vampire « Patti O'Shea's Blog

Posts Tagged ‘vampire’

A Short Story Wants to Grow Up and Be a Novel

Tuesday, May 19th, 2009

When I wrote Blood Feud for The Mammoth Book of Vampire Romance 2, I just had enough information to tell Isobel and Seere’s story, and while I could see the potential for this world, I didn’t really feel any driving desire to write more for this couple or any other couple. Things are different for the short story I’m writing for The Mammoth Book of Time Travel Romance.

The biggest thing is that I keep getting information on how to make Lia and Troll’s story a full-length novel and it’s hard for me to shorthand it. I feel as if I’m skipping stuff I’d really like to take time to explore. I can’t. I only have 6,500 to 12,000 words and I just can’t do it. I also had to jettison the suspense/action part of the story because there isn’t enough space, and while I could add a little in, it would be at the end which would make it feel tacked on. I reluctantly released that string.

I think my problem stems from the fact that Lia and Troll are part of my Jarved Nine world (Ravyn’s Flight, Eternal Nights) and I’ve been in love with Troll since I met him. Troll, BTW, is a member of Wyatt’s team from EN. He’s a reformed player and just sexy as all get out. I don’t know if I can do him justice in the length and I sure can’t convey the sincerity of his conversation.

Another issue is that Troll and Lia just met in this story. With Blood Feud, my hero and heroine had a past together and it was merely a matter of rekindling their feelings. Much easier than establishing a relationship between a h/h who didn’t hook up until 10 pages into a story that will be less than 50 pages. If I was doing a full-length story, I’d have it take place over a few weeks, I’d give them time to fall in love and then Lia’s decision to stay in the future would make sense. This is much more difficult to convey in a short where the h/h have been together the grand total of maybe ten hours. Love is out and I have to go for staying to see where the relationship might lead and the potential for a happy ending down the road.

And then there’s the other characters from the first two J9 books. Several of them have put in an appearance and I want to spend more time with them, too. That’s not all. Troll and Lia’s story takes place after Flare’s story, and Gravedigger’s, and Z Man’s and their heroines are there as well.

Despite all this, I’m somehow managing to get where I need to go with the short story. It’s just hard to remember the “short” part sometimes.

Tags: Eternal_Nights, Jarved9, Ravyns_Flight, time_travel, vampire, writing
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Picking More Theme Songs

Friday, May 8th, 2009

I realized yesterday that I didn’t have a theme song for my short story in The Mammoth Book of Vampire Romance 2 and I always come up with a song. Sometimes it’s harder than others and sometimes I get lucky and the song makes itself known to me. This time I had to work for it and then I got lucky.

You know there’s a story about it, right? I spent time going through my iPod and trying different songs that I thought might work, but if the lyrics were right, the tone of the song wasn’t and if the tone was right, the lyrics didn’t work for me. Now granted, some of the songs for other stories are only tangentially related in both music and words, but there’s usually some connection for me no matter how tenuous it might seem to everyone else. I wasn’t finding that yesterday.

After coming up empty, I thought I’d have to settle for something because I didn’t have a lot of time to spend on this. But when I arrived home and plugged in my iPod to update it, I saw something in iTunes. Daughtry. The first song listed: It’s Not Over. I listened to it and it works. It’s edgy enough and the lyrics can be said to fit Blood Feud. Not exactly, of course, but then with a few exceptions none of the theme songs fit precisely.

Now I decided I needed a theme song for the Time Travel short story. BTW, I still have no title for it. I had an idea come to me today, but it might be stupid and it doesn’t have any symmetry with Eternal Nights. Since this story is about a member of Wyatt’s team (he was the hero in EN), I’d like to tie it in somehow. But I digress–no surprise to any regular blog visitor.

So theme song for the untitled TT. I thought of the TV show Life On Mars immediately and all the great music they used. I even bought some of it after I heard it on the show. I checked out David Bowie’s Space Oddity first, but that didn’t really work for me. Next up was Spaceman by Harry Nilsson. Again, it’s not an exact fit, but this song talks about returning to Earth, and since my heroine winds up on Jarved Nine, that works. I decided to go with this one even though there were a number of other songs I found that would work, too.

Theme songs are now in place for my short stories! Yea! Now I just need to update my website and my iTunes online list.

Tags: songs, stories, time_travel, vampire
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News, News, Coffee!

Friday, March 13th, 2009

To start with the most exciting news first, In Twilight’s Shadow is a finalist for Best Paranormal in the Gayle Wilson Award of Excellence! Happy dog dancing on this one!

