crucible. Hanford was chosen for a number of reasons. There were very few people, thus the risk of fiery accidents had limited consequences. It was also remote (and still is), so enemies would have a tough time infiltrating or attacking it. There was also a powerful, inexhaustible source of cold, pure water which would be needed to cool the nuclear fuel rods (if it worked): the mighty Columbia River.
The military swooped in and displaced about 1,300 residents of three towns under eminent domain laws: Hanford, White Bluffs and Richland. One day, they were hard scrabble towns of farmers and ranchers in the middle of nowhere. The next, they disappeared inside a bustling, highly efficient military complex. The residents were forced to move. The only things remaining of White Bluffs today are a few photographs and some sturdy ruins of a bank and a school.
With the site chosen, next came the workforce to build the necessary reactors and processing plants. This was during the war and jobs were scarce in those days, the lure of good money irresistible. Tens of thousands and men and women were drawn to the area to live in rough barracks, eat sandwiches hurled out by an “automatic sandwich machine” and work on a secret, unspecified war construction project. They were mostly older men — all the young men, the best and the brightest were trudging around Europe or else sweating and cursing the heat of the Philippines, and dodging bullets.
The scale of the construction at Hanford was huge and mind boggling. No one had built nuclear reactors before, and in fact no one really knew what they were building then, other than the handful of white-coated scientists in charge. Metal workers were told to build sturdy aluminum pipes to exact specifications. Pipefitters were told to develop pigtails spigots so certain specifications. Bricklayers were told to develop a matrix of graphite bricks as big as a building. And nurses were told to treat mysterious burns.
This was war and questions could be saved until after we won. And there would be many questions.
But first there would success. Enriched plutonium in a special briefcase was transported by car to Portland, our home town, and the by train down to Alamogordo in New Mexico where it was successfully tested, then more of it was stuffed inside the Fat Man, flown to Japan and dropped into the heart of Nagasaki.
The war ended, the workers — probably a little stunned at what they had built — were celebrated. Hanford was a success and now we could rest on our accomplishments and protect the world. The plant was idled but then, mysteriously, a near mirror-image nuclear enrichment facility popped up in Russia. The nuclear arms race was on. Hanford would lumber back to life and churn out nuclear materials to be placed on the tips of InterContinental Ballistic Missiles at a furious pace, and it would be decades before we could slow that mad race.
When the plants were finally closed for good, there was one small problem: nuclear waste. Producing enriched nuclear materials yields tons of toxic, radioactive waste for every ounce of plutonium produced. And it was everywhere — in the waste products, in the dirt, in the water — and it was unstable and stored in inadequate containers built decades ago and in a rush, before we even knew what nuclear material was.
The clean up effort in Hanford is larger, though quieter, than the initial construction. But no less striking.
Billion dollar contracts stretching decades into the future provide the fuel for dump trucks scurrying back and forth to nuclear graveyards where the dust must be sprayed with water so it won’t drift. Scientists test plants and animals — deer and rabbits are especially vulnerable — for radiation to measure success. Wildfires and the threat of airborne contaminants are a daily concern. Engineers use practice tanks to test robotic arms so they can plug buried coffins of radioactive waste water. A giant plant is under construction to encase nuclear material in melted glass — glassification — so it can be safely stored…somewhere.
After spending a day in an air-conditioned bus and touring some of the facilities, three things stand out about Hanford.
First, the sheer enormity of the project and the triumph of science and muscle to solve a problem is inspiring. Sitting on a folding chair in the heart of Reactor B watching a movie about the process is akin to sitting in the front row of a church looking up at an altar. Only instead of seeing a pierced, sad and bearded martyr, we were looking at a huge and symmetrical row of pipes and fittings piercing a wall of graphite that once held nuclear rods. The effect was sacred and profound.
Second, the ghosts of those misplaced, misused and massacred by the project hang heavy over the high desert landscape. So many lives bent and blasted, it’s hard to feel anything other than nauseous and sad. Make no mistake, I’m very glad we won the arms race — the thought of a nuclear-armed Nazi regime is frightening indeed — but Hanford feels like the headwaters of the Atomic Age, and the shadow of that age — fear of mutually assured destruction — stretches into the present and beyond. Despite the jovial tour guide and earnest, good-natured engineers at ever stop, Hanford echoes with the eerie silence of a historic battlefield.
Third, there is something equally profound about the consequences of our success — the ghosts of victory. A once desolate but beautiful area is now a nuclear graveyard filled with leaking caskets of toxic material. The headstone is a towering, unfinished glassification plant that — it’s feared — may not even work in containing nuclear waste. Worse, even if it does, there’s no place to put the glass sculptures imprisoning the waste, no one wants it, and there’s no way to make it safe. It would appear the remnants of our success are more toxic than our success.
Despite the underlying sense of tragedy, it’s an amazing trip and a testament to what we can accomplish, when we have to, working together. I wish we felt similarly motivated to solve some of the greatest threats we face today: poverty, or climate change, for example. Sadly, it appears we can only come together against a distinct threat. When the danger lies within our own society, there’s no one to bomb and no one to focus our scientific exceptionalism on … except ourselves.
I also wish we had the foresight to think more about the consequences of our actions before they trap us forever in a glassified form of regret.
Note: This first ran on cowboyandvampire.com
The bomb killed an estimated 75,000 people, injured as many more — not counting the death and sickness that would linger for decades — and devastated much of the city. By most accounts, the bombing of Nagasaki, following closely on the heels of the bombing of Hiroshima, brought to an end World War Two. When faced with a level of destruction never before dreamed of, the Japanese leaders opted for preservation in the face of certain extinction.
Both Hiroshima and Nagasaki were turned into scorched graveyards, but would emerge from the ashes.
The bomb that landed on Nagasaki, known affectionately as Fat Man — rendering its deadly intent almost comical — was powered by plutonium. Plutonium, though harder to make than uranium (which was used in Little Boy, the bomb that landed on Hiroshima) had a greater probability of initiating the chain reaction necessary to produce the desired mushroom cloud of death now forever scorched into our collective subconscious. Making plutonium requires chain-reacting uranium and then extracting plutonium from it; that process was perfected, on the fly and under great pressure, on the sprawling Hanford Nuclear Reservation located near Richland, Washington.
Now decommissioned, Hanford is a 580-square mile nuclear graveyard that, like all graveyards, serves as a monument to the aspirations and successes of humans, and as a constant reminder that all of our efforts ultimately end in the grave. And in this case, that grave leaks radioactive contaminants that endanger the safety of all those who live in its shadow.
Hanford is located just a few hundred miles from our home in Portland, and they offer public tours throughout the summer. The tours book up quickly. Interest is high.
This summer, Kathleen and I finally made it onto the list and we had the opportunity spend a day on a bus touring the Hanford Nuclear Complex. No one is allowed to take photos. Apparently, the disposal of nuclear waste is just as sensitive as the process of nuclear enrichment.
Even seen through the filter of the tragic end use of the plutonium, the most striking thing about Hanford is how so many people came together for a monumental and purely, at that point, theoretical effort to enrich plutonium. It had never been done before, other than on a tiny scale. When it became clear the Nazis were pursuing nuclear capabilities, the race was on.
Some of the brightest minds in physics were assembled and given the full support of the military and the federal government. Failure meant a changed world, though success — as we would all find out — would mean the same.
The first step was to find a place to build the complex, the experiment, the crucible. Hanford was chosen for a number of reasons. There were very few people, thus the risk of fiery accidents had limited consequences. It was also remote (and still is), so enemies would have a tough time infiltrating or attacking it. There was also a powerful, inexhaustible source of cold, pure water which would be needed to cool the nuclear fuel rods (if it worked): the mighty Columbia River.
The military swooped in and displaced about 1,300 residents of three towns under eminent domain laws: Hanford, White Bluffs and Richland. One day, they were hard scrabble towns of farmers and ranchers in the middle of nowhere. The next, they disappeared inside a bustling, highly efficient military complex. The residents were forced to move. The only things remaining of White Bluffs today are a few photographs and some sturdy ruins of a bank and a school.
With the site chosen, next came the workforce to build the necessary reactors and processing plants. This was during the war and jobs were scarce in those days, the lure of good money irresistible. Tens of thousands and men and women were drawn to the area to live in rough barracks, eat sandwiches hurled out by an “automatic sandwich machine” and work on a secret, unspecified war construction project. They were mostly older men — all the young men, the best and the brightest were trudging around Europe or else sweating and cursing the heat of the Philippines, and dodging bullets.
The scale of the construction at Hanford was huge and mind boggling. No one had built nuclear reactors before, and in fact no one really knew what they were building then, other than the handful of white-coated scientists in charge. Metal workers were told to build sturdy aluminum pipes to exact specifications. Pipefitters were told to develop pigtails spigots so certain specifications. Bricklayers were told to develop a matrix of graphite bricks as big as a building. And nurses were told to treat mysterious burns.
This was war and questions could be saved until after we won. And there would be many questions.
But first there would success. Enriched plutonium in a special briefcase was transported by car to Portland, our home town, and the by train down to Alamogordo in New Mexico where it was successfully tested, then more of it was stuffed inside the Fat Man, flown to Japan and dropped into the heart of Nagasaki.
The war ended, the workers — probably a little stunned at what they had built — were celebrated. Hanford was a success and now we could rest on our accomplishments and protect the world. The plant was idled but then, mysteriously, a near mirror-image nuclear enrichment facility popped up in Russia. The nuclear arms race was on. Hanford would lumber back to life and churn out nuclear materials to be placed on the tips of InterContinental Ballistic Missiles at a furious pace, and it would be decades before we could slow that mad race.
When the plants were finally closed for good, there was one small problem: nuclear waste. Producing enriched nuclear materials yields tons of toxic, radioactive waste for every ounce of plutonium produced. And it was everywhere — in the waste products, in the dirt, in the water — and it was unstable and stored in inadequate containers built decades ago and in a rush, before we even knew what nuclear material was.
The clean up effort in Hanford is larger, though quieter, than the initial construction. But no less striking.
