The Master Vampire
I love my readers.
No, really, I do. I write under four (*ahem* or more *ahem*) pen names and so far, nearly every reader for books published under every pen name has been a delight to interact with.
But some of you are getting a little impatient.
A couple of months ago, I received an email from a fan of the Vampyr Series (V.R. Cumming) that pushed me to write a post detailing exactly what's been going on in my life over the past few years, since the release of The Vampire's Favorite (officially the second book in the Vampyr Series, though it was published after book 3) in February 2016. No, to be perfectly frank, the problems started well before that, but that particular book is the pertinent one today.
The post was long and personal and took a great deal of time and emotion to write. In fact, it was heart wrenching. I can't even read it now without crying.
And that's why I decided not to publish it. It's personal. I can't talk about it, nor am I going to until I am dadgum good and ready to. Just suffice it to say that I have been dealing with some personal issues over the past few years (including a rather unfortunate accident with an ax that knocked me on my butt for about six weeks last year) that kept me from devoting as much time and energy to writing as I wanted to.
No, as I needed to, not just to sustain my career and satisfy readers (because I love y'all, you know), but because I love, love, love writing and I have so many stories I want to share with y'all.
Trust me. I am well aware of how long it's been since I published X book in Y series. I keep meticulous records of such things.
But I also understand the impatience, so once again I'm going to assure you that I'm not going to George R.R. Martin any series.
Enter the Vampire
Today, though, I want to specifically talk about the Vampyr Series because those fans are by far the most vocal about wanting the final book. Not vocal in a bad way, necessarily, just very interested in getting the final installment and not shy about saying so, which I deeply appreciate.
So let's talk about Eric Logan for a minute, because honestly he's one of my favorite characters. I love Eric. He captured my imagination (and, yes, my heart) the moment he walked into my life. For those of you who don't know the story behind why I started writing the Vampyr Series, let me take just a few moments to explain.
When I first started self-publishing, way back in 2014 (which is the dinosaur age of digital publishing, just a few years after the Big Bang in 2009 when Amazon made it so easy to self-publish), serialized novels were the it thing in Romance. Alpha werewolves were also big, as were threesomes (usually one woman being shared by two men), but me, I'm just plain contrary, so when I decided to try a serialized novel, it was with vampires.
Which weren't such a hot thing in 2014, it turns out, but I digress.
At that point, I was writing mega-ganoodles pretty much every day. It felt like all these stories had been bottled up inside me waiting to be released. When I finally "got it" in 2013 and started writing my first novel (The Prophecy, Lucy Varna), everything just sorta spewed out, like lava exploding from a volcano. I wrote and wrote and wrote, night after night, hour after hour, getting down stories as fast as they came to me.
Eric was a special case, though. I wanted a nerdy, geeky kinda guy who had lots of room to grow and become something other. And, let's face it, geeks are hot, especially geeks who look like Eric and have his heart and intelligence. When I say intelligent, I mean genius level, people. Eric's brain is fascinating in its own right, which is why, when he started turning, he could do so many awesome things, like hold entire decision trees (multiple ones at that) in his head and manipulate other people on a cellular level.
Whoops. That's a bit of a spoiler if you haven't read the first three books. Sorry. It's only a tiny spoiler.
Anyway, the world grew organically from those seeds and was nurtured by my imagination and by readers' fascination with the developing story. In spite of vampires being "out" in Romance, the books found an audience. I eventually bundled up all six episodes of Eric's story into The Vampire's Pet, released Gianna's story in five episodes and bundled those into The New Vampire, then backtracked and wrote The Vampire's Favorite, Jason's story, under a single, massive novel, though I kept the episodic nature by dividing it into three sections.
And now we've come full circle and it's time for Eric to have another say.
The Master Vampire
I began writing The Master Vampire on 19 June 2015 beginning with what eventually became these two paragraphs:
Blood has a distinct odor. To humans, the coppery bite stings the nose and often dominoes into a gag reflex, out of fear of spilling too much of life’s precious fluids, or sheer revulsion. For a vampire, the metallic zing triggers far different reactions. A sharp hunger, the elongation of pointed fangs, and if enough is imbibed, an unnatural thirst for more combined with an overwhelming lust for another human’s flesh.
Not today.
