Clark Hays's Blog, page 5
August 3, 2012
Zombie Sex
Zombie versus vampire: Who’s better in the bedroom?
Note: Here's a little something we wrote for the Cocktails and Books blog.
When it comes to paranormal fiction, vampires and zombies are hot. Vampires have been with us for centuries in myths and legends and for about 200 years in their current incarnation, thanks to Poliodori and later, Bram Stoker. Zombies are, by comparison, relative new comers; the current iteration only dates back to the late 1960s and Romero’s Night of the Living Dead. But despite their shambling footsteps, they seem to be everywhere these days — movies, books, graphic novels, corporate America.
The one place zombies are conspicuously absent? Romantic leads.
You won’t find any zombies in our books, The Cowboy and the Vampire: A Darkly Romantic Mystery and Blood and Whiskey, but not because we have anything against the living dead. It’s just that they don’t really lend themselves to romance or even erotic horror. Cowboys are almost too easy with their muscles, rough hands, gentle hearts and tight blue jeans. There’s a strong case to be made for cowgirls, too. And vampires have been steaming up the pages ever since Dracula caused Lucy to get all tingly inside and the sexy vampire sisters got all up in Jonathan Harkers’ libido.
Sultry vampires, the bad boys and girls of the paranormal world, are far more conflicted, sexy and fun to work with than the current headliner — zombies. Here’s a quick run down of pluses and minuses of sexing up vampires and zombies:
-- Vampires have coffin breath and eternal bed-head. (Minus one for the undead.)
-- Zombies want you for your brains, not your body. (Plus one for the living dead.)
-- Vampires have voracious sexual appetites and the males have what we like to call “resur-erections” — they can come back from the dead again and again. (Plus one for the vampires. Make that plus two.)
-- Zombies are into the group thing – the ménage a trARRGGGGGGRRRHHHH. (Uhm, let’s say group sex is neutral.)
-- After a wild night, vampires don’t mind disappearing during the day to give you a little space. (Vampires, plus one.)
-- When zombies slip you a little tongue, you can keep it. (Ewww, minus one.)
-- Vampires leave you feeling drained, usually not in the good way. (Neutral; it’s totally worth it.)
-- Zombies have unintentionally removable appendages. That can be … awkward. (Minus one.)
-- Vampires are experienced in the ways of seduction and dark arts of pleasure. (Plus one, unless you are the jealous type, which we are, so probably minus one.)
-- Zombies tend to have much shorter life spans and forget even the basic moves, like lights out/missionary. (Minus one; shake it up a little zombies.)
-- Vampires clean up well and you can take them almost anywhere, except on a lunchtime picnic where they would likely burst into flames. (Plus one except for when they ignite, then it’s minus two.)
-- Zombies are putrefying hulks of rotting flesh and no amount of body spray can cover up that smell. (Minus one.)
If you tally it all up, you can see why vampires make it into the bedrooms of so many unsuspecting victims while zombies are left on the outside looking in ... often through the window with a bunch of their pals, groaning and leaving bloody, chunky streaks on the glass. That’s not sexy. Someone has to clean that up.
For more ... tasteful sex scenes, check out our latest book, Blood and Whiskey. You won't find any zombies, but there are plenty of sexy vampires.
Note: Here's a little something we wrote for the Cocktails and Books blog.
When it comes to paranormal fiction, vampires and zombies are hot. Vampires have been with us for centuries in myths and legends and for about 200 years in their current incarnation, thanks to Poliodori and later, Bram Stoker. Zombies are, by comparison, relative new comers; the current iteration only dates back to the late 1960s and Romero’s Night of the Living Dead. But despite their shambling footsteps, they seem to be everywhere these days — movies, books, graphic novels, corporate America.
The one place zombies are conspicuously absent? Romantic leads.
You won’t find any zombies in our books, The Cowboy and the Vampire: A Darkly Romantic Mystery and Blood and Whiskey, but not because we have anything against the living dead. It’s just that they don’t really lend themselves to romance or even erotic horror. Cowboys are almost too easy with their muscles, rough hands, gentle hearts and tight blue jeans. There’s a strong case to be made for cowgirls, too. And vampires have been steaming up the pages ever since Dracula caused Lucy to get all tingly inside and the sexy vampire sisters got all up in Jonathan Harkers’ libido.
Sultry vampires, the bad boys and girls of the paranormal world, are far more conflicted, sexy and fun to work with than the current headliner — zombies. Here’s a quick run down of pluses and minuses of sexing up vampires and zombies:
-- Vampires have coffin breath and eternal bed-head. (Minus one for the undead.)
-- Zombies want you for your brains, not your body. (Plus one for the living dead.)
-- Vampires have voracious sexual appetites and the males have what we like to call “resur-erections” — they can come back from the dead again and again. (Plus one for the vampires. Make that plus two.)
-- Zombies are into the group thing – the ménage a trARRGGGGGGRRRHHHH. (Uhm, let’s say group sex is neutral.)
-- After a wild night, vampires don’t mind disappearing during the day to give you a little space. (Vampires, plus one.)
-- When zombies slip you a little tongue, you can keep it. (Ewww, minus one.)
-- Vampires leave you feeling drained, usually not in the good way. (Neutral; it’s totally worth it.)
-- Zombies have unintentionally removable appendages. That can be … awkward. (Minus one.)
-- Vampires are experienced in the ways of seduction and dark arts of pleasure. (Plus one, unless you are the jealous type, which we are, so probably minus one.)
-- Zombies tend to have much shorter life spans and forget even the basic moves, like lights out/missionary. (Minus one; shake it up a little zombies.)
-- Vampires clean up well and you can take them almost anywhere, except on a lunchtime picnic where they would likely burst into flames. (Plus one except for when they ignite, then it’s minus two.)
-- Zombies are putrefying hulks of rotting flesh and no amount of body spray can cover up that smell. (Minus one.)
If you tally it all up, you can see why vampires make it into the bedrooms of so many unsuspecting victims while zombies are left on the outside looking in ... often through the window with a bunch of their pals, groaning and leaving bloody, chunky streaks on the glass. That’s not sexy. Someone has to clean that up.
For more ... tasteful sex scenes, check out our latest book, Blood and Whiskey. You won't find any zombies, but there are plenty of sexy vampires.
July 27, 2012
Lonely Together
When you have the loneliest job in the world — writing — it helps to have a partner.
Note: Here's something we wrote for the To Read or Not to Read blog. The topic: writing together. The results: the anti-mating call of the writer.
Few professional pursuits are as lonely as writing. A lighthouse keeper comes close. Or a hermit seeking enlightenment. Or possibly a toll booth operator.
It’s not that writers purposefully cut ourselves off from people, it’s just that we tend to live mostly inside our heads — forever spinning out plotlines, testing stories, creating characters, constructing new worlds and constantly, chronically, obsessively observing. And taking notes. It’s not normal behavior, truthfully, and it can make us feel alone, even in crowds.
Most productive writers don’t spend too much time in crowds anyway because we’re generally sequestered away somewhere scribbling in notebooks or pounding a keyboard. So it’s lonely AND boring. Think of the worst tortured artist from some subtitled French black and white film, magnify that by a god complex of biblical proportions and then add years of disappointment and the final product is somewhere near a typical writer. And chances are, that writer is probably single or has a sorely disappointed, long-suffering and very patient partner.
What’s the anti-mating call of the writer? “Not tonight dear, I’m making great progress on my book/short story/screenplay/manifesto.”
We are either lucky or crazy (probably both; about 60/40) because we fell in love knowing full well that our intended had the derangement of the senses that comes with being a writer. Then we went full blown loco and began writing together.
It started with The Cowboy and the Vampire: A Very Unusual Romance in 1999. At the time, we were trying to figure out how to put the pieces of our relationship back together after a fiery break up and two years in separate seclusion. The strategy worked. We’ve been writing together for more than ten years now and growing even lonelier together.
Now we happily (note: all writers are a little bit depressive) spend those fevered, stolen moments writing together, but apart, and taking comfort in the long silences, the frenzied work and crazed muttering. Instead of trying to minimize the self-imposed mental exile, instead of trying to schedule time to be social and “do” things together, we forged a writing partnership based in our shared loneliness.
Our second book, Blood and Whiskey, was just released and we barely did anything at all while we worked on it except write, talk about writing and then write some more. And it was kind of awesome.
When you have found the person you can be alone with, no matter what you do together, you’ve found the right person.
Note: Here's something we wrote for the To Read or Not to Read blog. The topic: writing together. The results: the anti-mating call of the writer.