Billion dollar contracts stretching decades into the future provide the fuel for dump trucks scurrying back and forth to nuclear graveyards where the dust must be sprayed with water so it won’t drift. Scientists test plants and animals — deer and rabbits are especially vulnerable — for radiation to measure success. Wildfires and the threat of airborne contaminants are a daily concern. Engineers use practice tanks to test robotic arms so they can plug buried coffins of radioactive waste water. A giant plant is under construction to encase nuclear material in melted glass — glassification — so it can be safely stored…somewhere.
After spending a day in an air-conditioned bus and touring some of the facilities, three things stand out about Hanford.
First, the sheer enormity of the project and the triumph of science and muscle to solve a problem is inspiring. Sitting on a folding chair in the heart of Reactor B watching a movie about the process is akin to sitting in the front row of a church looking up at an altar. Only instead of seeing a pierced, sad and bearded martyr, we were looking at a huge and symmetrical row of pipes and fittings piercing a wall of graphite that once held nuclear rods. The effect was sacred and profound.
Second, the ghosts of those misplaced, misused and massacred by the project hang heavy over the high desert landscape. So many lives bent and blasted, it’s hard to feel anything other than nauseous and sad. Make no mistake, I’m very glad we won the arms race — the thought of a nuclear-armed Nazi regime is frightening indeed — but Hanford feels like the headwaters of the Atomic Age, and the shadow of that age — fear of mutually assured destruction — stretches into the present and beyond. Despite the jovial tour guide and earnest, good-natured engineers at ever stop, Hanford echoes with the eerie silence of a historic battlefield.
Third, there is something equally profound about the consequences of our success — the ghosts of victory. A once desolate but beautiful area is now a nuclear graveyard filled with leaking caskets of toxic material. The headstone is a towering, unfinished glassification plant that — it’s feared — may not even work in containing nuclear waste. Worse, even if it does, there’s no place to put the glass sculptures imprisoning the waste, no one wants it, and there’s no way to make it safe. It would appear the remnants of our success are more toxic than our success.
Despite the underlying sense of tragedy, it’s an amazing trip and a testament to what we can accomplish, when we have to, working together. I wish we felt similarly motivated to solve some of the greatest threats we face today: poverty, or climate change, for example. Sadly, it appears we can only come together against a distinct threat. When the danger lies within our own society, there’s no one to bomb and no one to focus our scientific exceptionalism on … except ourselves.
I also wish we had the foresight to think more about the consequences of our actions before they trap us forever in a glassified form of regret.
Note: This first ran on cowboyandvampire.com
August 24, 2013
Hearts of darkness: The vampire as voyage of discovery
Note: This is a piece we wrote for our new Soapbox feature on our webpage to support "Discovery Month" at Cowboy and Vampire Industries.
Undead fiction, like The Cowboy and Vampire Thriller Series, help readers discover worlds beyond the reach of maps.
Everybody knows vampire fiction is dead. (Actually, undead.) There’s nothing original left to write about the undead. Every interesting lens vampires provide to examine social trends — the morally draining effects of capitalism, our uneasy relationship with mortality, our simmering mistrust of our sexual natures — has been done to death. There is nothing new under the sun, or hiding from the sun, and no possible way to breathe life back into the creatures of the night.
Or is there?
The thing about vampires is that since Poliodori first set pen to paper, since Stoker crystallized the archetype, they have refused to go away. Despite pronouncements from pundits and the best efforts of clumsy writers enchanted with clichés and stereotypes, vampires endure. And it’s not only because they represent the dark side of human behavior — we do an admirable job in fiction and in reality of showing the worst of ourselves without them — but because they represent that part of human nature that seeks out new places, that drives us to explore.
The glorious madness, the single-minded obsession that sends cheerful fellows to the green and venomous heart of the Amazon, to the oxygen-choked tip of Mount Everest, to the cold and silent depths of the ocean, to the ice-choked emptiness of the North Pole — the desire to explore, to learn, to understand — is fundamental to being human. That driving force is as much our legacy as the cruelty and sexual fetishes we layer onto our undead villains. Conveniently, our kind has developed an archetype that allows us to continually travel beyond the edge of the maps we rely on to guide us through our own experience: vampires.
The undead are both the vehicle and the journey for traveling to new frontiers of mortality and immortality, sexual freedom and perversion, kindness and cruelty, strength and power. They are the maps we draw to find out more about ourselves and, even in occasionally clumsy hands, the stories we tell about vampires tell the stories about us.
This often-hidden theme of discovery and exploration is brought to the front in our books, The Cowboy and Vampire Thriller Series.
There are some obvious themes of exploration in all the books as Tucker, the down-on-his luck cowboy, and Lizzie, the unwilling queen of the vampires, travel together into a new realm — love — and discover much about themselves and each other as the blaze a new trail. There’s also much to discover as two very different worlds collide. Tucker, comfortable in his rural life, is thrust into the middle of the urban world and the refined sensibilities of highly urban, and sophisticated vampires. And even before she becomes a vampire, Lizzie had to discover what makes LonePine, Wyoming, population 438, so special to the man she loves.
But there are even more powerful, unique themes of exploration at the heart of each standalone book.
In The Cowboy and the Vampire, book one of the series, religion is the new frontier and we take readers to the edges of faith and belief — and beyond. Lizzie and Tucker are thrust into a world of vampires who practice a mirror-image Christianity, a dark religion dating back 2,000 years in which evil is good, and kindness is weakness. The mad, tyrannical leader of the most powerful vampire faction uses this religion to batter his enemies and plots to hasten and apocalyptic end of times — at least for humans.
In Blood and Whiskey, book two, the uncharted territory is the political system and long-standing hostilities between vampire species. In an unexpected power vacuum, Lizzie has to balance the needs of the anxious ruling elite of the undead world against the seething hostility of masses of long-oppressed vampires, all while trying to protect humans from a danger they don’t even know exist. The book explores how vampires and humans choose to organize themselves socially and culturally. It’s a long, dark journey through a bloodthirsty monarchy, political power and the plight of disenfranchised.
In our soon-to-be-released third book, Rough Trails and Shallow Graves (working title), we explore the spiritual dimension. Our vampires die, completely, every dawn which means they truly experience and understand what happens after death. Their souls, their selves, are liberated in a daily Near Death Experience and they travel to the Meta, a giant energy field that contains and sustains all life. We use the experience to explore the afterlife and an emerging external spiritual dimension with implications for human existence.
Of course, the books are also loaded with all the things that keep the vampire myth popular — blood-sucking passion and perversions and violence, as well as comedy, action and romance, and a sustained exploration of the modern American West.
As long as there is something in us that causes us to look beyond the moment, beyond our selves and beyond our immediate environment, there will always be vampires. And because of that, because we never stop searching, never stop seeking, never stop redrawing our maps, the undead are here to stay.
Undead fiction, like The Cowboy and Vampire Thriller Series, help readers discover worlds beyond the reach of maps.
Everybody knows vampire fiction is dead. (Actually, undead.) There’s nothing original left to write about the undead. Every interesting lens vampires provide to examine social trends — the morally draining effects of capitalism, our uneasy relationship with mortality, our simmering mistrust of our sexual natures — has been done to death. There is nothing new under the sun, or hiding from the sun, and no possible way to breathe life back into the creatures of the night.
Or is there?
The thing about vampires is that since Poliodori first set pen to paper, since Stoker crystallized the archetype, they have refused to go away. Despite pronouncements from pundits and the best efforts of clumsy writers enchanted with clichés and stereotypes, vampires endure. And it’s not only because they represent the dark side of human behavior — we do an admirable job in fiction and in reality of showing the worst of ourselves without them — but because they represent that part of human nature that seeks out new places, that drives us to explore.
The glorious madness, the single-minded obsession that sends cheerful fellows to the green and venomous heart of the Amazon, to the oxygen-choked tip of Mount Everest, to the cold and silent depths of the ocean, to the ice-choked emptiness of the North Pole — the desire to explore, to learn, to understand — is fundamental to being human. That driving force is as much our legacy as the cruelty and sexual fetishes we layer onto our undead villains. Conveniently, our kind has developed an archetype that allows us to continually travel beyond the edge of the maps we rely on to guide us through our own experience: vampires.
The undead are both the vehicle and the journey for traveling to new frontiers of mortality and immortality, sexual freedom and perversion, kindness and cruelty, strength and power. They are the maps we draw to find out more about ourselves and, even in occasionally clumsy hands, the stories we tell about vampires tell the stories about us.
This often-hidden theme of discovery and exploration is brought to the front in our books, The Cowboy and Vampire Thriller Series.
There are some obvious themes of exploration in all the books as Tucker, the down-on-his luck cowboy, and Lizzie, the unwilling queen of the vampires, travel together into a new realm — love — and discover much about themselves and each other as the blaze a new trail. There’s also much to discover as two very different worlds collide. Tucker, comfortable in his rural life, is thrust into the middle of the urban world and the refined sensibilities of highly urban, and sophisticated vampires. And even before she becomes a vampire, Lizzie had to discover what makes LonePine, Wyoming, population 438, so special to the man she loves.
But there are even more powerful, unique themes of exploration at the heart of each standalone book.
In The Cowboy and the Vampire, book one of the series, religion is the new frontier and we take readers to the edges of faith and belief — and beyond. Lizzie and Tucker are thrust into a world of vampires who practice a mirror-image Christianity, a dark religion dating back 2,000 years in which evil is good, and kindness is weakness. The mad, tyrannical leader of the most powerful vampire faction uses this religion to batter his enemies and plots to hasten and apocalyptic end of times — at least for humans.
In Blood and Whiskey, book two, the uncharted territory is the political system and long-standing hostilities between vampire species. In an unexpected power vacuum, Lizzie has to balance the needs of the anxious ruling elite of the undead world against the seething hostility of masses of long-oppressed vampires, all while trying to protect humans from a danger they don’t even know exist. The book explores how vampires and humans choose to organize themselves socially and culturally. It’s a long, dark journey through a bloodthirsty monarchy, political power and the plight of disenfranchised.