Next exciting bit of news is that I have the cover for The Mammoth Book of Vampire Romance 2. I’ll have a story in the collection called Blood Feud and I had so much fun writing it! Maybe because it’s such a different length for me. I’ve never written anything this short before in my life! The heroine is Isobel and she’s the vampire, so I was really glad to see a female vampire on the cover. The hero is Seere and he’s a demon.

Release date in the US is Halloween and it’s up for pre-order on Amazon.

That’s all my news for today. To move on to the next subject in the title, I started grinding coffee beans today. I’d gotten a “deal” on some pretty expensive coffee, and although I’d been warned to only grind about a week’s worth at a time, I decided not to. It’s so darn messy that I wanted to grind everything and get it over with. I made it through 3 of the 5 twelve ounce bags. Ugh!

I could never work in a coffee shop, not if I had to grind coffee and smell it. I like the smell of coffee someone else has ground, but this just left me nauseated. Right now I don’t even feel like getting my coffee pot ready to brew tomorrow’s pot and that’s like a fish not feeling like swimming. It just doesn’t happen. So my plan is not to grind any more for a while until I can stand the thought of smelling that again. And I am never, ever buying beans that I have to grind myself, not even if the price is good. This is torturous!

Tags: coffee, news, twilights_shadow, vampire
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Write On

Friday, January 30th, 2009

The vampire short story is finished–more or less–and I think it turned out okay. I had fun with the story, liked the characters, and have been assured by my writing buddy that it’s “totally bitchin’.” That was a huge relief since this is a new length for me and I felt at sea sometimes. The thing that kind of amazes me is that I somehow managed to tell a whole story in 7800 words. I was planning to just do a peek in to their lives sort of thing, which is what others seem to do with this length, but I just wrote without any real plan and had a beginning, middle, and end. I really didn’t expect that, but I’ll take it. And if I can ever come up with a title that isn’t a lame play on words, it’ll all be good.

Now I need to make the transition back into my full-length book and I’m not finding that easy to do. I reread the last chapter I’d written, but I need to sit down and come up with chapter and/or scene goals. I’m hoping that will get my head back into Kel’s story and help me focus.

The test print of Edge of Dawn (which comes out June 30th) has been proofread and the pages that need correction will be mailed back today. I only had time to read through it once and that makes me uneasy–I usually read through them three times–but my mom read through it twice for me and found a few things that I never saw.

It’s pretty nice to have my writing To Do List whittled down to 1 thing. Granted, it’s the biggest item of them all, but having other projects like proofreading and the short story added to my stress because they were kind of hanging there like blades from guillotines. I still have too much to do and not enough time to do it in and I’ve been scarce online lately, but I’ll manage. Somehow.

Tags: edge_of_dawn, galleys, to-do, vampire, writing
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The Fang Set

Wednesday, January 28th, 2009

I’m still working on my vampire story, but I’ll have the first draft done before I go to bed tonight. I started it last Thursday, and my goal was to have it finished by Sunday night, but I trashed everything I wrote before Saturday multiple times and that put me behind where I’d hoped to be.

The experience of writing a short piece has been interesting. There isn’t a lot of room to let everything unfold the way there is in a full book, but I discovered this is a fun length to work with. Of course, I haven’t sent the first draft to my writing buddies yet either, so maybe the entire thing sucks (no pun intended) and then I won’t be thinking it’s that much fun after all.

Because of the length, I did a couple of things. First, my hero and heroine have a past relationship, and though they didn’t stay together, they’re both still in love with each other. That allowed me (I think) to have a believable romance going on in the story. The second thing I did was keep the plot very simple and Seere and Isobel will be able to resolve it more quickly than any of my heroes and heroines get to do in my longer stories. I hardly even tortured them either unless you count the time they’ve spent apart.

I did surprise myself a little, though. I hadn’t planned on doing any world building. Because of how short it is, I thought I’d just go with standard vampire lore, but that isn’t the way it worked. Isobel gave me a ton of information on her people. I doubt that any of it is earth shatteringly different, but it isn’t the standard Hollywood vampire background either. There’s also very little of this in the story–just enough for things to make sense–but I think it adds a richness to what is there because I know so many more facts and details.

The weird thing is that I never wanted to write vampires because I didn’t feel as if I had anything new to say, but after this story, I’ve become really interested in the world and I would like to explore it more. Of course, now vampires have been done to death and I’ve got other story ideas that are more unique I’d like to write, too, so I think it ends here. I’m glad, though, that I agreed to do this and spend time in this world with this h/h.