Few professional pursuits are as lonely as writing. A lighthouse keeper comes close. Or a hermit seeking enlightenment. Or possibly a toll booth operator.
It’s not that writers purposefully cut ourselves off from people, it’s just that we tend to live mostly inside our heads — forever spinning out plotlines, testing stories, creating characters, constructing new worlds and constantly, chronically, obsessively observing. And taking notes. It’s not normal behavior, truthfully, and it can make us feel alone, even in crowds.
Most productive writers don’t spend too much time in crowds anyway because we’re generally sequestered away somewhere scribbling in notebooks or pounding a keyboard. So it’s lonely AND boring. Think of the worst tortured artist from some subtitled French black and white film, magnify that by a god complex of biblical proportions and then add years of disappointment and the final product is somewhere near a typical writer. And chances are, that writer is probably single or has a sorely disappointed, long-suffering and very patient partner.
What’s the anti-mating call of the writer? “Not tonight dear, I’m making great progress on my book/short story/screenplay/manifesto.”
We are either lucky or crazy (probably both; about 60/40) because we fell in love knowing full well that our intended had the derangement of the senses that comes with being a writer. Then we went full blown loco and began writing together.
It started with The Cowboy and the Vampire: A Very Unusual Romance in 1999. At the time, we were trying to figure out how to put the pieces of our relationship back together after a fiery break up and two years in separate seclusion. The strategy worked. We’ve been writing together for more than ten years now and growing even lonelier together.
Now we happily (note: all writers are a little bit depressive) spend those fevered, stolen moments writing together, but apart, and taking comfort in the long silences, the frenzied work and crazed muttering. Instead of trying to minimize the self-imposed mental exile, instead of trying to schedule time to be social and “do” things together, we forged a writing partnership based in our shared loneliness.
Our second book, Blood and Whiskey, was just released and we barely did anything at all while we worked on it except write, talk about writing and then write some more. And it was kind of awesome.
When you have found the person you can be alone with, no matter what you do together, you’ve found the right person.
July 11, 2012
Self-Inflicted Research
Here's something we wrote for the Ramblings From This Chick blog. It's a funny look at a not so funny topic -- the time I almost blew my leg off with a .44 mag.
My one and (hopefully) only experience getting shot.
By Clark Hays (with a lot of help from Kathleen)
In Blood and Whiskey, the second book in The Cowboy and Vampire Thriller Series, there’s plenty of action. Since cowboys are involved, some of that action involves guns (along with romance and cowboy-on-vampire lust, of course).
But back to the guns. When we write about gunfights, I draw from my past. A former Montana cowboy, I did my share of shooting: targets, fence posts, pop cans, gophers (sorry gophers); I burned through a lot of ammo in those days. And while that’s probably not unique in cowboy country, I can draw from a less common experience for our writing: I’ve been on the receiving end of a six shooter.
A funny thing happened on the way to the prom
I was a junior in high school, Mom and Dad were gone for the weekend and I had a date for the prom. I’d rented a lovely sky blue tuxedo (it was the last one in the store that fit me, size doofus) and I had reservations at the nicest (only) steak house in nearby Butte, Montana.
Before all the festivities began, I took a walk in my 2,000-acre backyard and of course, strapped on a pistol first — a Ruger Blackhawk .44 mag. This was Montana, after all.
I was running down a canyon looking for coyotes to shoot at (not that I could have hit one) when I heard a terrible roar and felt an ugly tug on my leg. I looked down to see a gleaming flash of bone winking out of a gash along my knee, and my calf was scorched and blackened with powder burns. The bone wasn’t visible for long because blood began gushing down my leg, plus my vision got blurry.
The holster I was wearing broke and the gun tumbled out, landed hammer down on a rock and — it was an older model without a hammer guard — ignited the primer and sent a .44 caliber slug slicing alongside my leg. Another quarter of an inch and the bullet would have punched through my knee and I would have bled to death alone in the mountains. And missed the prom.
After the initial shock of just how close I’d come to a terminal mistake, I wrapped a bandana around my leg and hobbled home (after first unloading the stupid gun). I bandaged the wound, disposed of all the evidence and went to the prom.
I don’t remember much about the dance — pretty sure they played Stairway to Heaven — but I remember those sky blue pants had a bloodstain all down one leg by the end of the night. I dropped them off the next morning at the menswear store and never said a word.
Seriously: Do NOT try this at home, or anywhere
I am a big fan of authentic writing, but I cannot recommend taking research to this extreme. Guns are serious business and we treat them like that in our books. Tucker and his friends, like most folks in the west, see guns as tools and don’t invest them with any glorified movie fantasies. Of course, most folks aren’t dealing with bloodthirsty vampires. The undead are almost as scary as a sky blue tuxedo!
My one and (hopefully) only experience getting shot.
By Clark Hays (with a lot of help from Kathleen)
In Blood and Whiskey, the second book in The Cowboy and Vampire Thriller Series, there’s plenty of action. Since cowboys are involved, some of that action involves guns (along with romance and cowboy-on-vampire lust, of course).
But back to the guns. When we write about gunfights, I draw from my past. A former Montana cowboy, I did my share of shooting: targets, fence posts, pop cans, gophers (sorry gophers); I burned through a lot of ammo in those days. And while that’s probably not unique in cowboy country, I can draw from a less common experience for our writing: I’ve been on the receiving end of a six shooter.
A funny thing happened on the way to the prom
I was a junior in high school, Mom and Dad were gone for the weekend and I had a date for the prom. I’d rented a lovely sky blue tuxedo (it was the last one in the store that fit me, size doofus) and I had reservations at the nicest (only) steak house in nearby Butte, Montana.
Before all the festivities began, I took a walk in my 2,000-acre backyard and of course, strapped on a pistol first — a Ruger Blackhawk .44 mag. This was Montana, after all.
I was running down a canyon looking for coyotes to shoot at (not that I could have hit one) when I heard a terrible roar and felt an ugly tug on my leg. I looked down to see a gleaming flash of bone winking out of a gash along my knee, and my calf was scorched and blackened with powder burns. The bone wasn’t visible for long because blood began gushing down my leg, plus my vision got blurry.
The holster I was wearing broke and the gun tumbled out, landed hammer down on a rock and — it was an older model without a hammer guard — ignited the primer and sent a .44 caliber slug slicing alongside my leg. Another quarter of an inch and the bullet would have punched through my knee and I would have bled to death alone in the mountains. And missed the prom.
After the initial shock of just how close I’d come to a terminal mistake, I wrapped a bandana around my leg and hobbled home (after first unloading the stupid gun). I bandaged the wound, disposed of all the evidence and went to the prom.
I don’t remember much about the dance — pretty sure they played Stairway to Heaven — but I remember those sky blue pants had a bloodstain all down one leg by the end of the night. I dropped them off the next morning at the menswear store and never said a word.
Seriously: Do NOT try this at home, or anywhere
I am a big fan of authentic writing, but I cannot recommend taking research to this extreme. Guns are serious business and we treat them like that in our books. Tucker and his friends, like most folks in the west, see guns as tools and don’t invest them with any glorified movie fantasies. Of course, most folks aren’t dealing with bloodthirsty vampires. The undead are almost as scary as a sky blue tuxedo!
June 29, 2012
The Lady of the Lake: A Ghost story
In the mood for a ghost story? Here's a post we wrote for Embrace the Shadows, a paranormal book review blog. It's a true story. Well it's based on a true story, and we truly stayed at the lodge where the Lady of the Lake worked before she was murdered and dumped in the water. It all starts with a definition...
Saponify: to convert a fat into soap by treating with an alkali
Thankfully, few of us know much about the process of saponification. A pair of fishermen in 1940 found out the hard way that when a human body is exposed to sufficient amounts of alkali and pressure, and refrigerated to prevent decay, naturally occurring fat turns into a soap-like substance. When they noticed a woman’s body (recognizably female and wearing slightly outdated clothes) bobbing on the surface of Lake Crescent, the flesh slipped and oozed off like soap as they wrestled her to shore.
Thus began the legend of the Lady of the Lake.
Fast forward 72 years. After a long few months leading up to the release of Blood and Whiskey, the second book in The Cowboy and Vampire Thriller Series, we decided to take a week off and booked a cabin at Lake Crescent in Washington’s Olympic Peninsula. The Olympic National Park is a vast swath of wilderness about as far north and west as you can get in the lower 48 with mossy, old growth rain forests, the soaring, snow-capped peaks of the Olympic Mountains, an amazing stretch of rocky, undeveloped coastline, milky blue glacier-fed rivers and a series of historic lodges.