In our soon-to-be-released third book, Rough Trails and Shallow Graves (working title), we explore the spiritual dimension. Our vampires die, completely, every dawn which means they truly experience and understand what happens after death. Their souls, their selves, are liberated in a daily Near Death Experience and they travel to the Meta, a giant energy field that contains and sustains all life. We use the experience to explore the afterlife and an emerging external spiritual dimension with implications for human existence.
Of course, the books are also loaded with all the things that keep the vampire myth popular — blood-sucking passion and perversions and violence, as well as comedy, action and romance, and a sustained exploration of the modern American West.
As long as there is something in us that causes us to look beyond the moment, beyond our selves and beyond our immediate environment, there will always be vampires. And because of that, because we never stop searching, never stop seeking, never stop redrawing our maps, the undead are here to stay.
May 8, 2013
Possessed: Evil Dolls and Mojitos
Discovering the Dark Side of a tropical paradise
One of the great things about writing paranormal fiction (The Cowboy and the Vampire, Blood and Whiskey and the soon-to-be-released book three, which is getting closer) is that we get to do fun, weird stuff on a regular basis.
Case and point: We were recently in Key West on a well-deserved vacation. The weather was beautiful, the booze was flowing on Duval Street and while most people were dancing and laughing and enjoying another perfect sunset, we were on the “trolley of the doomed” touring the most haunted places on the island. And for a tiny island, there are a LOT of haunted places.
As a general rule, places get haunted because of some horrible event that occurred there in the past like murders or mass graves — there’s not a lot of ghosts skulking about the site of the “happiest tea party ever.” But one of the scariest stories we heard had nothing to do with crimes of passion — it was about a doll. Robert the Doll, to be precise — a creepy little life-sized figure in a sailor suit possessed by evil spirits that has become a local celebrity for his ghostly hijinks.
The doll was given to one Robert Eugene Otto, a little boy in Key West, when he was four. The year was 1906 and the doll was made for him by his nanny, a woman from the Bahamas said to be skilled in the black arts. She gave dressed the doll in a suit of Roberts’s clothes and gave it to him just about the time she was fired from the family. Perhaps because of the termination, she probably added a curse as well.
The boy quickly bonded with the doll and even officially gave it his own name, Robert, going by Eugene for the rest of his life. It was no biggie, boys play with dolls all the time — GI Joe was a doll, when you think it about it — but then things got weird.
His parents overheard their son conversing with someone, and that someone had a high, unfamiliar voice, but when they entered the room there was no one was there but the boy and the doll. When they asked, Eugene freely admitted Robert talked to him all the time.
Then furniture started breaking and of course, Eugene blamed it on Robert the Doll. They would find clothes mysteriously be strewn across the floor in all the rooms, and again Robert got the blame. They even heard footsteps, tiny footsteps, in empty rooms … empty save for Robert, who seemed to glare at them from wherever he was propped.
One day, Eugene’s mom came home and all the servants were locked out and a tearful Eugene told her Robert did it. She’d had enough. She locked Robert the Doll away in an unused turret in the house (we drove by it and it actually looks like a turret). Eugene seemingly forgot about the doll and went off to Europe, married a beautiful young lady and brought her back to Key West where he was developing a reputation as an author and a painter. And, as it turned out, as a kook.
He informed his wife that Robert the Doll would be seated at the dining table with them for meals, and had a bed placed into their bedroom so Robert could sleep next to them. Things get a little hazy after that, the intimacies of their peculiar marriage — and details of possibly the creepiest ménage a trois of all time — remain shrouded from history.
But the story picks up again years after Eugene dies. A new family buys the house, Robert the Doll is rediscovered in a dusty closet and a little girl, initially delighted, is probably scarred for life when her doll soon gets up to his old tricks — creating mischief, running around, talking to her and, it would seem, threatening to kill her in her sleep. (She’s been interviewed many times sense and swears the doll was alive.)
Her family was much quicker to act, donating Robert the Doll to the Key West historical society. The armchair historians were happy to accept such a well-preserved relic of the past. Only Robert the Doll refused to stay still. They locked him up safely under glass, but according to the staff, they sometimes find him in different positions inside his transparent prison. Impossible, of course, they admit, but it’s happened. Some have even heard him scampering around the old building late at night and have seen tiny, improbable footprints on the dusty floor or tiny smudges as if from ill-formed hands inside the glass.
One thing is clear, they said — folks who take his picture without asking first his permission are almost certain fall victim to his curse. The wall behind his exhibit is papered with letters from folks around the country and the world attesting to the misfortune that befell them after snapping his picture without asking.
We took no chances on the picture we took.
There’s one more thing. The tour guide handed out EMF meters so we could test the area for paranormal activity. There were six meters and five of them registered absolutely nothing. The sixth, however, was lighting up like a Christmas tree whenever the woman carried it to close to Robert.
An hour later, we let the spirits in our mojitos possess us and tried to get the image of that creepy little doll out of our minds. It took several before we were successful.
If you are ever in Key West, be sure and visit Robert the Doll. But be respectful. And try a mojito.
(You can check out a picture we took of the creepy little bastard on our website: http://cowboyandvampire.com)
One of the great things about writing paranormal fiction (The Cowboy and the Vampire, Blood and Whiskey and the soon-to-be-released book three, which is getting closer) is that we get to do fun, weird stuff on a regular basis.
Case and point: We were recently in Key West on a well-deserved vacation. The weather was beautiful, the booze was flowing on Duval Street and while most people were dancing and laughing and enjoying another perfect sunset, we were on the “trolley of the doomed” touring the most haunted places on the island. And for a tiny island, there are a LOT of haunted places.
As a general rule, places get haunted because of some horrible event that occurred there in the past like murders or mass graves — there’s not a lot of ghosts skulking about the site of the “happiest tea party ever.” But one of the scariest stories we heard had nothing to do with crimes of passion — it was about a doll. Robert the Doll, to be precise — a creepy little life-sized figure in a sailor suit possessed by evil spirits that has become a local celebrity for his ghostly hijinks.
The doll was given to one Robert Eugene Otto, a little boy in Key West, when he was four. The year was 1906 and the doll was made for him by his nanny, a woman from the Bahamas said to be skilled in the black arts. She gave dressed the doll in a suit of Roberts’s clothes and gave it to him just about the time she was fired from the family. Perhaps because of the termination, she probably added a curse as well.
The boy quickly bonded with the doll and even officially gave it his own name, Robert, going by Eugene for the rest of his life. It was no biggie, boys play with dolls all the time — GI Joe was a doll, when you think it about it — but then things got weird.
His parents overheard their son conversing with someone, and that someone had a high, unfamiliar voice, but when they entered the room there was no one was there but the boy and the doll. When they asked, Eugene freely admitted Robert talked to him all the time.
Then furniture started breaking and of course, Eugene blamed it on Robert the Doll. They would find clothes mysteriously be strewn across the floor in all the rooms, and again Robert got the blame. They even heard footsteps, tiny footsteps, in empty rooms … empty save for Robert, who seemed to glare at them from wherever he was propped.
One day, Eugene’s mom came home and all the servants were locked out and a tearful Eugene told her Robert did it. She’d had enough. She locked Robert the Doll away in an unused turret in the house (we drove by it and it actually looks like a turret). Eugene seemingly forgot about the doll and went off to Europe, married a beautiful young lady and brought her back to Key West where he was developing a reputation as an author and a painter. And, as it turned out, as a kook.
He informed his wife that Robert the Doll would be seated at the dining table with them for meals, and had a bed placed into their bedroom so Robert could sleep next to them. Things get a little hazy after that, the intimacies of their peculiar marriage — and details of possibly the creepiest ménage a trois of all time — remain shrouded from history.
But the story picks up again years after Eugene dies. A new family buys the house, Robert the Doll is rediscovered in a dusty closet and a little girl, initially delighted, is probably scarred for life when her doll soon gets up to his old tricks — creating mischief, running around, talking to her and, it would seem, threatening to kill her in her sleep. (She’s been interviewed many times sense and swears the doll was alive.)
Her family was much quicker to act, donating Robert the Doll to the Key West historical society. The armchair historians were happy to accept such a well-preserved relic of the past. Only Robert the Doll refused to stay still. They locked him up safely under glass, but according to the staff, they sometimes find him in different positions inside his transparent prison. Impossible, of course, they admit, but it’s happened. Some have even heard him scampering around the old building late at night and have seen tiny, improbable footprints on the dusty floor or tiny smudges as if from ill-formed hands inside the glass.
One thing is clear, they said — folks who take his picture without asking first his permission are almost certain fall victim to his curse. The wall behind his exhibit is papered with letters from folks around the country and the world attesting to the misfortune that befell them after snapping his picture without asking.
We took no chances on the picture we took.
There’s one more thing. The tour guide handed out EMF meters so we could test the area for paranormal activity. There were six meters and five of them registered absolutely nothing. The sixth, however, was lighting up like a Christmas tree whenever the woman carried it to close to Robert.
An hour later, we let the spirits in our mojitos possess us and tried to get the image of that creepy little doll out of our minds. It took several before we were successful.
If you are ever in Key West, be sure and visit Robert the Doll. But be respectful. And try a mojito.
(You can check out a picture we took of the creepy little bastard on our website: http://cowboyandvampire.com)
April 20, 2013
Bugging Out with the Cast of Blood and Whiskey
Any self-respecting prepper keeps a bug-out bag loaded with survival gear near the door, and the characters from The Cowboy and Vampire Thriller Series are definitely used to dealing with the worst.
The rationale behind a bug-out bag is simple — it’s a backpack or some other form of personal conveyance loaded with all the stuff necessary to survive the first few days after some kind of catastrophic event. Say a meteor hits — doesn’t seem so unlikely now, does it Russia? — or there’s a huge, city-leveling earthquake or solar flares disrupt earth communications and turn half the population into solar zombies. Whatever the cause, when (not if) disaster strikes, a bug-out bag provides careful planners with a head start that won’t be enjoyed by his or her neighbors who will be wandering around wringing their hands and wondering what to do. And probably becoming zombie food.A bug-out bag is basically the first step of survival 101. A typical starter bag might have some waterproof matches, a pocket knife, a couple of ponchos and a few granola bars. Moving up the scale of sophistication, start thinking about adding a first aid kid, some duct tape and a water purifier.
