Field Trip!

Head on over to Precious Monsters, the blog and check out my new post. Precious Monsters was created by Jolie du Pre, the author, editor, blogger and monster lover. Her first novella, Litria, Book 1 of The M Series, will be published in July of 2012 by Logical-Lust.

Chronicles of the Sanguivorous, Free Today Only

That’s right, this is the last day to download my book, Chronicles of the Sanguivorous for free on Smashwords for your Kindle or iPad or even your computer. At midnight, I”ll raise the price to 99 cents, (so I won’t lose my sales ratings on Amazon). Enjoy! Share with friends, write about it, tweet about it, shout it from your front porch…

Excuse Me, Are Those Your Fangs in My Neck? Part Two

 I’ve just released the first half of my vampire book, The Chronicles of the Sanguivorous – The Rising as an eBook.  I had started the book almost two years ago after reading Charlaine Harris’s “True Blood” series.  Inspired, I knew I could write about vampires through the lens of my own specialty, historical fiction, and actually tell the history of civilization (albeit through the eyes of vampires) in the seven volume series.  I did enormous amounts of research about vampires’ historical/mythological origins and discovered they were first mentioned in early Mesopotamia, around the time that the city of Ur rose to prominence (or “Ur of the Chaldees” as the Bible calls it.)  This was a fortunate turn of events, because I had already versed myself in Mesopotamian history for my second novel, Day of the False King.

I had long been a devotee of Egyptian history, and the one thing you discover about ancient Egypt is how consistent its historical flow was when compared to other civilizations.  Protected by its deserts, Egypt developed slowly, always in the service and celebration of its God-Kings.  But the study of Mesopotamia (called Assyriology) is a heartrending hodgepodge of invasions, battles, and massacres.  The people of the river plains between the Tigris and Euphrates did not deify their kings; rather, whoever was in charge was simply called the Big Man; and these men changed with stunning swiftness.  Armies of invaders would sweep in, establishing a turbulent new culture, only to be swept away again a few generations later.  Egypt possessed regularity in abundance; Mesopotamia was all chaos and confusion.

So, getting back to the vampires, I had a good head start on my first historical locale.  I wrote about 150 pages of the book and then made the mistake of going to my public library and seeing the array of titles in the New Books section.  Every other one of them was about vampires.  Disheartened, I put my writing aside – though all my friends who had read it loved it and pleaded for more.

One of the most fun things about attempting to write this series is creating a new mythology for my own vampires.  It seems  one of their first mythical Big Men, Lugal (actually the father of Gilgamesh, the greatest semi-divine hero in Mesopotamian literature) was known for his incredible licentiousness.  In other words, he’d sleep with anything.  Wind Demons who populated the river plains wanted a corporeal body, so they offered themselves up to Lugal.  Their mating indeed produced offspring with bodies that resembled humans, but they also came equipped with a terrifying appetite for human blood – i.e., vampires.

So MY vampires are actually a form of super-predator that have been around for as long as humans have been; one of their powers is that they can actually utilize telekinesis that enables them to control the winds (which is where we get the myth that they were the offspring of Wind Demons.)   In my books, when the winds blow – watch out, for that is how they hide their rising after years of hibernation.  They do NOT get burned by the sun, nor do they sleep in coffins.  Their aversion to light, however, exists because they hunt humans only at night and their keen vision enables them to see as clearly in the dark as we do during the day; they avoid strong light simply because it’s agony on their eyes.  They are immortal, in the sense that they do not age, but the CAN be killed by several methods.

Their main defense, however, lies in the fact that after a few generations of terrorizing the countryside, they are driven by a hibernation instinct to burrow into the ground and disappear.  During the time they are gone, mankind forgets about them and turns them into myth.  Generations later, the vampires rise again – by this time merely shriveled bags of bones and leather – to once again maraud and terrify and feast.  The blood they ingest enables them to “read” the cellular memories of their victims, allowing them to understand the current language and to know what has occurred while they slept.