We stayed at Crescent Lodge, a turn-of-the-century building with a delightful solarium, dusty, glassy-eyed elk heads on the walls and, naturally, ghosts. During the 1920s and perhaps beyond, the Singer Tavern, as the lodge was then known, served double duty as a house of ill repute. Like any good creaky, historic and now-defunct brothel, it has its share of spirits unwilling to leave this mortal plane.
One such spirit is the Lady of the Lake. Her real name was Hallie Illingworth and she was a rough-around-the-edges beauty, a waitress at the tavern and married (the third time was not a charm) to a louse. He was a beer truck driver and incorrigible ladies man, even after marrying her, and they were prone to violent arguments and fist fights – with each other or other inhabitants of the bar. She disappeared one cold night in December, not to be seen again for four years.
That’s when her saponified corpse popped up out of the icy depths of Lake Crescent — 600 feet straight down in some places — and into the local legend. She had been bound in rope to which weights had been affixed. Her husband was convicted and served his time unremarkably. She, poor soul, continues to mope about the lodge much to the terrified delight of guests and staff.
On a tour of the building, our guide told us one of the newbies heard her clattering up and down the stairs in the wee hours just the night before. Other staff spoke of lights flickering, doors banging shut and music suddenly getting louder in the lounge. She had a reputation for hard drinking, so that makes sense. Others had seen her, or knew someone who had seen her, drifting along the shore and over the water, glowing in the darkness, pale and translucent and a little bit sudsy.
Sadly, we had no paranormal experiences save for an otherworldly stiffness inhabiting our bodies after a night on those historic mattresses. We did take a canoe across the lake to the vicinity where her body was found and stared down into the blue-green depths, half expecting to see her just under the surface of the water — so cold, so deep, and so high in alkali sluiced off the steep peaks surrounding the lake. But we only saw two trout. And an eagle. And later a purple butterfly that landed on Kathleen’s toe. But no ghosts.
It was too sunny for ghosts during the day, and we were far too tired for much to wake us up at night. The canoeing and hiking left us sleeping like the dead. Still, we felt her as we walked the trails around the lake where she died, felt her sorrow in the waters she haunted and felt the sadness that still haunted her all those years later.
There are no ghosts in Blood and Whiskey, but there are plenty of vampires. Check it out.
Saponify: to convert a fat into soap by treating with an alkali
Thankfully, few of us know much about the process of saponification. A pair of fishermen in 1940 found out the hard way that when a human body is exposed to sufficient amounts of alkali and pressure, and refrigerated to prevent decay, naturally occurring fat turns into a soap-like substance. When they noticed a woman’s body (recognizably female and wearing slightly outdated clothes) bobbing on the surface of Lake Crescent, the flesh slipped and oozed off like soap as they wrestled her to shore.
Thus began the legend of the Lady of the Lake.
Fast forward 72 years. After a long few months leading up to the release of Blood and Whiskey, the second book in The Cowboy and Vampire Thriller Series, we decided to take a week off and booked a cabin at Lake Crescent in Washington’s Olympic Peninsula. The Olympic National Park is a vast swath of wilderness about as far north and west as you can get in the lower 48 with mossy, old growth rain forests, the soaring, snow-capped peaks of the Olympic Mountains, an amazing stretch of rocky, undeveloped coastline, milky blue glacier-fed rivers and a series of historic lodges.
We stayed at Crescent Lodge, a turn-of-the-century building with a delightful solarium, dusty, glassy-eyed elk heads on the walls and, naturally, ghosts. During the 1920s and perhaps beyond, the Singer Tavern, as the lodge was then known, served double duty as a house of ill repute. Like any good creaky, historic and now-defunct brothel, it has its share of spirits unwilling to leave this mortal plane.
One such spirit is the Lady of the Lake. Her real name was Hallie Illingworth and she was a rough-around-the-edges beauty, a waitress at the tavern and married (the third time was not a charm) to a louse. He was a beer truck driver and incorrigible ladies man, even after marrying her, and they were prone to violent arguments and fist fights – with each other or other inhabitants of the bar. She disappeared one cold night in December, not to be seen again for four years.
That’s when her saponified corpse popped up out of the icy depths of Lake Crescent — 600 feet straight down in some places — and into the local legend. She had been bound in rope to which weights had been affixed. Her husband was convicted and served his time unremarkably. She, poor soul, continues to mope about the lodge much to the terrified delight of guests and staff.
On a tour of the building, our guide told us one of the newbies heard her clattering up and down the stairs in the wee hours just the night before. Other staff spoke of lights flickering, doors banging shut and music suddenly getting louder in the lounge. She had a reputation for hard drinking, so that makes sense. Others had seen her, or knew someone who had seen her, drifting along the shore and over the water, glowing in the darkness, pale and translucent and a little bit sudsy.
Sadly, we had no paranormal experiences save for an otherworldly stiffness inhabiting our bodies after a night on those historic mattresses. We did take a canoe across the lake to the vicinity where her body was found and stared down into the blue-green depths, half expecting to see her just under the surface of the water — so cold, so deep, and so high in alkali sluiced off the steep peaks surrounding the lake. But we only saw two trout. And an eagle. And later a purple butterfly that landed on Kathleen’s toe. But no ghosts.
It was too sunny for ghosts during the day, and we were far too tired for much to wake us up at night. The canoeing and hiking left us sleeping like the dead. Still, we felt her as we walked the trails around the lake where she died, felt her sorrow in the waters she haunted and felt the sadness that still haunted her all those years later.
There are no ghosts in Blood and Whiskey, but there are plenty of vampires. Check it out.
June 9, 2012
Character Envy
Writing together, especially romances, can make for strange jealousies.
(Note: This is a guest post Kathleen and I wrote for the Where's My Muse book review site.)
In 1999, we came up with a radical plan to save our romance: write together. We had just reunited after an epic break up that required a several-year cooling off period. When a not-so-chance meeting rekindled the flames, we decided to channel some of the excess passion into a joint creative project to hopefully of avoiding total combustion.
The Cowboy and the Vampire: A Darkly Romantic Mystery (Midnight Ink, 2010) — and a newly entangled romance — was the result. This May, we finished our second book, Blood and Whiskey, and we learned something important: our characters lead far more romantic lives than we do.
Of course, they’re also dealing with murderous vampire hordes, cold-blooded killers straight out of the old west, biblical prophecies, undead race wars and the care and feeding of an overly-sensitive dog cow dog named Rex. But even with all of that, and even setting aside the fact they are from very different worlds — she needs human blood to live, he’s more of whiskey drinker — Tucker and Lizzie have a romance for the ages.
It may be petty but we’re kind of jealous.
And not just of the main characters Tucker and Lizzie. There’s also Elita, the fierce, sexy vampire warrior sworn to protect Lizzie, who has seduced her way through half the undead world and left a trail of drained human bodies — stone cold dead but with smiles on their faces — stretching back thousands of years. In Blood and Whiskey, she finds herself sandwiched happily between a handsome Russian vampire, Rurik and his supermodel human consort, Virote.
Us? Well, we found ourselves sandwiched between deadlines.
Early on, we figured that when romantic partners wrote together, it would involve far more reclining on satin sheets, sipping champagne and whispering sweet plotlines to one another. The truth is far less, well, romantic.
Here’s what a typical exchange between us sounds like (names changed to protect the not-so-innocent):
Chuck: Did you finish your chapter yet?
Cathy: Almost, did you finish yours?
Chuck: I need about two hundred more words and a better description of the thing.
Cathy: What thing?
Chuck: The thing. In the mountains. With Elita.
Cathy: Oh yeah. I forgot about that. Should we talk about the next chapters?
Etc., until bed time.
Compare that to a scene from Blood and Whiskey featuring Tucker and Lizzie:
“Do you ever, you know, take a look when I’m dead? Does it turn you on to have a naked corpse next to you?”
“Woman, don’t be gross.”
“I’d probably take a peek. I mean, I do anyway, at least when you are sleeping. What’s the difference? It’s perfectly natural.” She nipped at his neck playfully.
“It’s un-natural. That’s why they call you un-dead.”
“Is what I’m feeling now un-horny?”
“I’m pretty sure it’s the pregnancy hormones getting you all riled up.”
She unbuttoned her shirt and slipped his hand under, molding it around her breast and they both sighed. “You sure you haven’t felt me up when I’m cold and dead? I wouldn’t mind. And I wouldn’t know it if you, you know, did stuff to me.”
“No. I mean, yeah, I’m sure. I’d like to do stuff to you now though.”
“I like that idea.”
Is it any wonder we’re a little jealous?
Still, just in case it sounds like we’re complaining, we don’t write all the time. And the passion we channel into our characters has to come from somewhere.