We have a modest bug out bag. And so do the characters from our books, The Cowboy and the Vampire and Blood and Whiskey. Here’s a rundown of what our characters keep close at hand for when the Juan de Fuca plate drops open and a tsunami wipes out half of the west.
Tucker: He’s a tough, resourceful, perpetually-broke cowboy living in LonePine, Wyoming who falls for a vampire (Lizzie). His bug-out bag, kept in a pair of saddlebags in his truck, is pretty simple:
* Duct tape
* A folding knife
* A pair of fencing pliers (sort of the cowboy multi-tool)
* A bottle of whiskey
* A bag of snack cakes with enough preservatives to withstand the end of times
Lizzie: She’s a newly turned vampire queen in love with a cowboy (Tucker). Her bug out bag, though she would be loathe to admit she has one, is focused more on intellectual rather than physical survival. Now that she’s a vampire, she could survive just about anything anyway, except for direct sunlight, which is why she only keeps a few things in her purse:
* A copy of Anna Karenina
* A notebook and three pens
* A juice box of blood
* A body bag (in case she gets caught out doors at dawn
* A corkscrew (hopefully there will be wine after the apocalypse)
Lenny: He’s Tucker’s best friend and a way-off-the-grid-survivalist who practically invented the concept of bug out bags. He lives in a hidden bunker with stockpiles of guns, ammo and freeze dried meals. But Lenny, who has never met a conspiracy theory he didn’t like, knows all too well that a single bunker-buster dropped from a drone would leave him homeless. That’s why he has a bug-out bag by the exit of the escape tunnel from his bunker. Actually, it’s more like a bug-out trunk, with a bug out bag in it, as well as:
* Shelf-stable food and water for five days
* A collapsible assault rifle with 500 round of ammo
* A Geiger counter
* A first aid kit and mobile surgical operating suite
* Bio waste bags
* A hand crank power generator
* Solar chargers
* An emergency radio
* Lanterns
* Flares
* A kindle loaded with every how-to book ever printed
* A tool kit, U.S. and metric
* Fire starter tablets and matches
* A wire saw
* A tent
* Sleeping pads
* Night vision goggles
* A collapsible commuter bike
* A water filtration system
* Much more
Elita: She’s a sexy, powerful vampire who has lived through all manner of catastrophes. No matter the challenge, from feuding vampire species to angry villagers with torches, she always lands on her feet. It doesn’t hurt that she’s painfully beautiful and sexually insatiable. Her bug out bag fits neatly in one pocket:
* Lipstick
* A matching bra and panty set
* A fresh pack of clove cigarettes, but no matches— she can always find someone else to light them
With all the bad stuff going on in the world, a focus on self-reliance is on the upswing and blissful ignorance is waning. People are taking survival preparation more seriously — there’s even a show about it — and after a few killer storms, it doesn’t seem quite so crazy these days to hope for the best and prepare for the worst.
Some people choose to assemble their own bug-out bags, others buy them fully assembled online to save the time. No matter the source, one thing is clear, no bug-out bag is complete without a copy of The Cowboy and the Vampire and Blood and Whiskey. It can get mighty boring in a nuclear winter, so bring some good books. Actually bring a couple copies. They can be bartered for supplies.
The rationale behind a bug-out bag is simple — it’s a backpack or some other form of personal conveyance loaded with all the stuff necessary to survive the first few days after some kind of catastrophic event. Say a meteor hits — doesn’t seem so unlikely now, does it Russia? — or there’s a huge, city-leveling earthquake or solar flares disrupt earth communications and turn half the population into solar zombies. Whatever the cause, when (not if) disaster strikes, a bug-out bag provides careful planners with a head start that won’t be enjoyed by his or her neighbors who will be wandering around wringing their hands and wondering what to do. And probably becoming zombie food.A bug-out bag is basically the first step of survival 101. A typical starter bag might have some waterproof matches, a pocket knife, a couple of ponchos and a few granola bars. Moving up the scale of sophistication, start thinking about adding a first aid kid, some duct tape and a water purifier.
We have a modest bug out bag. And so do the characters from our books, The Cowboy and the Vampire and Blood and Whiskey. Here’s a rundown of what our characters keep close at hand for when the Juan de Fuca plate drops open and a tsunami wipes out half of the west.
Tucker: He’s a tough, resourceful, perpetually-broke cowboy living in LonePine, Wyoming who falls for a vampire (Lizzie). His bug-out bag, kept in a pair of saddlebags in his truck, is pretty simple:
* Duct tape
* A folding knife
* A pair of fencing pliers (sort of the cowboy multi-tool)
* A bottle of whiskey
* A bag of snack cakes with enough preservatives to withstand the end of times
Lizzie: She’s a newly turned vampire queen in love with a cowboy (Tucker). Her bug out bag, though she would be loathe to admit she has one, is focused more on intellectual rather than physical survival. Now that she’s a vampire, she could survive just about anything anyway, except for direct sunlight, which is why she only keeps a few things in her purse:
* A copy of Anna Karenina
* A notebook and three pens
* A juice box of blood
* A body bag (in case she gets caught out doors at dawn
* A corkscrew (hopefully there will be wine after the apocalypse)
Lenny: He’s Tucker’s best friend and a way-off-the-grid-survivalist who practically invented the concept of bug out bags. He lives in a hidden bunker with stockpiles of guns, ammo and freeze dried meals. But Lenny, who has never met a conspiracy theory he didn’t like, knows all too well that a single bunker-buster dropped from a drone would leave him homeless. That’s why he has a bug-out bag by the exit of the escape tunnel from his bunker. Actually, it’s more like a bug-out trunk, with a bug out bag in it, as well as:
* Shelf-stable food and water for five days
* A collapsible assault rifle with 500 round of ammo
* A Geiger counter
* A first aid kit and mobile surgical operating suite
* Bio waste bags
* A hand crank power generator
* Solar chargers
* An emergency radio
* Lanterns
* Flares
* A kindle loaded with every how-to book ever printed
* A tool kit, U.S. and metric
* Fire starter tablets and matches
* A wire saw
* A tent
* Sleeping pads
* Night vision goggles
* A collapsible commuter bike
* A water filtration system
* Much more
Elita: She’s a sexy, powerful vampire who has lived through all manner of catastrophes. No matter the challenge, from feuding vampire species to angry villagers with torches, she always lands on her feet. It doesn’t hurt that she’s painfully beautiful and sexually insatiable. Her bug out bag fits neatly in one pocket:
* Lipstick
* A matching bra and panty set
* A fresh pack of clove cigarettes, but no matches— she can always find someone else to light them
With all the bad stuff going on in the world, a focus on self-reliance is on the upswing and blissful ignorance is waning. People are taking survival preparation more seriously — there’s even a show about it — and after a few killer storms, it doesn’t seem quite so crazy these days to hope for the best and prepare for the worst.
Some people choose to assemble their own bug-out bags, others buy them fully assembled online to save the time. No matter the source, one thing is clear, no bug-out bag is complete without a copy of The Cowboy and the Vampire and Blood and Whiskey. It can get mighty boring in a nuclear winter, so bring some good books. Actually bring a couple copies. They can be bartered for supplies.
January 4, 2013
Welcome to LonePine, Wyoming, population 438
It’s like any other small, slowly dying town in the modern American west, only with vampires.
Note: This is a post Kathleen McFall and I wrote for the awesome Book Chick City blog. It's British, which makes us international celebrity wannabes.
Cut off from the rest of the world by miles of open range and rugged snow-capped mountains, LonePine is the quintessential American western town: the county fair and rodeo is still the biggest social event of the year, crusty old ranchers drive to town at sun-up for breakfast — waving at every pickup truck they pass because there are no strangers — and it’s not unusual to see a horse or two tethered outside the Watering Hole, the town’s favorite saloon. Not much has changed there in a hundred years … until then the undead ride into town.
The first vampire to visit LonePine (at least in THIS century: Red Winter) is Lizzie Vaughn, a beautiful, ambitious reporter from New York who falls hard for Tucker, a down-on-his-luck cowboy born and raised in LonePine. From opposite worlds to begin with, their relationship takes a turn for the paranormal when they learn Lizzie is a latent vampire.
Worse, a special power courses through her veins and the entire undead world wants to either control it, or eliminate her entirely. The ensuing clash of urban and rural cultures — between star-crossed lovers and between good and evil forces — is at the heart of The Cowboy and Vampire Thriller Series.
Fittingly, we came up with the concept for The Cowboy and the Vampire , the first book in the series, in 1999 at a rural western truckstop in the high desert town of Madras, Oregon. We were trying to rekindle our own relationship and the worlds-collide storyline (Kathleen is from Washington, D.C., and Clark was raised in Montana), along with the macabre and gothic elements, fit the moment and our personalities. And the decision to anchor the series in the modern American west tapped into our shared love of the region and the myths that sustain it.
People are fundamentally shaped by their environment, and that is especially evident for those hailing from the western U.S. Cowboy country covers thousands of square miles, from northern Montana down through southern Arizona, from eastern Oregon to western Nebraska, and everything in between. People who live in the west tend to value silence and space because their nearest neighbor may be ten miles away, their daytime view is uninterrupted by buildings all the way out to the craggy mountain peaks along the horizon and at night, most westerners can hear coyotes or wolves (if they are lucky) beneath clear, starry skies.
The west we love is a place where people can be alone with nature and their thoughts, which is why our books feature a distinctive element — a wide open spirituality that’s as big as the west and linked to vampires: the Meta. Along with the expected characteristics of the undead — insatiable blood lust, solar mortality — our vampires die every dawn, completely. That means they have a never-ending series of near death experiences as their souls, their consciousnesses, go racing of into the Meta. The Meta is an external shared consciousness, like a giant energy field, where humans and vampires alike exist before and after death. Experiencing the Meta, just like humans who “come back” after death, gives one a profound sense of calmness, certainty and belonging.
