With Murderous Intent
The couple that slays together stays together, hopefully…
Note: Kathleen and I originally wrote this for the paranormal and romantic suspense review blog
See that girl over there. The pretty barista with the bee-sting lips and dark braids? She’s about to die and we’re going to kill her.
Not immediately, but in the not-too-distant future she’s going to die. A horrible death. Actually, it won’t be too bad … at first. She’ll be lured into a luxury hotel room by a beautiful, raven-haired Vampire who will ply her with expensive champagne, seduce her on satin sheets, and take her to the edge of a mind-rattling
orgasm.
Just as she let’s herself go to the waves of pleasure, tragically, her throat will be slit open and her life’s blood sucked out of the pulsing wound. All that will be left behind is a lovely corpse that housekeeping will find in the morning.
But for now, she just wants to be paid for a coffee, black, and a cup of Irish breakfast tea to go.
She gets a good tip because we are going to kill her, or at least a fictional version of her, in our next book.
We are writers and shameless personality thieves, plundering the world around us for characters that will make it into our fiction. Though sometimes, as in the case of the barista, not for long.
Two become one
We started writing The Cowboy and the Vampire together in the early stages of our relationship “version 2.0.” Reconnecting after a tumultuous break up, the idea of writing together seemed like a logical way to channel our passion into something constructive, something that bridged our opposites-certainly-attract-but-don’t-have-very-much-in-common situation. (Clark was raised on a ranch in Montana, Kathleen in the heart of Washington DC). Sitting at a truck stop café in Madras, Ore., we each picked a topic to bring to the writing project. Clark went with cowboys, drawing from his love of the West, and Kathleen picked what seemed to be the polar opposite, the dark world of Vampires. We literally sketched out the plot line on the back of a paper placemat in the crayons they kept on hand to entertain little kids.
From there, the rest came easy (if easy can ever include massive, week-long fights about semi-colons or over uses of dashes) and, because we were living in 200 miles apart at the time, began mailing chapters back and forth. As the writing project took on an undead life of its own, we dug deep into the research, got a lot better at working together and began stealing the personalities of people around us.
Cannibalizing the world
One of the things we quickly learned was that we shared a penchant for obsessively watching others, creating stories about their lives and filing away their quirks, traits and unique characteristics for future use.
The farmer on the bus picking his ear and smelling his finger obsessively, he’ll show up again.
The transvestite flossing her teeth as she shows us furniture in a second hand store, she’ll be back.
The cheerleader who looks like she’s been crying, the one who is pale as death and smells of clove cigarettes, we’ll use that.
The barista, of course, we’ve already killed. But her earnest boyfriend with the ironic mustache and plaid shirt … we’d better file him away too.
Vampire novels tend to have a high body count. But in The Cowboy and the Vampire, and in the sequel we’re working on, Blood and Whiskey, every single victim was someone we once saw. Characters have to be someone, someone real, or else readers won’t feel a connection and — when they meet their tragic demise — a sense of loss.
Before we got so deeply involved in Blood and Whiskey, for fun we’d pick someone at random to hone our skills at building back-stories. A contest and a chance to scavenge from a renewable resource — people-watching.
That same approach has helped us create rich, nuanced characters in our work. Some of the characters in Blood and Whiskey have stories stretching back 500 years. But we know them inside and out so when we are advancing the plot through their action, we know exactly how they will respond, the words they will choose and the gestures they will make.
So if you ever happen to be in Portland and see two people watching you intently and scribbling feverishly in notebooks, don’t worry about, we’re probably just killing you in some horrible way. With any luck though, there will be dark, kinky sex first.
Note: Kathleen and I originally wrote this for the paranormal and romantic suspense review blog
See that girl over there. The pretty barista with the bee-sting lips and dark braids? She’s about to die and we’re going to kill her.
Not immediately, but in the not-too-distant future she’s going to die. A horrible death. Actually, it won’t be too bad … at first. She’ll be lured into a luxury hotel room by a beautiful, raven-haired Vampire who will ply her with expensive champagne, seduce her on satin sheets, and take her to the edge of a mind-rattling
orgasm.
Just as she let’s herself go to the waves of pleasure, tragically, her throat will be slit open and her life’s blood sucked out of the pulsing wound. All that will be left behind is a lovely corpse that housekeeping will find in the morning.
But for now, she just wants to be paid for a coffee, black, and a cup of Irish breakfast tea to go.
She gets a good tip because we are going to kill her, or at least a fictional version of her, in our next book.
We are writers and shameless personality thieves, plundering the world around us for characters that will make it into our fiction. Though sometimes, as in the case of the barista, not for long.
Two become one
We started writing The Cowboy and the Vampire together in the early stages of our relationship “version 2.0.” Reconnecting after a tumultuous break up, the idea of writing together seemed like a logical way to channel our passion into something constructive, something that bridged our opposites-certainly-attract-but-don’t-have-very-much-in-common situation. (Clark was raised on a ranch in Montana, Kathleen in the heart of Washington DC). Sitting at a truck stop café in Madras, Ore., we each picked a topic to bring to the writing project. Clark went with cowboys, drawing from his love of the West, and Kathleen picked what seemed to be the polar opposite, the dark world of Vampires. We literally sketched out the plot line on the back of a paper placemat in the crayons they kept on hand to entertain little kids.
From there, the rest came easy (if easy can ever include massive, week-long fights about semi-colons or over uses of dashes) and, because we were living in 200 miles apart at the time, began mailing chapters back and forth. As the writing project took on an undead life of its own, we dug deep into the research, got a lot better at working together and began stealing the personalities of people around us.
Cannibalizing the world
One of the things we quickly learned was that we shared a penchant for obsessively watching others, creating stories about their lives and filing away their quirks, traits and unique characteristics for future use.
The farmer on the bus picking his ear and smelling his finger obsessively, he’ll show up again.
The transvestite flossing her teeth as she shows us furniture in a second hand store, she’ll be back.
The cheerleader who looks like she’s been crying, the one who is pale as death and smells of clove cigarettes, we’ll use that.
The barista, of course, we’ve already killed. But her earnest boyfriend with the ironic mustache and plaid shirt … we’d better file him away too.
Vampire novels tend to have a high body count. But in The Cowboy and the Vampire, and in the sequel we’re working on, Blood and Whiskey, every single victim was someone we once saw. Characters have to be someone, someone real, or else readers won’t feel a connection and — when they meet their tragic demise — a sense of loss.
Before we got so deeply involved in Blood and Whiskey, for fun we’d pick someone at random to hone our skills at building back-stories. A contest and a chance to scavenge from a renewable resource — people-watching.
That same approach has helped us create rich, nuanced characters in our work. Some of the characters in Blood and Whiskey have stories stretching back 500 years. But we know them inside and out so when we are advancing the plot through their action, we know exactly how they will respond, the words they will choose and the gestures they will make.
So if you ever happen to be in Portland and see two people watching you intently and scribbling feverishly in notebooks, don’t worry about, we’re probably just killing you in some horrible way. With any luck though, there will be dark, kinky sex first.
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