(Note: This is a guest post Kathleen and I wrote for the Where's My Muse book review site.)
In 1999, we came up with a radical plan to save our romance: write together. We had just reunited after an epic break up that required a several-year cooling off period. When a not-so-chance meeting rekindled the flames, we decided to channel some of the excess passion into a joint creative project to hopefully of avoiding total combustion.
The Cowboy and the Vampire: A Darkly Romantic Mystery (Midnight Ink, 2010) — and a newly entangled romance — was the result. This May, we finished our second book, Blood and Whiskey, and we learned something important: our characters lead far more romantic lives than we do.
Of course, they’re also dealing with murderous vampire hordes, cold-blooded killers straight out of the old west, biblical prophecies, undead race wars and the care and feeding of an overly-sensitive dog cow dog named Rex. But even with all of that, and even setting aside the fact they are from very different worlds — she needs human blood to live, he’s more of whiskey drinker — Tucker and Lizzie have a romance for the ages.
It may be petty but we’re kind of jealous.
And not just of the main characters Tucker and Lizzie. There’s also Elita, the fierce, sexy vampire warrior sworn to protect Lizzie, who has seduced her way through half the undead world and left a trail of drained human bodies — stone cold dead but with smiles on their faces — stretching back thousands of years. In Blood and Whiskey, she finds herself sandwiched happily between a handsome Russian vampire, Rurik and his supermodel human consort, Virote.
Us? Well, we found ourselves sandwiched between deadlines.
Early on, we figured that when romantic partners wrote together, it would involve far more reclining on satin sheets, sipping champagne and whispering sweet plotlines to one another. The truth is far less, well, romantic.
Here’s what a typical exchange between us sounds like (names changed to protect the not-so-innocent):
Chuck: Did you finish your chapter yet?
Cathy: Almost, did you finish yours?
Chuck: I need about two hundred more words and a better description of the thing.
Cathy: What thing?
Chuck: The thing. In the mountains. With Elita.
Cathy: Oh yeah. I forgot about that. Should we talk about the next chapters?
Etc., until bed time.
Compare that to a scene from Blood and Whiskey featuring Tucker and Lizzie:
“Do you ever, you know, take a look when I’m dead? Does it turn you on to have a naked corpse next to you?”
“Woman, don’t be gross.”
“I’d probably take a peek. I mean, I do anyway, at least when you are sleeping. What’s the difference? It’s perfectly natural.” She nipped at his neck playfully.
“It’s un-natural. That’s why they call you un-dead.”
“Is what I’m feeling now un-horny?”
“I’m pretty sure it’s the pregnancy hormones getting you all riled up.”
She unbuttoned her shirt and slipped his hand under, molding it around her breast and they both sighed. “You sure you haven’t felt me up when I’m cold and dead? I wouldn’t mind. And I wouldn’t know it if you, you know, did stuff to me.”
“No. I mean, yeah, I’m sure. I’d like to do stuff to you now though.”
“I like that idea.”
Is it any wonder we’re a little jealous?
Still, just in case it sounds like we’re complaining, we don’t write all the time. And the passion we channel into our characters has to come from somewhere.
May 16, 2012
Where the hell is Plush, Oregon?
"Where the hell is Plush, Oregon?"
It’s a question Tucker and his best friend Lenny ask in our new book Blood and Whiskey after they uncover a human trafficking ring in Portland, Oregon. Under extreme duress, one of the bad guys confesses the victims are shipped to Plush where terrible things await them.
We know exactly where Plush is; we went there in 2010 just before The Cowboy and The Vampire was released. I’d read about Plush the year before. It’s the only place in Oregon where you can mine for sunstones, the state gemstone. Sunstone is a type of feldspar that sparkles and catches the light and we wanted to learn more.
Did I mention Kathleen is a geologist?
It’s a long drive from Portland to Plush, about 360 hard miles, and an even larger culture shift. Portland is a small town by some standards, with a population of about half a million. Plush, on the other hand, has about 139 residents on a good day. And good days aren’t that common. It’s smack dab in the middle of nowhere in the best possible sense of the word.
Sagebrush, rocky bluffs, unexpected lakes and hundreds of curious, fleet-footed antelopes. We found deserted hot springs, a haunted sanitarium and plenty of sunstone mines — most operated by deeply-tanned hippies and other drop outs from society living on the edge of the world. It was fantastic.
I can still remember making a tofu and refried bean sandwich, with Roma tomatoes, on the hood of the car, baking in the summer sun, before we sorted through a conveyor belt of pulverized rocks looking for sunstones. And we found many. They are hard to miss because of the way they seem to trap sunlight.
More than gemstones, we found a place to anchor our latest book. Yes, Blood and Whiskey is still set in our favorite small town, fictional LonePine, Wyoming, but we loved Plush so much, we had figure out a way to get our heroes there. Lenny and Tucker track down a band of particularly vicious Vampires who operate a “feedlot” in Plush. But nothing is ever what it seems in The Cowboy and Vampire Thriller Series.
Along with the unforgettable landscape and the quirky little town, we wanted to do something with the beautiful sunstones as well. Vampires, as we all know, are affected by the sun, so it made sense to give the lovely little gemstones special powers over the undead.
To find out what those powers are, check out Blood and Whiskey. To find out what Plush and the surrounding vicinity looks like, check out our photo album Armchair Tour of Plush and Parts Beyond on Facebook.
It’s a question Tucker and his best friend Lenny ask in our new book Blood and Whiskey after they uncover a human trafficking ring in Portland, Oregon. Under extreme duress, one of the bad guys confesses the victims are shipped to Plush where terrible things await them.
We know exactly where Plush is; we went there in 2010 just before The Cowboy and The Vampire was released. I’d read about Plush the year before. It’s the only place in Oregon where you can mine for sunstones, the state gemstone. Sunstone is a type of feldspar that sparkles and catches the light and we wanted to learn more.
Did I mention Kathleen is a geologist?
It’s a long drive from Portland to Plush, about 360 hard miles, and an even larger culture shift. Portland is a small town by some standards, with a population of about half a million. Plush, on the other hand, has about 139 residents on a good day. And good days aren’t that common. It’s smack dab in the middle of nowhere in the best possible sense of the word.
Sagebrush, rocky bluffs, unexpected lakes and hundreds of curious, fleet-footed antelopes. We found deserted hot springs, a haunted sanitarium and plenty of sunstone mines — most operated by deeply-tanned hippies and other drop outs from society living on the edge of the world. It was fantastic.
I can still remember making a tofu and refried bean sandwich, with Roma tomatoes, on the hood of the car, baking in the summer sun, before we sorted through a conveyor belt of pulverized rocks looking for sunstones. And we found many. They are hard to miss because of the way they seem to trap sunlight.
More than gemstones, we found a place to anchor our latest book. Yes, Blood and Whiskey is still set in our favorite small town, fictional LonePine, Wyoming, but we loved Plush so much, we had figure out a way to get our heroes there. Lenny and Tucker track down a band of particularly vicious Vampires who operate a “feedlot” in Plush. But nothing is ever what it seems in The Cowboy and Vampire Thriller Series.
Along with the unforgettable landscape and the quirky little town, we wanted to do something with the beautiful sunstones as well. Vampires, as we all know, are affected by the sun, so it made sense to give the lovely little gemstones special powers over the undead.
To find out what those powers are, check out Blood and Whiskey. To find out what Plush and the surrounding vicinity looks like, check out our photo album Armchair Tour of Plush and Parts Beyond on Facebook.
April 30, 2012
Smackdown: Big cities vs. small towns
Kathleen and I wrote this for the For The Love of Reading Blog run by Niina, a fantastic book blogger in Finland and a Goodreadsian.
Blood and Whiskey, the second book in The Cowboy and Vampire Thriller Series, captures the best and worst of rural and urban living.
In Blood and Whiskey, (Pumpjack Press, May 1, 2012 ), Tucker and Lizzie once again find themselves marooned in tiny LonePine, Wyoming, battling the maddening aspects of small town life (at least for Lizzie) and the murderous international intrigues of sophisticated, highly urban vampires (according to Tucker, the worst kind of city slickers).
One of our favorite things about writing for these characters, and the tensions between cowboys and vampires, is the “opposites attract” relationship of Tucker and Lizzie. Tucker has spent his entire life in LonePine (population 438, with one on the way), with the notable exception of a fevered trip to New York when Lizzie was kidnapped (you’ll have to read The Cowboy and the Vampire: A Darkly Romantic Thriller for more). The evil vampires anxious to kill her and drain his blood were almost as bad as the crowds of people, bumper to bumper traffic on endless paved streets and rows of skyscrapers blocking the view.