That uncluttered confidence is common in the west, which gets to the heart of the region as an ideal, tangling up history with the golden myths of movie screen cowboys and pulp fiction heroes. Those who settled the frontier were tough, resilient and independent, characteristics which earned them a permanent place in the national, and even international, psyche. Hollywood added a sheen that mostly canceled out any of the negatives associated with life in a hard time — the brutality and cruelty and greed; they were human, after all — until the historic cowboy became an icon and a symbol of all that’s good and right in the world. And the perfect foil for the time-tested symbols of evil, corruption and decadence — vampires.
Of course, nothing is ever exactly what it seems in LonePine — cowboys are not always heroes and vampires are not always villains. The only thing that’s certain is that romance is always hard. We hope you’ll take the time to visit LonePine and meet some of the cowboys, cowgirls, survivalists, ranchers, barmaids, vampires and overly sensitive cowdogs that make it a funny, sexy and scary destination.
Check out Blood and Whiskey to learn more about the Meta and the wide open, wild and undead West.
Note: This is a post Kathleen McFall and I wrote for the awesome Book Chick City blog. It's British, which makes us international celebrity wannabes.
Cut off from the rest of the world by miles of open range and rugged snow-capped mountains, LonePine is the quintessential American western town: the county fair and rodeo is still the biggest social event of the year, crusty old ranchers drive to town at sun-up for breakfast — waving at every pickup truck they pass because there are no strangers — and it’s not unusual to see a horse or two tethered outside the Watering Hole, the town’s favorite saloon. Not much has changed there in a hundred years … until then the undead ride into town.
The first vampire to visit LonePine (at least in THIS century: Red Winter) is Lizzie Vaughn, a beautiful, ambitious reporter from New York who falls hard for Tucker, a down-on-his-luck cowboy born and raised in LonePine. From opposite worlds to begin with, their relationship takes a turn for the paranormal when they learn Lizzie is a latent vampire.
Worse, a special power courses through her veins and the entire undead world wants to either control it, or eliminate her entirely. The ensuing clash of urban and rural cultures — between star-crossed lovers and between good and evil forces — is at the heart of The Cowboy and Vampire Thriller Series.
Fittingly, we came up with the concept for The Cowboy and the Vampire , the first book in the series, in 1999 at a rural western truckstop in the high desert town of Madras, Oregon. We were trying to rekindle our own relationship and the worlds-collide storyline (Kathleen is from Washington, D.C., and Clark was raised in Montana), along with the macabre and gothic elements, fit the moment and our personalities. And the decision to anchor the series in the modern American west tapped into our shared love of the region and the myths that sustain it.
People are fundamentally shaped by their environment, and that is especially evident for those hailing from the western U.S. Cowboy country covers thousands of square miles, from northern Montana down through southern Arizona, from eastern Oregon to western Nebraska, and everything in between. People who live in the west tend to value silence and space because their nearest neighbor may be ten miles away, their daytime view is uninterrupted by buildings all the way out to the craggy mountain peaks along the horizon and at night, most westerners can hear coyotes or wolves (if they are lucky) beneath clear, starry skies.
The west we love is a place where people can be alone with nature and their thoughts, which is why our books feature a distinctive element — a wide open spirituality that’s as big as the west and linked to vampires: the Meta. Along with the expected characteristics of the undead — insatiable blood lust, solar mortality — our vampires die every dawn, completely. That means they have a never-ending series of near death experiences as their souls, their consciousnesses, go racing of into the Meta. The Meta is an external shared consciousness, like a giant energy field, where humans and vampires alike exist before and after death. Experiencing the Meta, just like humans who “come back” after death, gives one a profound sense of calmness, certainty and belonging.
That uncluttered confidence is common in the west, which gets to the heart of the region as an ideal, tangling up history with the golden myths of movie screen cowboys and pulp fiction heroes. Those who settled the frontier were tough, resilient and independent, characteristics which earned them a permanent place in the national, and even international, psyche. Hollywood added a sheen that mostly canceled out any of the negatives associated with life in a hard time — the brutality and cruelty and greed; they were human, after all — until the historic cowboy became an icon and a symbol of all that’s good and right in the world. And the perfect foil for the time-tested symbols of evil, corruption and decadence — vampires.
Of course, nothing is ever exactly what it seems in LonePine — cowboys are not always heroes and vampires are not always villains. The only thing that’s certain is that romance is always hard. We hope you’ll take the time to visit LonePine and meet some of the cowboys, cowgirls, survivalists, ranchers, barmaids, vampires and overly sensitive cowdogs that make it a funny, sexy and scary destination.
Check out Blood and Whiskey to learn more about the Meta and the wide open, wild and undead West.
December 8, 2012
Welcome to the Meta, but will you ever leave?
This week, we are talking about Near Death Experiences on our webpage and facebook page. Head on over and vote in the poll for a chance to win a free book.
And check out this post about how the Meta came to be:
Vampires have been around in popular legends for hundreds of years and in popular fiction, courtesy of Polidori and then Stoker, for more than a century. Working with such a popular archetype has its pluses — immediately resonating with readers — and minuses: tiredly expected attributes, like fangs and shrinking, hissing, from crucifixes, can feel tired. That’s why every author hopes to come up with some new take that’s still grounded in the classics.
When we began work on The Cowboy and the Vampire Thriller Series, we were intrigued by several aspects of the vampire myth: how it plugged into religion, the politics of the two castes of vampires and how could an advanced, sentient being die repeatedly — literally; we’re talking full biologic shutdown — only to be resurrected each sundown with all their memories and their personality intact. It’s that last topic that we explore more deeply in Blood and Whiskey.
Because our vampires die, fully, every dawn they have a classic near death experience every single morning. When they die, their consciousness zips off into “the Meta,” a giant energy field and external shared consciousness that contains and sustains all life. At sundown, all of those strands of energy untangle and the vampires return to their bodies once again and arise none the worse for wear. And hungry.
It’s not just for vampires though. Humans go to the Meta as well when they have a near death experience. Think of the classic NDE with the tunnel of light, meeting familiar relatives and experiencing a sense of bliss and meaning. Of course, that only happens to a very small number of people, and to some advanced mental travelers who are able to enter the Meta by meditating.
Vampires, however, enter the Meta every single day.
The concept of the Meta, and what it means for human spirituality, is resonating. In their review of Blood and Whiskey, Kirkus Reviews says:
“While a number of existentialist underpinnings give the series some depth, the book is first and foremost a thriller, upping the ante in every chapter as bullets fly and relationships strain under the weight of old loyalties and new revelations. In a way, it’s a shame more time isn’t spent exploring the existence of this meta world where consciousnesses wait out the daylight hours and immortality has all sorts of ramifications for human spirituality. But with strong writing, funny characters (no irony is lost on one vampiress who takes to sporting a “Future Farmers of America” jacket) and plenty of action, it’s hard to fault the authors for keeping the focus on a story this riveting.”
We agree, and are definitely spending more time in the Meta in book three (we are hard at work on it), but Blood and Whiskey has a huge focus on this new take on the afterlife (and the before and during life as well) based on morphic fields.
Here are a few quotes and sections from Blood and Whiskey that deal with the Meta:
Page 46
After all they shared it was hard to believe Julius was really dead. Lizzie still refused to discuss the details of what happened that night, saying only that she had taken care of the situation. Elita knew he was dead though. She felt his force wither away and bleed into the Meta, smelled and saw his blood on Lizzie’s breath and felt it coursing within her.
Page 65
Lizzie struggled to climb out of what felt like an endless, undifferentiated and always terrifying, darkness. Elita promised her it would get easier, being reborn anew every night, and that soon she’d find her place in the darkness — the Meta — and sense others there too. Not their bodies or their voices, not like in the ghost stories of humans, but their essence, able to feel the part of them that existed after death, the part that existed underneath life. For now, it was all a jumble and still disconcerting.
Page 231
There was a flash of ruby incandescence that erupted from where their blood mingled, growing in power and then consuming her and catapulting her thoughts out of her body. She swirled up into the arch of the sky and beyond, slamming into Virote’s soul on the way. They intertwined, joining together as one, their consciousness and experience of sensations now singular and shared, gloriously rushing along a tunnel of light, spiritual adrenaline flowing, radiant and free.
Page 280
As the sun dropped below the horizon, life flooded back into Lizzie and she sat up with a gasp. Her once dead lungs labored anew as her heart began to beat and formless, racing thoughts reorganized into ‘Lizzie,’ a unique body separate from the Meta. But tonight, as death retreated again into the night, a raw and unexpected power coursed through her dusty veins.
Page 280
A Vampire was present; several, actually, but one was particularly strong. She could feel them all re-inhabiting their bodies as well, their energies so recently intertwined in the Meta now separating back into distinct individuals. Humans too, evil humans; she could taste their corpuscles circulating underneath their skin as they walked around encased in evil and she hungered for them.
Page 284
She closed her eyes again, centering herself and letting energy from the Meta flow through her. Where had it been these last few days? She could feel them approaching, could feel the surge in adrenaline and testosterone, could even feel the blood engorging the penises of her assailants.
Page 319
Lizzie looked at him incredulously. “You seriously never, ever listen to me Tucker,” she said. “I’ve told you about this a hundred times; what it’s like, where our thoughts go, our consciousness, our sense of self, when we die.”
Page 323
“I saw your mother,” Dad said. “She’s waiting for me. In the Metro or whatever it’s called.”
If these have you wondering more about the Meta, check out The Cowboy and The Vampire and Blood and Whiskey for insights into a new and decidedly undead take on spirituality.
And check out this post about how the Meta came to be:
Vampires have been around in popular legends for hundreds of years and in popular fiction, courtesy of Polidori and then Stoker, for more than a century. Working with such a popular archetype has its pluses — immediately resonating with readers — and minuses: tiredly expected attributes, like fangs and shrinking, hissing, from crucifixes, can feel tired. That’s why every author hopes to come up with some new take that’s still grounded in the classics.