In my first volume, The Rising, the vampires discover that mankind has developed something fairly new – organized religion.  Their great predatory powers of swiftness and strength can convince humans that they are gods, and they begin to co-opt the temples.  They no longer have to hunt, you see, for they invent a new ritual – human sacrifice.  Thus their prey is driven to them.

Each book ends with the vampires once again “going to ground”, and in the next volume they rise into an entirely new historical era.  (In the second book they will become the gods Homer’s “Iliad”; the Trojan War, you will discover, was an internecine struggle between various tribes of Vampires, who utilized humans in their own civil war.)  And in the third book, set in Jerusalem about 2,000 years ago, we will see how Christianity itself was their product, too.  Surely you’ve heard of all that “blood into wine” stuff…well, now you know why.

Uniting all this will be my central couple, Aron and Enna.  Theirs is a love story that quite literally spans five-thousand years of history.  Newlyweds separated by the rise of Vampires, themselves made victims of it, they search for one another across time.  Aron will increasingly wish to discover what Vampires really are, and why some of their victims “turn”  – the only way they can reproduce – while others simply die.  In some volumes, Aron will be on the run, for humans (particularly in that little burg known as Transylvania) soon get wise to their ways and begin to hunt them down.  But through it all, we will see how Vampires were present at every great moment of human history.  It is also my conceit that when they rise, human fascination with vampires in arts and culture rise as well.

The last time they rose, you see, was in the late 1800s – just about the time that Bram Stoker’s little novel made an appearance.  But this new modern age is also an era when religion has receded for the first time and replaced by secularism – the biggest threat to the Vampire race.

That’s my Chronicles of the Sanguivorous in a nutshell.  I’m not going to give away anything more; for that you’ll have to plunk down your 99 cents. Whether you’re a fan of historical fiction or vampires, I hope you enjoy them – and be sure to write and let me know what you think.

Excuse Me, Are Those Your Fangs In My Neck? Part One of Two Parts

I don’t know when I first became enamored of vampires.  I read “Dracula” when I was very young, and though it didn’t terrify me, it nevertheless made quite a creepy impression.  I remember how Dracula is first introduced as a decrepit old man who then grows progressively younger and more vigorous during the course of the book, as the blood of his victims begins to rejuvenate him.  The most vivid impression that remains was of the Count slithering up the side of the castle like a reptile.  There was a mixture of the effete and the bestial in Stoker’s vampire, which is still a horrifying alchemy.  When would this tuxedoed gentleman inevitably bring his darker nature to the fore?  After all, we were simply meals to him.  This touch of cannibalism also brought with it a further creepy factor, that of ending one’s days in the jaws of a feral beast.  But not just any beast, but one that disguised its terrible predatory habits by simply resembling us.

I had seen the 1931 “Dracula”, of course, the one starring Bela Lugosi, when I was very young.  In 1950s Southern California, we had the Million Dollar Movie on Channel 9, which showed the same film over and over again for five nights a week, and consequently I saw “Dracula” probably every day of that week.  (This was well before videotapes and DVDs – we never knew when we would ever see these films again and had to store up the experiences.) Lugosi, with his middle European accent and fluid, balletic gestures seemed the quintessential blood-sucking nobleman of my youth.

Then in 1967 I saw Roman Polanski’s “The Fearless Vampire Killers”.  My best friend Randy and I were diehard film addicts and we had long heard of this mangled masterpiece by the Hungarian wunderkind.  It had been recut by MGM to feature its slapstick humor and general quirkiness, and a toning down of the violence had supposedly occurred.  (It a parody of all the Hammer epics starring Christopher Lee, you see.) What I did not expect was the full-blown horror that the film showed alongside the slapstick.  Polanski’s vampires were once again elegantly attired royalty inhabiting a seedy castle.  But when the blood lust came upon them they became animals, sporting huge jagged fangs that ripped into their victims’ throats with horrifying rapacity.  No delicate little puncture holes for our Roman Polanski; in fact, the man who designed the fangs was given a screen credit.  I remember being so terrified during the attack sequences that I had to go stand in the lobby.  I was in love with Sharon Tate back then, too, and “Valley of the Dolls” had been released earlier that year.  I remember saying to Randy that my one overwhelming memory of Tate would always be the moment when she turned into a vampire at the end of the film.  Alas, she was to be remembered for something far more dreadful.