Lizzie, on the other hand, grew up in New York and loves the hustle and bustle, the art and culture, the pace and energy and the international melting pot of people. She traveled to LonePine, a wasteland by her cultural standards, to research an article about the dying west. After falling for Tucker, she stays. And while she loves the clean air and wide-open spaces, she hasn’t quite adjusted to small — really small — town life. The highway truck stop is the only place to eat in town, the only play they have is put on by the fourth grade class during the holidays and the library is the same size as the drive-thru espresso shack.
Despite that, Tucker and Lizzie appreciate what’s special and different about the other and that’s what helps keep them together and keeps their relationship strong despite some serious obstacles including, at least in Blood and Whiskey, a price on Lizzie head and a scheming vampire world pushed to the edge of extinction.
That part of their relationship, east meets west, is drawn directly from our own lives.
Whitehall, Montana, meet Washington, DC
Our early years could not have been more different. Kathleen grew up in the very heart of Washington, DC, which has a population of more than 600,000 people and is located in a dense urban area of millions. Her childhood home was not far from the Washington Cathedral and just a stone’s throw from Embassy Row. For her, hopping on the metro and wandering through the Smithsonian, reading at the Library of Congress or taking in an exhibit at the Hirshhorn were all in a regular day. She learned to be confident around people and grounded in the history, creativity and learning unique to America’s capital.
Clark grew up on a ranch in Montana, 15 miles from the nearest town, Whitehall, which had about 2,000 people. His childhood home was a stone’s throw from Fish Creek, near a number of historic stage stops and homesteader cabins and was surrounded by a lot of sagebrush. For him, hopping on a horse and riding up into the mountains, reading a good book under apple trees planted by settlers or building fence torn down by elk was all part of a regular day. He learned to be confident in the wilderness and grounded in the history, beauty and tenacity of western living.
We met and fell in love in Portland, Oregon, a small town by Kathleen’s standards and a big city by Clark’s. We’ve lived here for years now and enjoy the best of both worlds. We visit the east coast often to visit Kathleen’s family and load up on art and cultural events, and we visit the remote areas of Oregon — Plush and Steens Mountain — to load up on the stillness and beauty of the wilderness. Plus, we are able to head over to the lovely Oregon coast frequently.
For us, like our characters, opposites really do attract and start to change each other. Kathleen has learned to love the empty spaces and Clark has become a fan of galleries and museums. With that in mind, here are two “top five” lists based on our experiences.
A city girl’s top five reasons to love small towns:
1) The views are spectacular, especially when there are mountains involved.
2) Clean air and no traffic.
3) Fewer lights make for beautiful starry skies at night.
4) Friendly people — everybody waves at everybody in western towns and really care about how your day is going.
5) There are no distractions for reading and writing.
A country boy’s top five reasons to love big cities:
1) History — especially on the east coast, you can visit buildings that have been standing for two or three hundred years. I know that has nothing on the historical cities of Europe, but for me, it’s old.
2) Art — I love all the shows and museums and galleries, even the ones I don’t really get (which is most of them).
3) Great food — there’s nothing wrong with small town restaurants, but eating at the drive-in every week gets a little old compared to Thai, Indian, Vietnamese, Greek, etc.
4) Interesting people — sometimes really interesting, like you cannot look away they are so interesting.
5) Bookstores. And good coffee.
Read Blood and Whiskey to find out even more about the difference between small towns and big cities, opposites attract romantic tension — it doesn’t get much more opposite than a human and a vampire falling in love — and thrill-a-minute action. As Lizzie comes to terms with being undead, she has difficult choices ahead that will make Tucker far more uncomfortable than learning how to hail a taxi. And of course, their enemies are going to make it difficult for true love to last beyond the next sunset.
Blood and Whiskey, the second book in The Cowboy and Vampire Thriller Series, captures the best and worst of rural and urban living.
In Blood and Whiskey, (Pumpjack Press, May 1, 2012 ), Tucker and Lizzie once again find themselves marooned in tiny LonePine, Wyoming, battling the maddening aspects of small town life (at least for Lizzie) and the murderous international intrigues of sophisticated, highly urban vampires (according to Tucker, the worst kind of city slickers).
One of our favorite things about writing for these characters, and the tensions between cowboys and vampires, is the “opposites attract” relationship of Tucker and Lizzie. Tucker has spent his entire life in LonePine (population 438, with one on the way), with the notable exception of a fevered trip to New York when Lizzie was kidnapped (you’ll have to read The Cowboy and the Vampire: A Darkly Romantic Thriller for more). The evil vampires anxious to kill her and drain his blood were almost as bad as the crowds of people, bumper to bumper traffic on endless paved streets and rows of skyscrapers blocking the view.
Lizzie, on the other hand, grew up in New York and loves the hustle and bustle, the art and culture, the pace and energy and the international melting pot of people. She traveled to LonePine, a wasteland by her cultural standards, to research an article about the dying west. After falling for Tucker, she stays. And while she loves the clean air and wide-open spaces, she hasn’t quite adjusted to small — really small — town life. The highway truck stop is the only place to eat in town, the only play they have is put on by the fourth grade class during the holidays and the library is the same size as the drive-thru espresso shack.
Despite that, Tucker and Lizzie appreciate what’s special and different about the other and that’s what helps keep them together and keeps their relationship strong despite some serious obstacles including, at least in Blood and Whiskey, a price on Lizzie head and a scheming vampire world pushed to the edge of extinction.
That part of their relationship, east meets west, is drawn directly from our own lives.
Whitehall, Montana, meet Washington, DC
Our early years could not have been more different. Kathleen grew up in the very heart of Washington, DC, which has a population of more than 600,000 people and is located in a dense urban area of millions. Her childhood home was not far from the Washington Cathedral and just a stone’s throw from Embassy Row. For her, hopping on the metro and wandering through the Smithsonian, reading at the Library of Congress or taking in an exhibit at the Hirshhorn were all in a regular day. She learned to be confident around people and grounded in the history, creativity and learning unique to America’s capital.
Clark grew up on a ranch in Montana, 15 miles from the nearest town, Whitehall, which had about 2,000 people. His childhood home was a stone’s throw from Fish Creek, near a number of historic stage stops and homesteader cabins and was surrounded by a lot of sagebrush. For him, hopping on a horse and riding up into the mountains, reading a good book under apple trees planted by settlers or building fence torn down by elk was all part of a regular day. He learned to be confident in the wilderness and grounded in the history, beauty and tenacity of western living.
We met and fell in love in Portland, Oregon, a small town by Kathleen’s standards and a big city by Clark’s. We’ve lived here for years now and enjoy the best of both worlds. We visit the east coast often to visit Kathleen’s family and load up on art and cultural events, and we visit the remote areas of Oregon — Plush and Steens Mountain — to load up on the stillness and beauty of the wilderness. Plus, we are able to head over to the lovely Oregon coast frequently.
For us, like our characters, opposites really do attract and start to change each other. Kathleen has learned to love the empty spaces and Clark has become a fan of galleries and museums. With that in mind, here are two “top five” lists based on our experiences.
A city girl’s top five reasons to love small towns:
1) The views are spectacular, especially when there are mountains involved.
2) Clean air and no traffic.
3) Fewer lights make for beautiful starry skies at night.
4) Friendly people — everybody waves at everybody in western towns and really care about how your day is going.
5) There are no distractions for reading and writing.
A country boy’s top five reasons to love big cities:
1) History — especially on the east coast, you can visit buildings that have been standing for two or three hundred years. I know that has nothing on the historical cities of Europe, but for me, it’s old.
2) Art — I love all the shows and museums and galleries, even the ones I don’t really get (which is most of them).
3) Great food — there’s nothing wrong with small town restaurants, but eating at the drive-in every week gets a little old compared to Thai, Indian, Vietnamese, Greek, etc.
4) Interesting people — sometimes really interesting, like you cannot look away they are so interesting.
5) Bookstores. And good coffee.
Read Blood and Whiskey to find out even more about the difference between small towns and big cities, opposites attract romantic tension — it doesn’t get much more opposite than a human and a vampire falling in love — and thrill-a-minute action. As Lizzie comes to terms with being undead, she has difficult choices ahead that will make Tucker far more uncomfortable than learning how to hail a taxi. And of course, their enemies are going to make it difficult for true love to last beyond the next sunset.
January 24, 2012
Andy Warhol Saved My Vision
A detached retina put a serious crimp in my writing and reading.