When we began work on The Cowboy and the Vampire Thriller Series, we were intrigued by several aspects of the vampire myth: how it plugged into religion, the politics of the two castes of vampires and how could an advanced, sentient being die repeatedly — literally; we’re talking full biologic shutdown — only to be resurrected each sundown with all their memories and their personality intact. It’s that last topic that we explore more deeply in Blood and Whiskey.
Because our vampires die, fully, every dawn they have a classic near death experience every single morning. When they die, their consciousness zips off into “the Meta,” a giant energy field and external shared consciousness that contains and sustains all life. At sundown, all of those strands of energy untangle and the vampires return to their bodies once again and arise none the worse for wear. And hungry.
It’s not just for vampires though. Humans go to the Meta as well when they have a near death experience. Think of the classic NDE with the tunnel of light, meeting familiar relatives and experiencing a sense of bliss and meaning. Of course, that only happens to a very small number of people, and to some advanced mental travelers who are able to enter the Meta by meditating.
Vampires, however, enter the Meta every single day.
The concept of the Meta, and what it means for human spirituality, is resonating. In their review of Blood and Whiskey, Kirkus Reviews says:
“While a number of existentialist underpinnings give the series some depth, the book is first and foremost a thriller, upping the ante in every chapter as bullets fly and relationships strain under the weight of old loyalties and new revelations. In a way, it’s a shame more time isn’t spent exploring the existence of this meta world where consciousnesses wait out the daylight hours and immortality has all sorts of ramifications for human spirituality. But with strong writing, funny characters (no irony is lost on one vampiress who takes to sporting a “Future Farmers of America” jacket) and plenty of action, it’s hard to fault the authors for keeping the focus on a story this riveting.”
We agree, and are definitely spending more time in the Meta in book three (we are hard at work on it), but Blood and Whiskey has a huge focus on this new take on the afterlife (and the before and during life as well) based on morphic fields.
Here are a few quotes and sections from Blood and Whiskey that deal with the Meta:
Page 46
After all they shared it was hard to believe Julius was really dead. Lizzie still refused to discuss the details of what happened that night, saying only that she had taken care of the situation. Elita knew he was dead though. She felt his force wither away and bleed into the Meta, smelled and saw his blood on Lizzie’s breath and felt it coursing within her.
Page 65
Lizzie struggled to climb out of what felt like an endless, undifferentiated and always terrifying, darkness. Elita promised her it would get easier, being reborn anew every night, and that soon she’d find her place in the darkness — the Meta — and sense others there too. Not their bodies or their voices, not like in the ghost stories of humans, but their essence, able to feel the part of them that existed after death, the part that existed underneath life. For now, it was all a jumble and still disconcerting.
Page 231
There was a flash of ruby incandescence that erupted from where their blood mingled, growing in power and then consuming her and catapulting her thoughts out of her body. She swirled up into the arch of the sky and beyond, slamming into Virote’s soul on the way. They intertwined, joining together as one, their consciousness and experience of sensations now singular and shared, gloriously rushing along a tunnel of light, spiritual adrenaline flowing, radiant and free.
Page 280
As the sun dropped below the horizon, life flooded back into Lizzie and she sat up with a gasp. Her once dead lungs labored anew as her heart began to beat and formless, racing thoughts reorganized into ‘Lizzie,’ a unique body separate from the Meta. But tonight, as death retreated again into the night, a raw and unexpected power coursed through her dusty veins.
Page 280
A Vampire was present; several, actually, but one was particularly strong. She could feel them all re-inhabiting their bodies as well, their energies so recently intertwined in the Meta now separating back into distinct individuals. Humans too, evil humans; she could taste their corpuscles circulating underneath their skin as they walked around encased in evil and she hungered for them.
Page 284
She closed her eyes again, centering herself and letting energy from the Meta flow through her. Where had it been these last few days? She could feel them approaching, could feel the surge in adrenaline and testosterone, could even feel the blood engorging the penises of her assailants.
Page 319
Lizzie looked at him incredulously. “You seriously never, ever listen to me Tucker,” she said. “I’ve told you about this a hundred times; what it’s like, where our thoughts go, our consciousness, our sense of self, when we die.”
Page 323
“I saw your mother,” Dad said. “She’s waiting for me. In the Metro or whatever it’s called.”
If these have you wondering more about the Meta, check out The Cowboy and The Vampire and Blood and Whiskey for insights into a new and decidedly undead take on spirituality.
October 20, 2012
Love, and Other Glorious Misfortunes
Tucker, from the pages of The Cowboy and The Vampire Thriller Series, writes a guest blog (with a little help from Clark and Kathleen)
A cowboy talks about falling hat-over-boot-heels for a vampire.
One time I saw a grizzly bear get hit by lightning.
I was way up in the mountains doing a little scouting ahead of hunting season and I happened to see this big old grizzly ambling through a grove of aspen across the canyon. I was watching him through my spotting scope while this summer storm rolled in with big old dark, threatening clouds. As if sensing impending danger, the bear sat down on his haunches and was sniffing the air when a bolt of lightning sizzled down and hit the tree right next to him. It gave him quite a jolt and sent him tumbling ass over tea kettle. Of course, being a bear he didn’t know what the hell had happened and roared up ready to fight — all singed and smoking and pissed off — only there wasn’t anything to fight.
It was something to see, from a safe distance of course, and I was having quite a laugh at his expense, but I noticed he calmed down quick. The lightning had split that tree and knocked down a bee hive about the size of a football right to his feet. There was a whole, honey-sweetened bonanza of lightly toasted larvae — that’s what bears really like and not, as some folks suspect, the honey — and soon enough he’d forgot all about the fireworks and the pain and the confusion and was just snuffling happily through a gourmet lunch.
I learned something from that old bear — even when life hits you hard, look for the bright side of things.
Let me tell you about Elizabeth Vaughan. She is the prettiest woman I have ever seen, and that’s counting on the television. She’s also the stubbornest, hard-headedest and just downright most irritating human being. Correction: she’s not human any more, but she was when we first met. We got hit by a bolt of lightning, figuratively speaking, that knocked both our hearts right off their feet.
It didn’t not start off auspiciously. I’ve always had my suspicions that beautiful people think they are a little better than the rest of us — I supposed that could be misplaced jealousy — and I’ve also always been a little distrustful of city folks in general. So when a beautiful city girl with a dictionary-sized vocabulary showed up in LonePine, I kept my distance. It didn’t last long. I blame Rex, that fool dog of mine. He liked her right off, but he’s always been a push over. He still likes her, even though she’s a vampire.
Did I mention that part? Let me tell you what it’s like loving a vampire. First off, you can’t ever have any more fights, ever. Vampires are a lot stronger than us and she’s come close to accidentally breaking my hand just squeezing it affectionately. I can’t imagine what would happen if she got really worked up about something.
Another thing is, they die every morning. Like full on, stiff-corpse dead. Talk about a mood killer when you want to snuggle up and spend the morning in bed with your lady and she’s cold and got the rigor mortis. Lizzie gets to go jetting metaphysically off to some energy field thing — The Meta. She’s tried to explain it; it’s where folks go when they almost die — into the tunnel of light, see grandma, and then come back. Apparently, vampires go there every day. She comes back all rested and rejuvenated, but I’m just getting tireder because stay up all night with her and then can’t fall asleep once the sun comes up.
Also, the vampire world is full of back-stabbing, power-hungry psychopaths. And those are the good ones. The undead are forever scheming and trying to take over the world or kill each other or whatnot. Lizzie has this special power that they want, so it’s even worse for us. Plus there’s whole Hatfields versus McCoys thing between the royal vampires and Reptiles. Two different species, one giant pain in the neck for humans.
Speaking of that, she needs blood to live, and plenty of it. The best kind of blood, the most nourishing, is the blood of evil humans and it’s the best when they bleed out and die in the process. It’s like organic, free range beef to them. There are only 439 people in LonePine, well, 438 now, and even though a fair percentage of them are bad apples, the law tends to notice when folks turn up missing in a small town. I don’t mind sharing a little of my blood from time to time — I’m not ashamed to admit it feels pretty good — but now I’m tired and anemic.
Multiply all of that stuff by her being pregnant, with hormones racing through veins and just idling there during the daylight hours when she’s dead, and an international council of vampires hanging out in LonePine, and you can imagine what my life has become.
Sometimes I feel a lot like that old bear, hit by a bolt of lightning out of the blue — vampire wars and mystical prophecies and a periodically dead girlfriend— and looking around stupidly and wondering what the hell is going on and roaring a lot. But love is a glorious roasted bee hive and there’s no question that my life is the better for having Lizzie in it. I had almost forgot what it was like to feel alive; funny that it took a beautiful undead vampire to remind me.
Note: This is a post we helped Tucker write for the ExLibris blog. Check out Blood and Whiskey for more of his exploits with Lizzie.
A cowboy talks about falling hat-over-boot-heels for a vampire.
One time I saw a grizzly bear get hit by lightning.
I was way up in the mountains doing a little scouting ahead of hunting season and I happened to see this big old grizzly ambling through a grove of aspen across the canyon. I was watching him through my spotting scope while this summer storm rolled in with big old dark, threatening clouds. As if sensing impending danger, the bear sat down on his haunches and was sniffing the air when a bolt of lightning sizzled down and hit the tree right next to him. It gave him quite a jolt and sent him tumbling ass over tea kettle. Of course, being a bear he didn’t know what the hell had happened and roared up ready to fight — all singed and smoking and pissed off — only there wasn’t anything to fight.
It was something to see, from a safe distance of course, and I was having quite a laugh at his expense, but I noticed he calmed down quick. The lightning had split that tree and knocked down a bee hive about the size of a football right to his feet. There was a whole, honey-sweetened bonanza of lightly toasted larvae — that’s what bears really like and not, as some folks suspect, the honey — and soon enough he’d forgot all about the fireworks and the pain and the confusion and was just snuffling happily through a gourmet lunch.