Tags: vampire, writing
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Don’t Wanna Stop!

Monday, January 26th, 2009

It was a major writing weekend for me. My goal was to finish the first draft of my vampire short story by Sunday evening, but I didn’t make it. I still need to write one more scene and a conclusion, but I did get a lot of work done. Eighteen pages in two days is a lot for me. I just wish I had one more day.

So I don’t have a lot to blog about. I can tell you that oddly enough my vampire romance is being told in both third and first person points of view (POV). Yeah, I know. I hate first person POV, but my heroine is talking that way to me and it didn’t work when I tried to force it into third. My hero is talking in third person and I never even tried to switch his POV to match the heroine’s. I guess I’ll see how my writing buddies react when I send it to them.

I found a picture of my hero quickly and he is hot. Again, my heroine surprised me–she’s a redhead. Do you know how hard it is to find pictures of redheaded women? I went to all the modeling agency sites I had bookmarked, but only a few of them had any models with the right color hair and none of them were my heroine. I then tried to do a Google image search for redhead. Don’t ever do that. ::shudder::

I wrote without her picture, but last night–after my brain shut down for the day–I went looking some more. I found one that’s close enough and we called it good.

Today, the writing went exceptionally well and darn it, I didn’t want to stop. I’d still be writing now except my brain shut down for the night. Again. I hate when that happens.

Tags: pictures, vampire, writing
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Working On the Night Shift

Friday, January 23rd, 2009

I was talking to one of the guys at work about my vampire short story and he started asking me questions about vampires. You know, like how do you kill a vampire, do they only drink human blood or can they drink animal blood? Things like this. For a moment, I was stymied. While there is a great deal of vampire lore out there, it’s still my story to tell. I finally said to him, “my world, my rules.”

That’s when he suggested that if a vampire could drink animal blood, he could get a job at the slaughterhouse and no one would be the wiser. His best idea IMO, though, was the vampire night shift of airplane mechanics. I asked if they’d be able to wear their capes while they worked on the planes and he said, probably not. OSHA wouldn’t allow it.

This got me thinking of the movie Love at First Bite and wondering if it was possible to do a comedy like that with the vampire airplane mechanic idea. Of course, I don’t write funny so it’s a what-if scenario rather than anything I’m actually going to attempt, but it still kept me entertained for a while.

And speaking of the vampire short story, I started it officially today. I’ve been getting narration for a couple of weeks now–usually in first person–but this week it finally switched to third person which means it’s time to rock. This doesn’t happen all the time–where I get the story in first person and then it switches–but it has happened a couple of times. It rattled me the first time because I’m not a fan of first person POV, but when the story switched to third person before I wrote it, I calmed down. Now I don’t get shaken, I just wait for it to morph into a writable version.

Nearly done with my first read through on galleys. I should finish it tomorrow. I’m still hoping to squeeze in a second run, but might not have time.

Tags: humor, vampire, writing
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My Vampire Chick

Monday, January 19th, 2009

I mentioned that I was asked to participate in The Mammoth Book of Vampire Romance 2 and I think I said that my heroine was talking to me. She imparted a lot of information, most it helpful, but would not tell me her name. I know she’s switched names a lot over the centuries, but the hero knows her real name and he calls her that name. Only I don’t know it.

Squeezing her got me nowhere. In fact, she stopped talking. But it was getting ridiculous, you know? I can’t move forward without a name. To make it even more fun, it needs to be a name that was used back when she was born, and since I don’t write historical and have no intention of ever doing so, I don’t have resources for historical names. I was toying with using Elizabeth. I wasn’t completely certain, but I thought it had been around long enough, but that didn’t feel exactly right.

Close, but not exactly.

Tonight, I made it my mission to figure out what the heck my heroine’s name is. I found a site that has links to all kinds of names from medieval as well as other historical eras and I started clicking. It didn’t take too long before I found Isabella. Hmm. Was Isabella really around back then? I mean, the site I found was for creating characters in a Role Playing Game and I was a little leery, so I visited my favorite name site: Behind the Name.

They listed Isabella as a form of Isabel and when I clicked over to Isabel (which seemed oh, so right for my heroine), I discovered that Isabel is a form of Elizabeth and that it became popular in England in the 13th century. Bingo!

I knew Elizabeth was almost right, but I had no idea why. Now I do. How cool is this?

Tags: heroines, names, vampire
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