On a recent trip to Washington, DC, with Kathleen (her home town) for a family event, we took in a Warhol exhibit at the Hirshhorn. Called Shadows, it featured 102 silk screen prints of exactly the same scene — a shadowy view from inside Warhol’s studio — in different colors. Each print was about three feet by four feet and displayed in a long, continuous line around the distinctive curved walls of the Hirshhorn.
As it turned out, the exhibit was a perfect vision test.
I’d been having vision trouble for several months — extremely tired eyes, a constellation of floaters, sparkling lights and odd, flickering motion — but wrote it off as eyestrain. I work in communications for a financial services company which means I spend a lot of time parked in front of a computer and I had just finished cranking through quarterly earnings. Compounding that, Kathleen and I had recently finished a blog tour in support of our book, The Cowboy and the Vampire, and we were hard at work on the final draft of the sequel, Blood and Whiskey. As a result, we had both spent an inordinate amount of time in front of our computers. I chalked up the symptoms as eyestrain.
It wasn’t. It was a torn retina that was gradually getting worse. Even though Kathleen had been insisting I get it checked out, I kept putting it off. Until I visited the Warhol exhibit.
Standing in front of the equally-sized prints, I could see 25 prints stretching away to the right; on the left side, I could only see 17. It was clear something was significantly wrong with my peripheral vision.
I made an appointment as soon as we got back from DC still expecting to hear “use these eye drops and spend a little less time on the computer.” Instead I heard “you’ll be having emergency surgery tomorrow.” The doctor was worried that waiting until after the long weekend would risk permanent vision loss in my right eye. For a writer and avid reader, the thought of losing my sight, even in one eye, was frightening.
At 11 a.m. the next morning, with a squeeze of my hand from Kathleen and a cheerful nod from an avuncular and talented anesthesiologist, I slipped off to sleep and woke up with a silicon fan belt around my eye. Thank you, Dr. Lo.
The surgery went well. Most of my peripheral vision returned to pre-detached levels, but the recovery was long, painful and irritating. For the first few days, it felt like I’d been hit in the eye with a flaming arrow. Not only was the right eye mostly out of commission, part of the treatment included injecting a gas bubble into the damaged eye to speed healing. That meant two weeks of looking at the world through the most boring kaleidoscope ever — it was all a blurry haze with a blob of ink at the end.
Naturally, the whole process put a serious crimp in my writing … and my reading. Obviously, my contributions to the editing process for Blood and Whiskey were put on hold. Thankfully, Kathleen picked up the slack. Almost as bad, I couldn’t read; I still can’t and that is truly torture. Copies of the New Yorker, Mental Floss and Psychology Today are still piling up. I had just started The Egyptian(thanks Niina), was planning to reread Cruelty: Human Evil and the Human Brain, and got The Secret History of M16 for Christmas. And I still want to tackle Porius, my albatross. Instead, I watched a lot of bad movies with one eye, and always only on my right side.
I’m on the upside of the recovery process now, and I realized a couple of things. First, the eyes are very important, so treat them well. If you have any trouble, get it checked out. I love to read, and love to write, and while I know both can be done with one eye (I told myself that Snake Plissken saved the president with just one eye) it’s a lot easier with two.
The other thing I realized is that, Andy Warhol, wherever you are, I owe you one.
Note: We published this on our website as well at http://www.cowboyandvampire.com.
On a recent trip to Washington, DC, with Kathleen (her home town) for a family event, we took in a Warhol exhibit at the Hirshhorn. Called Shadows, it featured 102 silk screen prints of exactly the same scene — a shadowy view from inside Warhol’s studio — in different colors. Each print was about three feet by four feet and displayed in a long, continuous line around the distinctive curved walls of the Hirshhorn.
As it turned out, the exhibit was a perfect vision test.
I’d been having vision trouble for several months — extremely tired eyes, a constellation of floaters, sparkling lights and odd, flickering motion — but wrote it off as eyestrain. I work in communications for a financial services company which means I spend a lot of time parked in front of a computer and I had just finished cranking through quarterly earnings. Compounding that, Kathleen and I had recently finished a blog tour in support of our book, The Cowboy and the Vampire, and we were hard at work on the final draft of the sequel, Blood and Whiskey. As a result, we had both spent an inordinate amount of time in front of our computers. I chalked up the symptoms as eyestrain.
It wasn’t. It was a torn retina that was gradually getting worse. Even though Kathleen had been insisting I get it checked out, I kept putting it off. Until I visited the Warhol exhibit.
Standing in front of the equally-sized prints, I could see 25 prints stretching away to the right; on the left side, I could only see 17. It was clear something was significantly wrong with my peripheral vision.
I made an appointment as soon as we got back from DC still expecting to hear “use these eye drops and spend a little less time on the computer.” Instead I heard “you’ll be having emergency surgery tomorrow.” The doctor was worried that waiting until after the long weekend would risk permanent vision loss in my right eye. For a writer and avid reader, the thought of losing my sight, even in one eye, was frightening.
At 11 a.m. the next morning, with a squeeze of my hand from Kathleen and a cheerful nod from an avuncular and talented anesthesiologist, I slipped off to sleep and woke up with a silicon fan belt around my eye. Thank you, Dr. Lo.
The surgery went well. Most of my peripheral vision returned to pre-detached levels, but the recovery was long, painful and irritating. For the first few days, it felt like I’d been hit in the eye with a flaming arrow. Not only was the right eye mostly out of commission, part of the treatment included injecting a gas bubble into the damaged eye to speed healing. That meant two weeks of looking at the world through the most boring kaleidoscope ever — it was all a blurry haze with a blob of ink at the end.
Naturally, the whole process put a serious crimp in my writing … and my reading. Obviously, my contributions to the editing process for Blood and Whiskey were put on hold. Thankfully, Kathleen picked up the slack. Almost as bad, I couldn’t read; I still can’t and that is truly torture. Copies of the New Yorker, Mental Floss and Psychology Today are still piling up. I had just started The Egyptian(thanks Niina), was planning to reread Cruelty: Human Evil and the Human Brain, and got The Secret History of M16 for Christmas. And I still want to tackle Porius, my albatross. Instead, I watched a lot of bad movies with one eye, and always only on my right side.
I’m on the upside of the recovery process now, and I realized a couple of things. First, the eyes are very important, so treat them well. If you have any trouble, get it checked out. I love to read, and love to write, and while I know both can be done with one eye (I told myself that Snake Plissken saved the president with just one eye) it’s a lot easier with two.
The other thing I realized is that, Andy Warhol, wherever you are, I owe you one.
Note: We published this on our website as well at http://www.cowboyandvampire.com.
December 1, 2011
Death Obsessed
It’s not that we’re not anxious for the end, we’re just “die-curious.”
Note: Kathleen and I wrote this for the Getting Naughty Between the Sheets blog
Recently we bought our first coffin.
No, we weren’t shopping for final accommodations to drop into side-by-side cemetery plots — fingers crossed, we’ve got a few decades left. Our first coffin is a tiny decorative number purchased online and delivered in 3 – 5 days. We bought it to hold business cards and freebie stickers splattered with blood (pictured) to give away at author events as we sell The Cowboy and the Vampire.
We write about Vampires (Note: We also write about cowboys, but the existence of cowboys is not up for debate even though, sadly, it seems their numbers are dwindling). It’s a dark and noble calling that carries on a literary tradition stretching back to Poliodori’s The Vampyre (1819). And that’s just the literary tip of the iceberg. It’s likely the Vampires myth (hopefully it’s a myth) has been un-alive and well since humans first gathered around the fires and told stories about the shadowy monsters that must be responsible for all the evils things life threw at them — from mysterious diseases to death.
How the “die” was cast
We started working on The Cowboy and the Vampire about ten years ago as a means to test the potential strength of a resurrected relationship. The scars from the first few attempts were still fresh and a creative project seemed like a good way to find out if we had what it took for marriage.
Very little in our lives before The Cowboy and the Vampire indicated we would one day be poring over old books about murder, monsters and malice and spending sunny afternoons inside trying imagine what happens when a Vampire dies at sunrise or what it is about human blood they need to survive.
How did two generally happy, mostly well-balanced individuals come to spend an unhealthy amount of time thinking about death and skulking around in the shadowy parts of the psyche?
Library of the damned
We did not choose to write about Vampires, rather they chose us, reaching out with their pale, skeletal fingers from the pages of a thousand books.
Kathleen grew up in the shadow of Washington Cathedral in DC and perhaps can thank the soaring Gothic architecture for influencing her interests. She is intrigued by religion and the human tendency to construct and maintain intricate belief frameworks in part to explain what happens to the “self” after death. She also has researched near death experiences to understand the current scientific thinking about what happens neurologically at death when the brain shuts down.