Look closely at that date. In June 2015, I was still in the middle of writing The Vampire's Favorite when I jotted down the first 2,100 words of The Master Vampire. It's part of my process: Get the idea on paper while it's fresh in my head, then noodle with it until it's ready to be written.
Only, in the past three years since completing and publishing The Vampire's Favorite, I have sat down with The Master Vampire about a dozen and a half times, and it just didn't come to me.
Part of that was due to the personal problems mentioned previously, which sucked up the emotions and energy normally expended on writing.
Part of it was because the series is so complex that I'm absolutely terrified of dropping a thread or a detail and disappointing readers.
And part of it was because the story wasn't ready to be written.
Or maybe I'm just not ready to let go of it yet. Either way, the result is the same, a huge block when it comes to writing this story. It just doesn't feel right yet, and when it doesn't feel right, there's a story-level problem I need to solve before I can move on.
The List
The only way to solve the problem, however, is to focus on the story, and to do that, I need to get some other projects out of the way first. The Master Vampire is one of my larger novels. It will, almost definitely, be over 100,000 words in length. Most of my novels range anywhere from 50,000 (Sunshine Walkingstick Series, Celia Roman) to 70,000 (Daughters of the People Series and The Pruxnae Series, Lucy Varna) words in length, but the Vampyr books are longer. The stories just need more space, and I'm happy to give it to them, but longer stories mean longer writing times which means a larger chunk of my schedule needs to be set aside for them.
Last year, I devoted six to eight weeks to assessing my writing business and prioritizing stories. I put the stories that were closer to being finished first and separated stories set within the same series world so that I could have the space to think about the next book after finishing the first draft of the previous one, as with the example mentioned above where I began Book 4 while the previous book was being written. The story needs time to stew in my imagination, hence my tentative schedule as set late last year:
- Romancing the Weird (C.D. Watson)
- Witch Hollow (Sunshine Walkingstick, Book 4)
- Redemption (Daughters of the People, Book 6)
- The Master Vampire (The Vampyr, Book 4)
- Sweet Surrender (The Pruxnae, Book 5)
- War's Last Refuge (Daughters of the People, Book 7)
My schedule, is much, much more complicated than that because I'm also, simultaneously, working on novels and short stories written under my own name (C.D. Watson) so that I can get it established and eventually stop writing under every name but that one.
Plus, when I set my writing schedule last year, I also penciled in stories I wanted to write under my pen names (like more Sons of the People novels, or a series devoted to Darien and the Greater Atlanta werewolf pack), but those are always a whim thing; I'll decide what to write once all my open series are wrapped up. The Truth is that I don't particularly want to let my pen names go and I have tons of stories I'd like to write under those names, but the smart thing to do is to settle on one name rather than dividing as I've been doing.
Anyway, my schedule is fluid, of course. What I eventually settled on was the above rough schedule for stories promised under my pen names alternated with stories for my own name, although I often work on those concurrently.
For example, right now I'm working on the first draft of Redemption, but I'm also working on the first draft of a Zombie Comedy (Dark Humor/Satire) intended to be published under my own name and writing short stories as needs must.
I hope to have both the ZomCom and Redemption completed by the end of this month, but if push comes to shove, I'll focus completely on Redemption so that I can finish it up and get it out later this year. In the name of transparency, I will now confess that I'm running about three to four months behind schedule, but I'm very, very satisfied with what I've accomplished this year.
Besides, my schedule is more of a suggested guideline than rigorous must-do, so there's that.
Speaking of Schedules...
Once Redemption is finished, I will pick up The Master Vampire regardless of what's going on with the ZomCom, which is (probably) the start of a series anyway. I'll work on later books in the ZomCom series (if needed) while I'm working on The Master Vampire.
Note here that since finishing the first draft of my first novel, I've always worked on two or more stories simultaneously, excepting 2016, a disastrous writing year, when I took Big Name Indie Author's advice and focused on one book at a time, thus nearly completely destroying my productivity, my sanity, and any semblance I had of a writing process or schedule.
(If you didn't get it, let me be blunt: That was a HORRIBLE (!!!!) idea. For me anyway. You do what works for you.)
Anyway, my alternative is to write The Master Vampire the way I wrote the episodes for The Vampire's Pet way back in the dinosaur age, one segment at a time with other stories being written around it.