I learned something from that old bear — even when life hits you hard, look for the bright side of things.
Let me tell you about Elizabeth Vaughan. She is the prettiest woman I have ever seen, and that’s counting on the television. She’s also the stubbornest, hard-headedest and just downright most irritating human being. Correction: she’s not human any more, but she was when we first met. We got hit by a bolt of lightning, figuratively speaking, that knocked both our hearts right off their feet.
It didn’t not start off auspiciously. I’ve always had my suspicions that beautiful people think they are a little better than the rest of us — I supposed that could be misplaced jealousy — and I’ve also always been a little distrustful of city folks in general. So when a beautiful city girl with a dictionary-sized vocabulary showed up in LonePine, I kept my distance. It didn’t last long. I blame Rex, that fool dog of mine. He liked her right off, but he’s always been a push over. He still likes her, even though she’s a vampire.
Did I mention that part? Let me tell you what it’s like loving a vampire. First off, you can’t ever have any more fights, ever. Vampires are a lot stronger than us and she’s come close to accidentally breaking my hand just squeezing it affectionately. I can’t imagine what would happen if she got really worked up about something.
Another thing is, they die every morning. Like full on, stiff-corpse dead. Talk about a mood killer when you want to snuggle up and spend the morning in bed with your lady and she’s cold and got the rigor mortis. Lizzie gets to go jetting metaphysically off to some energy field thing — The Meta. She’s tried to explain it; it’s where folks go when they almost die — into the tunnel of light, see grandma, and then come back. Apparently, vampires go there every day. She comes back all rested and rejuvenated, but I’m just getting tireder because stay up all night with her and then can’t fall asleep once the sun comes up.
Also, the vampire world is full of back-stabbing, power-hungry psychopaths. And those are the good ones. The undead are forever scheming and trying to take over the world or kill each other or whatnot. Lizzie has this special power that they want, so it’s even worse for us. Plus there’s whole Hatfields versus McCoys thing between the royal vampires and Reptiles. Two different species, one giant pain in the neck for humans.
Speaking of that, she needs blood to live, and plenty of it. The best kind of blood, the most nourishing, is the blood of evil humans and it’s the best when they bleed out and die in the process. It’s like organic, free range beef to them. There are only 439 people in LonePine, well, 438 now, and even though a fair percentage of them are bad apples, the law tends to notice when folks turn up missing in a small town. I don’t mind sharing a little of my blood from time to time — I’m not ashamed to admit it feels pretty good — but now I’m tired and anemic.
Multiply all of that stuff by her being pregnant, with hormones racing through veins and just idling there during the daylight hours when she’s dead, and an international council of vampires hanging out in LonePine, and you can imagine what my life has become.
Sometimes I feel a lot like that old bear, hit by a bolt of lightning out of the blue — vampire wars and mystical prophecies and a periodically dead girlfriend— and looking around stupidly and wondering what the hell is going on and roaring a lot. But love is a glorious roasted bee hive and there’s no question that my life is the better for having Lizzie in it. I had almost forgot what it was like to feel alive; funny that it took a beautiful undead vampire to remind me.
Note: This is a post we helped Tucker write for the ExLibris blog. Check out Blood and Whiskey for more of his exploits with Lizzie.
October 4, 2012
Blood and Whiskey: Inspired by Paranoia
How one character, in particular, sets the tone for the blood- and romance-drenched second book in The Cowboy and Vampire Thriller Series.
Note: This is a post we wrote for the Book Lovin Mamas blog.
Blood and Whiskey is an opposites-attract love story. It’s hard to get more opposite than the salt-of-the-earth cowboy, Tucker, who falls irreversibly, hat over heels in love with Lizzie, the queen of the undead. She’s nuts about him too, and she wasn’t always a vampire — when she met Tucker she was a big city girl who thought the handsome, undereducated stranger would make for a memorable drunken mistake.
A lot can change in a few months. Now they’re pregnant, for starters.
The book captures the magic and chaos of their very different worlds colliding in a love affair for the ages. Like any new lovers, they have plenty of stuff to work through. She favors martinis and piano bars; he likes camping. He flosses too loudly; she needs human blood to survive. And that’s just the easy stuff. They are also being pursued by vampire assassins, and the world of the night walkers is teetering on the edge of civil war which could spell disaster for the human race. Plenty of action, sizzling romance and dark humor swirl around them.
With all the chemistry and passion and heartaches between them, it would be easy to assume Tucker or Lizzie provided the impetus for Blood and Whiskey. Easy, but not entirely correct. And no, it’s not Elita either, the sexy two thousand year old vampire forever taking out her boredom on unsuspecting victims in an orgy of blood and kinky sex. She demands attention, it’s true, but the secret source of paranoid energy powering Blood and Whiskey comes courtesy of Lenny.
Lenny is Tucker’s best friend and a way-off-the-grid survivalist. He once designed weapons for the military, but exposure to hazardous chemicals and dark deeds in the name of national security earned him a medical discharge.
Lenny has never met a conspiracy theory he didn’t like, from Roswell to the JFK assassination, from black helicopters to cattle mutilators. He lives in a bunker in LonePine with his wife June surrounded by enough dried meals and stockpiled weapons to last through any apocalypse. Little did he know it would spill out of a musty coffin.
In The Cowboy and the Vampire, when the evil vampire hordes threaten Lizzie’s life, Tucker turns to Lenny for help. With weapons Lenny designed and some “wet work,” they survive the worst the undead could throw at them. In Blood and Whiskey, it’s Lenny who needs help. His niece Rose, an orphan and runaway, is kidnapped from the streets of Portland, Oregon, but not before she has time to make one panicked phone call to her uncle.
Lenny calls in his favor with Tucker and they drive to Portland, then on to a deranged meat packing plant in Plush where Rose is being held.
Along the way, Lenny:
* uses military grade amphetamines to try and stay awake — they seem to have the opposite effect and Tucker has to do all of the driving
* admits that his engine modifications allow his car, an old Pontiac LeMans, to run for thousands of miles on a single tank, but worries that OPEC will kill him to suppress the invention
* threatens to “pop” an evil cowboy with a special deep sea diver’s knife designed to puff a ball of compressed air into sharks
* acknowledges that the U.S. government killed Michael Jackson with propofol
* admits that he’s seen aliens
And that’s just in the first third of the book. Things really heat up from there.
Lenny might not be one of the star-crossed main characters, and he may not be sexy or plagued by world-shaking issues of good and evil, but he knows the world “ain’t what it seems.” He always knew an Illuminati was pulling the strings, he just didn’t know the mysterious overlords were terminally allergic to sunlight.
While the love between Tucker and Lizzie anchors The Cowboy and Vampire Thriller Series, Lenny is the one who insisted this story to be told. Because Lenny knows that reality — when you look it straight in the eye and don’t flinch — is darker than we could ever dream and that humans are not at the top of the food chain.
Find out more about Lenny, and his pal Tucker, in Blood and Whiskey
Note: This is a post we wrote for the Book Lovin Mamas blog.
Blood and Whiskey is an opposites-attract love story. It’s hard to get more opposite than the salt-of-the-earth cowboy, Tucker, who falls irreversibly, hat over heels in love with Lizzie, the queen of the undead. She’s nuts about him too, and she wasn’t always a vampire — when she met Tucker she was a big city girl who thought the handsome, undereducated stranger would make for a memorable drunken mistake.
A lot can change in a few months. Now they’re pregnant, for starters.
The book captures the magic and chaos of their very different worlds colliding in a love affair for the ages. Like any new lovers, they have plenty of stuff to work through. She favors martinis and piano bars; he likes camping. He flosses too loudly; she needs human blood to survive. And that’s just the easy stuff. They are also being pursued by vampire assassins, and the world of the night walkers is teetering on the edge of civil war which could spell disaster for the human race. Plenty of action, sizzling romance and dark humor swirl around them.
With all the chemistry and passion and heartaches between them, it would be easy to assume Tucker or Lizzie provided the impetus for Blood and Whiskey. Easy, but not entirely correct. And no, it’s not Elita either, the sexy two thousand year old vampire forever taking out her boredom on unsuspecting victims in an orgy of blood and kinky sex. She demands attention, it’s true, but the secret source of paranoid energy powering Blood and Whiskey comes courtesy of Lenny.
Lenny is Tucker’s best friend and a way-off-the-grid survivalist. He once designed weapons for the military, but exposure to hazardous chemicals and dark deeds in the name of national security earned him a medical discharge.
Lenny has never met a conspiracy theory he didn’t like, from Roswell to the JFK assassination, from black helicopters to cattle mutilators. He lives in a bunker in LonePine with his wife June surrounded by enough dried meals and stockpiled weapons to last through any apocalypse. Little did he know it would spill out of a musty coffin.
In The Cowboy and the Vampire, when the evil vampire hordes threaten Lizzie’s life, Tucker turns to Lenny for help. With weapons Lenny designed and some “wet work,” they survive the worst the undead could throw at them. In Blood and Whiskey, it’s Lenny who needs help. His niece Rose, an orphan and runaway, is kidnapped from the streets of Portland, Oregon, but not before she has time to make one panicked phone call to her uncle.
Lenny calls in his favor with Tucker and they drive to Portland, then on to a deranged meat packing plant in Plush where Rose is being held.
Along the way, Lenny:
* uses military grade amphetamines to try and stay awake — they seem to have the opposite effect and Tucker has to do all of the driving
* admits that his engine modifications allow his car, an old Pontiac LeMans, to run for thousands of miles on a single tank, but worries that OPEC will kill him to suppress the invention
* threatens to “pop” an evil cowboy with a special deep sea diver’s knife designed to puff a ball of compressed air into sharks
* acknowledges that the U.S. government killed Michael Jackson with propofol
* admits that he’s seen aliens
And that’s just in the first third of the book. Things really heat up from there.
Lenny might not be one of the star-crossed main characters, and he may not be sexy or plagued by world-shaking issues of good and evil, but he knows the world “ain’t what it seems.” He always knew an Illuminati was pulling the strings, he just didn’t know the mysterious overlords were terminally allergic to sunlight.