(Kathleen’s recent book list: The Immortalization Commission, Ice, The Gospel of Anarchy, The Harvard Psychedelic Club)
Clark grew up on a ranch in Montana, surrounded by acres of silence. He filled that silence with a steady reading diet of sword and sorcery fantasy and horror masters. That morphed into a fascination with American Spiritualists starting with the passion and energy emanating from the Burned Over Region in the mid-1800s through mediums such as the Fox sisters and Daniel Home (check out Heyday of a Wizard) leading up to the skepticism at the turn of the century and the resurgence of interest after the staggering loss of life associated with World War One.
(Clark’s current author obsessions: H.P. Lovecraft, Ambrose Bierce, Edgar Allen Poe, Kathleen Taylor)
As we started working on The Cowboy and the Vampire, all of those books, avenues of inquiry and influences prompted us to dig deeply into the graveyard world of Vampires.
The post-death experience
Authors have been reinterpreting Vampires since the early greats formalized the archetype of the sinister, powerful, immortal creatures that feed upon, and project, our darkest fears. As homage to those early creators, we came up with something different in The Cowboy and the Vampire, blending religious fundamentalism with evolutionary biology reflecting the modern age in three ways:
First, for all their wisdom, strength and unique morality, our Vampires are shackled to a religious fervor just like humans. There are believer and non-believers, but their actions are always defined by or in response to ancient codas.
Second, our Vampires are shaped by evolution. It’s a much more gradual process because many of them have lived for centuries, even thousands of years, but the same biologic forces are in play. Vampires have an Achilles heel: sunlight. Because they die every dawn, humans have yet to be displaced as the dominant species on earth. Luckily for us, there’s a symbiotic balance between predator and prey, due to challenges associated with the way Vampire’s reproduce.
Third, our Vampires have unique spiritual lives. Because they die, completely, their bodies and brains shut down every morning. And yet they retain a unique, uninterrupted sense of self when they are resurrected at sunset. They experience a post-death experience, which we link to a shared external consciousness — the Vampire Cloud — that preserves their individual identities. They have the same kind of emotional and spiritual response as humans who have near death experiences, only every day.
We introduce all these themes in The Cowboy and the Vampire and examine them more deeply in Blood and Whiskey, coming in 2012.
Go toward the light
Spending all our time pondering death is ultimately life-affirming, prompting good conversation and allowing us to spend quality time together. The only downside is that we tend to get so focused on the creative work and the macabre world of Vampires, we forget to go outside.
That burning orb in the sky is punishing after spending all morning hunched over a computer writing, sketching out a plotline or wondering if Vampires that feed on humans with high cholesterol causes health concerns for the undead.
(Note: We’re inclined so say cholesterol only changes the taste of human blood, making it a little too rich and buttery for the refined palates of most Vampires.).
Note: Kathleen and I wrote this for the Getting Naughty Between the Sheets blog
Recently we bought our first coffin.
No, we weren’t shopping for final accommodations to drop into side-by-side cemetery plots — fingers crossed, we’ve got a few decades left. Our first coffin is a tiny decorative number purchased online and delivered in 3 – 5 days. We bought it to hold business cards and freebie stickers splattered with blood (pictured) to give away at author events as we sell The Cowboy and the Vampire.
We write about Vampires (Note: We also write about cowboys, but the existence of cowboys is not up for debate even though, sadly, it seems their numbers are dwindling). It’s a dark and noble calling that carries on a literary tradition stretching back to Poliodori’s The Vampyre (1819). And that’s just the literary tip of the iceberg. It’s likely the Vampires myth (hopefully it’s a myth) has been un-alive and well since humans first gathered around the fires and told stories about the shadowy monsters that must be responsible for all the evils things life threw at them — from mysterious diseases to death.
How the “die” was cast
We started working on The Cowboy and the Vampire about ten years ago as a means to test the potential strength of a resurrected relationship. The scars from the first few attempts were still fresh and a creative project seemed like a good way to find out if we had what it took for marriage.
Very little in our lives before The Cowboy and the Vampire indicated we would one day be poring over old books about murder, monsters and malice and spending sunny afternoons inside trying imagine what happens when a Vampire dies at sunrise or what it is about human blood they need to survive.
How did two generally happy, mostly well-balanced individuals come to spend an unhealthy amount of time thinking about death and skulking around in the shadowy parts of the psyche?
Library of the damned
We did not choose to write about Vampires, rather they chose us, reaching out with their pale, skeletal fingers from the pages of a thousand books.
Kathleen grew up in the shadow of Washington Cathedral in DC and perhaps can thank the soaring Gothic architecture for influencing her interests. She is intrigued by religion and the human tendency to construct and maintain intricate belief frameworks in part to explain what happens to the “self” after death. She also has researched near death experiences to understand the current scientific thinking about what happens neurologically at death when the brain shuts down.
(Kathleen’s recent book list: The Immortalization Commission, Ice, The Gospel of Anarchy, The Harvard Psychedelic Club)
Clark grew up on a ranch in Montana, surrounded by acres of silence. He filled that silence with a steady reading diet of sword and sorcery fantasy and horror masters. That morphed into a fascination with American Spiritualists starting with the passion and energy emanating from the Burned Over Region in the mid-1800s through mediums such as the Fox sisters and Daniel Home (check out Heyday of a Wizard) leading up to the skepticism at the turn of the century and the resurgence of interest after the staggering loss of life associated with World War One.
(Clark’s current author obsessions: H.P. Lovecraft, Ambrose Bierce, Edgar Allen Poe, Kathleen Taylor)
As we started working on The Cowboy and the Vampire, all of those books, avenues of inquiry and influences prompted us to dig deeply into the graveyard world of Vampires.
The post-death experience
Authors have been reinterpreting Vampires since the early greats formalized the archetype of the sinister, powerful, immortal creatures that feed upon, and project, our darkest fears. As homage to those early creators, we came up with something different in The Cowboy and the Vampire, blending religious fundamentalism with evolutionary biology reflecting the modern age in three ways:
First, for all their wisdom, strength and unique morality, our Vampires are shackled to a religious fervor just like humans. There are believer and non-believers, but their actions are always defined by or in response to ancient codas.
Second, our Vampires are shaped by evolution. It’s a much more gradual process because many of them have lived for centuries, even thousands of years, but the same biologic forces are in play. Vampires have an Achilles heel: sunlight. Because they die every dawn, humans have yet to be displaced as the dominant species on earth. Luckily for us, there’s a symbiotic balance between predator and prey, due to challenges associated with the way Vampire’s reproduce.
Third, our Vampires have unique spiritual lives. Because they die, completely, their bodies and brains shut down every morning. And yet they retain a unique, uninterrupted sense of self when they are resurrected at sunset. They experience a post-death experience, which we link to a shared external consciousness — the Vampire Cloud — that preserves their individual identities. They have the same kind of emotional and spiritual response as humans who have near death experiences, only every day.
We introduce all these themes in The Cowboy and the Vampire and examine them more deeply in Blood and Whiskey, coming in 2012.
Go toward the light
Spending all our time pondering death is ultimately life-affirming, prompting good conversation and allowing us to spend quality time together. The only downside is that we tend to get so focused on the creative work and the macabre world of Vampires, we forget to go outside.
That burning orb in the sky is punishing after spending all morning hunched over a computer writing, sketching out a plotline or wondering if Vampires that feed on humans with high cholesterol causes health concerns for the undead.
(Note: We’re inclined so say cholesterol only changes the taste of human blood, making it a little too rich and buttery for the refined palates of most Vampires.).
November 29, 2011
Notes from the Frontlines: Writing Sex Scenes as Nonverbal Conversations
Writing authentic sex scenes is a tricky proposition for any writer; for writing partners, it’s twice as challenging, and three times as rewarding.
Note: Kathleen and I wrote this for the Reading Between the Wines Book Club blog
We wrote The Cowboy and the Vampire together. It was first published in 1999 (Llewellyn) and thanks to the interest in paranormal romance (aka Twilight), was re-released in 2010 (Midnight Ink). We’re making the most of this new wave of bloody energy and releasing a trilogy taking off where The Cowboy and Vampire ends, starting with the first title Blood and Whiskey which will be published early next year.
The Cowboy and the Vampire is a love story, written by two people in love. Tucker and Lizzie, our main characters are, despite their better judgment, also passionately and crazily hot for each other. When they aren’t arguing about his poor grammar (ain’t is not a word), debating her love of sushi (fish bait), or fending off Vampire attacks, they can’t keep their hands off of each other.