My real conversion occurred when Anne Rice’s “Interview with the Vampire” was published in 1976.  (I still have the first edition).  She literally redefined the genre.  It was the time of the disco sex revolution, and I was just old enough to participate in all of it, and somehow the goth-influencing Rice novel seemed a mirror of it all – the infernal highs of mind-bending drugs (which is how the vampires described their ingestion of blood) and the gender-bending concepts of love and devotion.  It was all very perverse and exceedingly glamorous.  Just like Louis and Lestat, we were all night time prowlers looking for sex in all the wrong places.  And we were all so deliciously bored, you see, by our perceived immortality and the constant parade of flesh that paraded through our lives with barely an acknowledgment.  (Except that our immortality lasted all of five or so years before the dying set in.)

I never got into the “Twilight” phenomenon.  I read the first book because I decided that I must know more about this craze if I were to be a knowledgeable writer.  But it just didn’t take.  Perhaps I was the wrong age, and/or the wrong sex.  I was much more a creature of the rampaging 70s than the timid 90s, and it all seemed so vapid.  Was I really supposed to believe that the first question that the 100 year old vampire Edward asks Bella is “What’s your favorite color?” Really?  That’s it?  I simply don’t buy it; I believe that any 100 year old creature would be so mentally advanced when compared to a 17 year old high school girl that I wonder if he could ever think of her as anything other than a comestible…?

Nevertheless, inspired by both the success of Twilight and Charlaine Harris’ wonderful “True Blood” series (which I am unashamedly addicted to), I have decided to take the plunge and write my own vampire saga, called “The Chronicles of the Sanguivorous”. You can buy it here for a mere 99 cents.

Sanguivorous means “blood eater” and I’ve taken the story all the way back in time to the very first mention of vampires in history…to the river plain of Mesopotamia, to Ur of the Chaldees.  Each book will begin in a new time, until by the seventh we arrive in the 21^st Century.  They also give to mankind both the art of writing and…religion.

What do you think?  Should Anne Rice become one of the vampires in the last volume?  After all, my heroine starts off with the name Enna.  Could she be one and the same?

Sometimes I think it’s the only explanation.

Are vampires your guilty pleasure?

Mine too. But not the sparkly teen variety. I’m more a Bram Stoker fan. My contribution to vampire literature is now available on Amazon and you can be one of the first to download, read and review. If you do offer a review, (good or bad) let me know and if you’re a blog follower, I’ll send you one of my favorite books to say thank you. Sanguivorous means blood-eater, by the way. And you’ll want to know that my dear friends who’ve read it have said I gave them nightmares. Did I mention the first volume is only 99cents? Barely a bite.

Oh, Canada!

I’m swamped today and headed off to teach tomorrow, but wanted to tell you that Chronicles of Sanguivorous, The Rising is available on Smashwords, the formatting for SW has yet to be proven, so if you’d like to wait for the Kindle edition, it won’t be long. Did I mention this first edition is free? If you love it, let me know and I’ll quickly finish Volume II.

And today is the first day in the blog that my international readers outnumber my American readers. Warm hello to my Canadian friends, and all our readers all over the world. It’s thrilling to me to see my WordPress map light up worldwide.

Also if you’re not follow me on Twitter, come on board… It’s always a fun conversation and the community is very entertaining and supportive of writers and aspiring writers. Follow me @BradGeagley and @Sanguivorous1, if you’re more attuned to the vampires and creatures of the night.

