THE LEGEND OF THE FALL
Hello you three,
So, having explained why I am writing this blog I should probably explain why I wrote the work of epic awesomeness that is The Fall of Night’s Blood – and also, I suppose, a bit about myself.
Firstly, and perhaps most importantly, I should state with all sincerity, that I do not expect this book to be a much of a success (sorry, LSF), and I’m not even sure if I want it to. Bullshit! I hear all three of you cry – but hear me out, for it is the truth, I think… I mean, perhaps I did once, in the beginning, but now it is written I find that all I really want to do is get on with the next book, that and shoot zombies, oh, and spend time with Sarah, my wonderful fiancée, of course.
True, it would be great to earn my living from writing, but I perceive a major drawback to this: If I didn’t have to get up every morning and stay sober all day, I’d suffer terminal liver failure within six months. Yet at the same time I see a very appealing silver lining: Six great months!
To further demonstrate just what an idiot I am, I will explain how I came to write The Fall of Night’s Blood.
Being quite a lengthy tale, and much longer than I ever intended it to be, the story was conceived in August/September, 2007, and writing commenced soon after.
As you may recall, at around the same time a number of banks (who I can only assume employed sufficiently qualified and clever people) were beginning to realise that giving mortgages to millions of people who never really stood a realistic chance of paying them back probably wasn’t such a good idea after all. In addition to this, I was facing redundancy.
Funny time to start writing a book you might think – and you would be right. Unfortunately for me, I suffer from a chronic allergy to reality which prevented me from realising this. So, when fate decided to deal out a really bad day to Vicky, an unlikely chain of events were set into motion…
Vicky worked in Sales, and one evening we were both in the office much later than expected. Unlike the Production Department (where I worked), the Sales Department were not being given redundancy, but higher targets and more stress. Vicky had also recently made the mistake of accepting promotion, and to compound her newly acquired problems, not only had she just missed the deadline she’d stayed back to meet (causing a run-in with our fearsome Production Director), but she’d also missed her last train home. This was the final straw and she was unable to prevent herself from crying.
Obviously I felt bad for her and, being about to leave myself, offered to give her a lift home. This was actually quite an awkward prospect for me because I didn’t really know Vicky that well (and actually still don’t – even though she is a friend of Sarah’s and we now live in the same town). Being a socially inept and shy type of person, I would happily sit in comfortable silence rather than feel compelled to strike up mundane conversations – but Vicky lived a half hour drive from the office, and that is a lot of silence when you’re sitting in a car with someone. Doubting that she would be content to sit there listening to my rather fine selection of extreme metal albums, I feared that we would have to spend the journey talking about work, or my approaching termination of it, or that subprime mortgage bubble that had just exploded somewhere…
As it turned out, Vicky was actually very cool. Once she’d stopped apologising for subjecting me to the hitherto unseen spectacle of her tears, I discovered that we shared a surprising number of interests (although, sadly, extreme metal was not one of them).
Then, nearing the end of the journey, she spoke those fateful words: “You know, I’ve always really wanted to write a vampire novel.”
For some reason – and I only realise now, as I write this, that I have never really stopped to wonder why – I replied: “We should write one together!”
Perhaps it was the kind of epiphany that only a reality-adverse idiot with obsessive tendencies can have. Right there and then, faced with the certain prospect of being cast out into the rapidly swelling ranks of the unemployed, I knew that there was not a single better thing I should be doing than writing a vampire novel. I knew it in the very core of my soul.
For some equally strange reason (now that I think about it) Vicky also appeared to be quite keen on the idea.
It wasn’t even something I had ever contemplated before – but I knew about vampires. Vampires were cool. I had read most of Anne Rice’s Vampire Chronicles, and at least half of Bram Stoker’s Dracula, and I loved Cradle of Filth’s early albums. That was some good vampire pedigree right there! And though I knew it had always been a popular genre, there hadn’t been any really big vampire novels for years… or so I thought at the time.
Yeah, I know, I really should have stopped to research that – and I still haven’t. Even when I started writing and all the other vampires came creeping out of the night and onto the TV and cinema screens. Even when I wanted to call my book ‘The House of Night Song’ only to discover there is already a vampire series called ‘House of Night’ – even when I changed it to ‘The Fall of Night’s Blood’ and discovered there was a vampire novel called ‘Fall of Night’ (at which point I stopped trying to come up with another title). Not once have I really bothered to actually find out what any of them are like – it turns out that I am embarrassingly ignorant when it comes to vampires.
Nevertheless, I got home that evening, immersed myself in those cool old Cradle CDs, and thought of nothing but vampires.
And so, over the next few weeks, Vicky and I outlined the basic plot. Much of it is still intact, though I cannot now remember exactly whose ideas were originally whose. I would say more about this here, but won’t in case it spoils the plot for anyone (even though I know all three of you have already read it).
During that time I also went on holiday to Sicily (it had, of course, been booked long before the redundancy thing – I’m not quite that much of an idiot). My head was still swimming with vampires and I saw them everywhere I went – perched on the walls of the Saracen Castle, creeping through the alleyways of Taormina, and in the narrow streets of Castelmola…
When I returned home I began to write in earnest and found I enjoyed it so much that, for a time, it overtook my entire life. I didn’t even think writing was a viable alternative to finding a job – I knew very well that I needed to find a job, but I was having so much fun that I just didn’t care.
Unfortunately for me, a very astute friend, who I daresay knows me well enough to see the reality of my situation, decided to inconvenience me by getting me a job.
So as it turned out I only ended up being unemployed for about a month – in which time I’d forgotten to attend both my appointments at the job centre and had blown the majority of my redundancy payment on the red wine that fuelled my fevered writing. Ah… but what a great month that was!
And what happened to Vicky? Sadly, our situations at the time were so different that I simply overtook her. While I spent the last two months of my employment with little to do other than write, she was busy with work – and also had a social life. The joint venture became unviable and simply ceased to be.
Whether or not it could have worked is something I will never know – yet, whether this book ever achieves any kind of success or not, I shall be forever thankful to Vicky and that shitty day that she had.