They make love in the mountains, in Tucker’s doublewide trailer, in the catacombs beneath a Manhattan church, in a cabin high in the Tetons, a barn and many other places. And that’s just Tucker and Lizzie. Vampires as a species are sexually insatiable and forever seducing humans, taking their pleasure from them and, usually, draining them (not in the good way.)
That leaves a lot of sex scenes to be written. We were up for the challenge, and we learned a few lessons in the process.
Lesson one: Get the tone right
We don’t write bare-breasted, hip-thrusting erotica (yet, anyway) so we try to capture the emotion, passion and physical action of sexual encounters in ways that creep in just under the wire of R-rated and avoid the extremes of sappy romance or graphic porn.
Writing sex scenes — either between loving couples or hungry blood-suckers — that resonate with readers is an adventure. We approach sex scenes in our fiction the same as we would a silent conversation. This means that the creative framework we use to develop actual spoken conversations — building the back story, understanding the motivations that shape actions, setting the mood — ground a sex scene too.
Sex is what two people (or sometimes more) say to each other with their bodies when the topic is passion. It occurs in time and space between people who are “saying” something for a reason. For example, in The Cowboy and Vampire, the passion and romance between Tucker and Lizzie is all tangled up with the events around them and the quirks of their own personalities, as shown in this short excerpt from the book:
We made love under the first layer of coarse blankets quietly and slowly, both scared of this powerful thing between us, but neither of us backing down or hiding at all, just staring deep into each other and holding on so fiercely that it seemed there was nothing left in this broken-down old world but me and her and what was felt between us.
That and pine splinters in our private parts. And Rex, who’d crept up to the foot of the bed, and who I kept kicking at but he refused to budge until I at last grew tired of fighting him and he stretched out proper across the bottom blankets, trapping my feet.
Lesson two: Know your audience
As we work through the second draft of Blood and Whiskey, we found a chapter with some raw sex between two of our Vampires and a willing human. Elita, one of our favorite characters, was lying under the human – Virote, a Russian beauty – holding her wrists and feeding on her neck while Rurik, a powerful Vampire, took out his frustrations on her sexually. It was a battle of the wills between Elita and Rurik with Virote sandwiched happily between them, benefiting from the tremendous sexual energy crackling back and forth as they sampled her blood. Virote was treated to an otherworldly orgasm in exchange for a few pints.
We liked the scene, but took it out because it was too graphic in a “Dear Penthouse, I never thought this would happen to me” way. Cue the porn music.
No finger pointing at which one of wrote it, but it certainly sprang up from some frustrations at the time. Hopefully at some point, it will be the basis for a hot piece of Vampire Erotica (hmm, maybe a new book under a pseudonym?).
Lesson three: Take advantage of the opportunity for immediate feedback from a trusted source
Writing sex scenes with a romantic partner can lead to some prickly questions like:
Why don’t you ever do that for me?
Don’t ever do that to me, ok?
Where did you learn that?
Wow, is that really something you think about?
But writing sex scenes with a partner also means access to an immediate litmus test. If one of us has been laboring over some passionate interlude and the other reads it and laughs, or worse, grimaces, then there’s more work to be done. On the other hand, if the other half flushes, turns the computer off and says, “I’m thinking about calling it a night. Care to join me upstairs?” well, bingo!
Lesson four: It gives us something to aspire to in our own relationship
When you write about two people who are passionately in love with each other and share a close and tender relationship, it prompts us to always make sure our own relationship is “novel-worthy.” It’s hard not to let some of that hope and excitement bleed into our lives. We’ve been together for nearly 15 years now and writing together about love and sex keeps those topics alive in ways others may not find as easy. Of course, we did recently forget our own wedding anniversary. We blame the Vampires. Just like Lizzie and Tucker remind us how to stay in love, our Vampires are completely self-centered and worried only about their own desires. That’s probably not the healthiest role models to keep in mind but as the years creep up in marriage, maybe it’s not all bad.
That Vampire Erotica novel is sounding better and better.
Note: Kathleen and I wrote this for the Reading Between the Wines Book Club blog
We wrote The Cowboy and the Vampire together. It was first published in 1999 (Llewellyn) and thanks to the interest in paranormal romance (aka Twilight), was re-released in 2010 (Midnight Ink). We’re making the most of this new wave of bloody energy and releasing a trilogy taking off where The Cowboy and Vampire ends, starting with the first title Blood and Whiskey which will be published early next year.
The Cowboy and the Vampire is a love story, written by two people in love. Tucker and Lizzie, our main characters are, despite their better judgment, also passionately and crazily hot for each other. When they aren’t arguing about his poor grammar (ain’t is not a word), debating her love of sushi (fish bait), or fending off Vampire attacks, they can’t keep their hands off of each other.
They make love in the mountains, in Tucker’s doublewide trailer, in the catacombs beneath a Manhattan church, in a cabin high in the Tetons, a barn and many other places. And that’s just Tucker and Lizzie. Vampires as a species are sexually insatiable and forever seducing humans, taking their pleasure from them and, usually, draining them (not in the good way.)
That leaves a lot of sex scenes to be written. We were up for the challenge, and we learned a few lessons in the process.
Lesson one: Get the tone right
We don’t write bare-breasted, hip-thrusting erotica (yet, anyway) so we try to capture the emotion, passion and physical action of sexual encounters in ways that creep in just under the wire of R-rated and avoid the extremes of sappy romance or graphic porn.
Writing sex scenes — either between loving couples or hungry blood-suckers — that resonate with readers is an adventure. We approach sex scenes in our fiction the same as we would a silent conversation. This means that the creative framework we use to develop actual spoken conversations — building the back story, understanding the motivations that shape actions, setting the mood — ground a sex scene too.
Sex is what two people (or sometimes more) say to each other with their bodies when the topic is passion. It occurs in time and space between people who are “saying” something for a reason. For example, in The Cowboy and Vampire, the passion and romance between Tucker and Lizzie is all tangled up with the events around them and the quirks of their own personalities, as shown in this short excerpt from the book:
We made love under the first layer of coarse blankets quietly and slowly, both scared of this powerful thing between us, but neither of us backing down or hiding at all, just staring deep into each other and holding on so fiercely that it seemed there was nothing left in this broken-down old world but me and her and what was felt between us.
That and pine splinters in our private parts. And Rex, who’d crept up to the foot of the bed, and who I kept kicking at but he refused to budge until I at last grew tired of fighting him and he stretched out proper across the bottom blankets, trapping my feet.
Lesson two: Know your audience
As we work through the second draft of Blood and Whiskey, we found a chapter with some raw sex between two of our Vampires and a willing human. Elita, one of our favorite characters, was lying under the human – Virote, a Russian beauty – holding her wrists and feeding on her neck while Rurik, a powerful Vampire, took out his frustrations on her sexually. It was a battle of the wills between Elita and Rurik with Virote sandwiched happily between them, benefiting from the tremendous sexual energy crackling back and forth as they sampled her blood. Virote was treated to an otherworldly orgasm in exchange for a few pints.
We liked the scene, but took it out because it was too graphic in a “Dear Penthouse, I never thought this would happen to me” way. Cue the porn music.
No finger pointing at which one of wrote it, but it certainly sprang up from some frustrations at the time. Hopefully at some point, it will be the basis for a hot piece of Vampire Erotica (hmm, maybe a new book under a pseudonym?).
Lesson three: Take advantage of the opportunity for immediate feedback from a trusted source
Writing sex scenes with a romantic partner can lead to some prickly questions like:
Why don’t you ever do that for me?
Don’t ever do that to me, ok?
Where did you learn that?
Wow, is that really something you think about?
But writing sex scenes with a partner also means access to an immediate litmus test. If one of us has been laboring over some passionate interlude and the other reads it and laughs, or worse, grimaces, then there’s more work to be done. On the other hand, if the other half flushes, turns the computer off and says, “I’m thinking about calling it a night. Care to join me upstairs?” well, bingo!
Lesson four: It gives us something to aspire to in our own relationship
When you write about two people who are passionately in love with each other and share a close and tender relationship, it prompts us to always make sure our own relationship is “novel-worthy.” It’s hard not to let some of that hope and excitement bleed into our lives. We’ve been together for nearly 15 years now and writing together about love and sex keeps those topics alive in ways others may not find as easy. Of course, we did recently forget our own wedding anniversary. We blame the Vampires. Just like Lizzie and Tucker remind us how to stay in love, our Vampires are completely self-centered and worried only about their own desires. That’s probably not the healthiest role models to keep in mind but as the years creep up in marriage, maybe it’s not all bad.
That Vampire Erotica novel is sounding better and better.