More About My Upcoming Novel, Chronicles of the Sanguivorous, The Rising

Where were we? Ah, more about my upcoming novel, Chronicles of the Sanguivorous, The Rising. As you read this, it’s being churned from a word doc to a .mobi and so on, so you can download it on Kindle, iPad or Nook. I promise you’ll know the moment it appears. And we’re doing everything we can to make the first volume free.

My own conceit is that vampires are a species of super-predators that appear periodically in history to “thin the herds.”  After slumbering in the earth for hundreds of years, during which the memory of their last rising has been forgotten or turned into folk tales by mankind, they rise again – shriveled, gaunt and ferociously thirsty – to wreak havoc on the populations they encounter.  Blood itself carries “cellular memories” so that vampires become instantly aware of languages and what has happened since they last “went to ground.”

In  “The Rising”, they discover that mankind has begun to settle in cities (in particularly the city of Ur of the Chaldees) and that the rudiments of religion are being created.  It is at that moment in history when the Earth Mother has given way to the Sky Gods.  They cleverly seize on religion, claiming to be ferocious gods who demand human sacrifice.  The prey is thus brought to them; in fact, the first novel concludes in the historically true vaults of Ur, where a tremendous amount of human skeletons were discovered, all part of a mass human sacrificial ritual.

After an indeterminate number of years on earth, the Sanguivorous are irresistibly called again to slumber in soil and rock.  Each book begins with them awaking into a new age.  In book two, for instance, a civil war brews between the vampire tribes.  They, in fact, become the gods and goddesses worshipped by the Trojans and the Greeks, and “The Iliad” is retold from their vampire perspective.  Book three takes place in Jerusalem, beginning in Bethlehem…well, let’s just say that the phrase “blood into wine” takes on a whole new meaning.  And so on, right up into the late nineteenth century when they rise again, spurring an entire new interest in vampires through the likes of Bram Stoker, Bela Lugosi, and all the rest.  Would it surprise you that they might make an appearance, too?

Uniting all these books will be the story of Aron and Enna, lovers from prehistoric Mesopotamia, whose wedding night is torn asunder by murderous winds – the first sign that the Blood Eaters are rising – and who become the victims of a family feud that is played out for three millennia.

And there you have the story in a nutshell.

But will you do me a favor?  After you read the book, will you please write to me and let me know what you think of the story?  Have I jumped on the vampire bandwagon too late?  Is the public thoroughly sick of the entire genre?  Should I even continue?

Let me know – and, while you’re doing that, take a moment to download The Stand In, too.  I promise you, no vampires there.  Just a damn good thriller.

Chronicles of the Sanguivorous, Not Just Another Vampire Novel

Sanguivorous means blood-eater.

Allow me to present to you, my newest novel. And very soon, dear reader, will be able to download Chronicles of the Sanguivorous, The Rising for free.

The novel is part of a planned seven book series that I’ve outlined, called The Chronicles of the Sanguivorous, with the first book being subtitled, “The Rising.”  As some of you might have already guessed, it’s about vampires.

I love vampire stories; they’ve always appealed to me, all the way back to when I was a kid and read Dracula for the first time.  Then Interview with the Vampire came along, which still is the overly prolific Anne Rice’s greatest work.  I particularly enjoy the Sookie Stackhouse books and love HBO’s “True Blood” series made from them.  Somehow, the working class South and eternal vampires make for a potent combination, and my hat’s off to Charlaine Harris for coming up with such a winning concept.

So, inspired– I decided to write my own vampire series, bringing my own particular historical twist to them.  I had always wanted to write a time travel book about a love that lasted for centuries, but I didn’t want to write science fiction.  I take the story all the way back to the beginning of history when vampires were first mentioned in the historical records.

That turned out to be in Mesopotamia, which is a very convenient place for me to write about because I had done extensive research on it for my second best-selling novel, Day of the False King, which is set in ancient Babylon.  It is believed by scholars that the vampire legends first arose there, when wind demons, desiring a corporeal body, mated with the depraved King Lugal.  Their misbegotten spawn became the vampire of legend.

(Stay tuned… details about the upcoming novel in my next post.)