Eh. Honestly, that's not how The Vampire's Pet's episodes were written. They were my secondary story written around a primary story (mostly novels in the Daughters of the People Series), but I want to finish out the Vampyr Series as much as readers want to finish reading it.
So. I may focus really hard on one segment of The Master Vampire, take a break by writing on another story for a few days or a week, then pick up the next segment of TMV and so on. At this point, whatever works to get the stories written, that's what I'm going to do.
Three to Five Parts
Oh, I bet you're wondering what those segments will be. Haha. Me, too. I know absolutely, 100% for sure that the first segment (Part 1) is called "Aftermath." Here's the introductory quote:
The world moves on, even when you don’t want it to, even when change feels like the end of everything. It never stops.
Ann Aguirre
I have (very tentatively) divided TMV into five parts. The working titles of all five parts (and these are very tentative, aside from the first one) are:
- Part 1: Aftermath
- Part 2: The Abyss
- Part 3: The Fire and the Forge (super duper tentative)
- Part 4: Trinity
- Part 5: The Strongest of Them All
Yes, lots of clues as to what's taking place in each of the five segments, but y'all have been so patient, I think you deserve some breadcrumbs.
I'll give you a couple more hints. Here's the (current and quite tentative) quote preceding Part 2: The Abyss:
Whoever fights monsters should see to it that in the process he does not become a monster. And if you gaze long enough into an abyss, the abyss will gaze back at you.
Friedrich Nietzsche
And the (current and quite tentative) quote preceding Part 3, currently named "The Fire and the Forge":
What would an ocean be without a monster lurking in the dark? It would be like sleep without dreams.
Werner Herzog
You can thank my friend Alden Duffield for the Herzog quote. Alden introduced me to Herzog, and while I don't share his enthusiasm for the now-deceased eccentric, it led me to dig a little deeper into Herzog's life, hence the quote.
At any rate, the number and names of the parts are still, well, tentative. It's early days yet for the story, even though I've been fiddling with it for going on four years now. There may be more parts, there may be fewer ones. But the ones mentioned above should give you a good idea of where I'm headed without completely giving the plot away.
I mean, let's face it. Y'all have had three years to ponder the Vampyr. I'm betting each of you has some pretty serious ideas as to where the story should go. But I'm going to surprise you, as I always do, and it may twist and turn and deceive before it wraps up.
But when?
So the final two questions are when am I going to devote time to The Master Vampire and when is it going to be published?
The first question is very easy to answer and has already partially been answered herein: I'll start on The Master Vampire shortly after finishing the first draft of Redemption. More specfically, if (big if there) I can finish Redemption this month, then I will start working on TMV in earnest in May.
Caveat: As I mentioned previously, I'm running behind schedule for the year, meaning I'm writing far more slowly than I would like. Which is fine. I will not put pressure on myself to finish a story before it's ready to be told. Doing so results in disastrous stories like A Warrior's Touch (The Pruxnae, Lucy Varna), so let's not push and risk a repeat of that, ok?
The question of publication is a little trickier than the other one. I don't know how long it will take to complete the first draft of The Master Vampire. In an ideal world, I would finish it in a month or two and publish it a couple of months after that.
But this isn't an ideal world. For one, I'm still struggling with my writing; it's just not going as quickly as it once did. For another, I have outside obligations that are quite personal, including family, friends, and, well, a life.
So it will be finished when it's finished and published when it's published and that's the best I can promise there. That process may take another couple of months, or it may take another year or more. I'm working more toward the former than the latter, I swear, and to nudge me along, I may even give a shout out to my V.R. Cumming newsletter subscribers when each part is finished.
Maybe. I truly hate bugging people, even readers who want to hear about the progress. So we'll see what's what on that one.
Have patience. I promise, I'm slowly working my way through my backlog of promised stories. I'm getting to them, albeit (again) much more slowly than I would like. Trust me, I'm ready to move on to other series, but I'm not going to until I get these older series finished.
With the exception of the zombies because, hey, they're so cool. And the story is about the relationship between a single mom and her adorable grownup son, so yeah, it's quasi-semi-almost-autobiographical and one of those stories I just need to work on.
If you haven't read the Vampyr Series, here are the first three books. Ok, I added them in here because the covers are super cool, but still. Just click on the pictures and you're on your way to reading them.