While the love between Tucker and Lizzie anchors The Cowboy and Vampire Thriller Series, Lenny is the one who insisted this story to be told. Because Lenny knows that reality — when you look it straight in the eye and don’t flinch — is darker than we could ever dream and that humans are not at the top of the food chain.
Find out more about Lenny, and his pal Tucker, in Blood and Whiskey
September 9, 2012
What if Vampires Wrote about Humans
by Kathleen McFall & Clark Hays
(Note: this is a post we wrote for our "splash" in the Orangeberry Summer Book Tour.)
Imagine if the undead featured on the pages of Blood and Whiskey were the ones writing about strange paranormal creatures of fantasy — humans — instead of the other way around.
Everybody loves a good fright story and there’s nothing more frightening than humans, forever skulking about in the sunlight with their wooden stakes and tan skin. In Blood and Whiskey, we tried to do something different and imaginative with our people, the non-dead, as they are known. Humans have existed in legends and folktales for thousands of years and each country seems to have similar stories about the sun-walkers. We stripped those stories down to the bare bones to re-think the traditional notion of humans as simple-minded monsters.
They are short lived, of course, existing in some cases for just 50 or 60 years. Evolution has left them physically defenseless, weak to the point of debilitation and vulnerable to injury and disease. Luckily, it also made their blood delicious and nutritious. We introduced a new concept — that the blood of evil humans was especially sustaining, but of course we all know blood is blood.
Our humans possess a cockroach-like tenacity to survive and have especially cunning little minds. They use those minds to fashion tools of destruction to attack the heroic vampires. The non-dead are also able to walk in full sunlight with no harm whatsoever, which makes them an even greater threat to the protagonists, who spend each day residing in The Meta. The humans in our book don’t even know The Meta exists.
We also introduced the concept of “love.” Our humans fall in love, a condition far removed from the ever-shifting relationships known to our kind, which are based on convenience and personal sexual satisfaction regardless of gender or familiarity. These humans have a monolithic belief that love is somehow shared between two beings, and of lasting import.
That’s the underlying comedic element of the book, almost absurdist. This love is somewhat infectious, passing between two humans and creating a shared derangement of the senses.
In our book, the evil human — from the mythical cowboy tribe — is a carrier of an especially virulent form of love. As improbable as it sounds, a vampire is infected by his love. We know that sounds almost disgusting, that a predator would feel any sort of connection to our prey, but the book is not supposed to be funny — it’s a tragedy; readers should be warned, this is not another “vampire triumphant” novel.
Learn more about the mythical, mystical world of humans in Blood and Whiskey
(Note: this is a post we wrote for our "splash" in the Orangeberry Summer Book Tour.)
Imagine if the undead featured on the pages of Blood and Whiskey were the ones writing about strange paranormal creatures of fantasy — humans — instead of the other way around.
Everybody loves a good fright story and there’s nothing more frightening than humans, forever skulking about in the sunlight with their wooden stakes and tan skin. In Blood and Whiskey, we tried to do something different and imaginative with our people, the non-dead, as they are known. Humans have existed in legends and folktales for thousands of years and each country seems to have similar stories about the sun-walkers. We stripped those stories down to the bare bones to re-think the traditional notion of humans as simple-minded monsters.
They are short lived, of course, existing in some cases for just 50 or 60 years. Evolution has left them physically defenseless, weak to the point of debilitation and vulnerable to injury and disease. Luckily, it also made their blood delicious and nutritious. We introduced a new concept — that the blood of evil humans was especially sustaining, but of course we all know blood is blood.
Our humans possess a cockroach-like tenacity to survive and have especially cunning little minds. They use those minds to fashion tools of destruction to attack the heroic vampires. The non-dead are also able to walk in full sunlight with no harm whatsoever, which makes them an even greater threat to the protagonists, who spend each day residing in The Meta. The humans in our book don’t even know The Meta exists.
We also introduced the concept of “love.” Our humans fall in love, a condition far removed from the ever-shifting relationships known to our kind, which are based on convenience and personal sexual satisfaction regardless of gender or familiarity. These humans have a monolithic belief that love is somehow shared between two beings, and of lasting import.
That’s the underlying comedic element of the book, almost absurdist. This love is somewhat infectious, passing between two humans and creating a shared derangement of the senses.
In our book, the evil human — from the mythical cowboy tribe — is a carrier of an especially virulent form of love. As improbable as it sounds, a vampire is infected by his love. We know that sounds almost disgusting, that a predator would feel any sort of connection to our prey, but the book is not supposed to be funny — it’s a tragedy; readers should be warned, this is not another “vampire triumphant” novel.
Learn more about the mythical, mystical world of humans in Blood and Whiskey
August 18, 2012
A Geologist and a Cloud-Watcher Walk into a Bar …
Writing together takes advantage of the power of opposites.
(Note: this is a post we wrote for the awesome A Chick Who Readsblog and features a hand-crafted joke.)
Kathleen and I have been writing together for more than ten years now, almost as long as we’ve been together, yet we could not be more different. She’s a geologist by training and spends most of her time watching the ground for sedimentary clues. I am a chronic cloud watcher and spend most of my time with my head in the stratosphere watching for lenticular clouds (Note: Mount Hood, near our home town of Portland, is a great place to spot them).
That difference is just the tip of the iceberg. She likes to read Russian fiction; I’m more into graphic novels. Kathleen is not a big fan of music — of any kind; I can’t make it more than ten waking minutes without reaching for the iPod (the Yeah Yeah Yeahs are on in the background as I write). She’s vegan; I’m vegetarian … OK, so that’s not very different. She likes French movies with subtitles and whisper-thin plots that usually involve some sort of stolen look; I’m more of a horror/western/action movie junkie.
Those are just a few of the many differences between us, and exploring and focusing that tension makes our writing more than the sum of the parts. In our books — The Cowboy and the Vampire and Blood and Whiskey — the love between our hero and heroine mirrors the chaos and energy of our own opposites attract experiences.
Like us (Washington, DC; Whitehall, Montana), Tucker and Lizzie are from different worlds. Tucker is a down on his luck Wyoming cowboy and Lizzie is a reporter from New York. He was used to being by himself in the middle of nowhere with nothing but sagebrush and Rex, his long-suffering dog, to keep him company. Lizzie was used to the hustle and bustle of the capital of the world (sorry Paris but New York kind of is) and fighting to keep her space in a sea of people.
Their whirlwind romance, fueled by nights of scorching passion and, if they were honest with each other, a desperation born of the notion they would likely never see each other again, helped form a bond that would keep them together against seemingly insurmountable odds — and a horde of evil vampires.
In Blood and Whiskey, the differences between them only increase. Tucker has to deal with the fact that his girlfriend is suddenly the most powerful figure in the shadowy world of the vampires. Every single member of the undead tribes wants something from her, and some just want her dead. Lizzie just needs Tucker, and human blood, but can’t bring herself to kill. Or can she?
In our books, the opposites attract nature of our own relationship allows us to so easily get inside their heads. In a romance made stronger by two almost diametrically opposed world views, we found common ground in our love of writing, and it comes through in our books. Check out The Cowboy and Vampire Thriller Series to find out for yourself.
Oh yeah, about that joke:
So this geologist and a cloud watcher walk into a bar. The geologist says, “I’ll take a gin and tectonic.” The bartender says, “Sorry, we don’t serve your types here.” The cloud watcher shakes his head and says, “Are you cirrus?”
(Note: this is a post we wrote for the awesome A Chick Who Readsblog and features a hand-crafted joke.)
Kathleen and I have been writing together for more than ten years now, almost as long as we’ve been together, yet we could not be more different. She’s a geologist by training and spends most of her time watching the ground for sedimentary clues. I am a chronic cloud watcher and spend most of my time with my head in the stratosphere watching for lenticular clouds (Note: Mount Hood, near our home town of Portland, is a great place to spot them).
That difference is just the tip of the iceberg. She likes to read Russian fiction; I’m more into graphic novels. Kathleen is not a big fan of music — of any kind; I can’t make it more than ten waking minutes without reaching for the iPod (the Yeah Yeah Yeahs are on in the background as I write). She’s vegan; I’m vegetarian … OK, so that’s not very different. She likes French movies with subtitles and whisper-thin plots that usually involve some sort of stolen look; I’m more of a horror/western/action movie junkie.
Those are just a few of the many differences between us, and exploring and focusing that tension makes our writing more than the sum of the parts. In our books — The Cowboy and the Vampire and Blood and Whiskey — the love between our hero and heroine mirrors the chaos and energy of our own opposites attract experiences.
Like us (Washington, DC; Whitehall, Montana), Tucker and Lizzie are from different worlds. Tucker is a down on his luck Wyoming cowboy and Lizzie is a reporter from New York. He was used to being by himself in the middle of nowhere with nothing but sagebrush and Rex, his long-suffering dog, to keep him company. Lizzie was used to the hustle and bustle of the capital of the world (sorry Paris but New York kind of is) and fighting to keep her space in a sea of people.
Their whirlwind romance, fueled by nights of scorching passion and, if they were honest with each other, a desperation born of the notion they would likely never see each other again, helped form a bond that would keep them together against seemingly insurmountable odds — and a horde of evil vampires.
In Blood and Whiskey, the differences between them only increase. Tucker has to deal with the fact that his girlfriend is suddenly the most powerful figure in the shadowy world of the vampires. Every single member of the undead tribes wants something from her, and some just want her dead. Lizzie just needs Tucker, and human blood, but can’t bring herself to kill. Or can she?
In our books, the opposites attract nature of our own relationship allows us to so easily get inside their heads. In a romance made stronger by two almost diametrically opposed world views, we found common ground in our love of writing, and it comes through in our books. Check out The Cowboy and Vampire Thriller Series to find out for yourself.
Oh yeah, about that joke:
So this geologist and a cloud watcher walk into a bar. The geologist says, “I’ll take a gin and tectonic.” The bartender says, “Sorry, we don’t serve your types here.” The cloud watcher shakes his head and says, “Are you cirrus?”
