The Call of Chaos and Old Night

Therefore I see no wrong in riding with the Nightmare to-night; she whinnies to me from the rocking tree-tops and the roaring wind; I will catch her and ride her through the awful air. Woods and weeds are alike tugging at the roots in the rising tempest, as if all wished to fly with us over the moon, like that wild amorous cow whose child was the Moon-Calf. We will rise to that mad infinite where there is neither up nor down, the high topsy-turveydom of the heavens. I will answer the call of chaos and old night. I will ride on the Nightmare; but she shall not ride on me.
—G. K. Chesterton, "The Nightmare", Alarms and Discursions

I think I shall spend the next short while revising my Urban Fantasy/Dark Fantasy/anyway-there's-werewolves-and-vampires-in-it book, ideally while figuring out how to publish the first SFer. For some reason, whenever autumn rolls around, I get in a horrory-vampirey mood—maybe it's the spirits of the dead revisiting the earth, maybe it's the shorter days and chill in the air. Maybe you only think those are two different things.

I already thought of a tagline for the back of the thing:

Hundreds of rounds of ammunition.
Stabbings, beheadings, impalements.
A guy who twists off zombies' heads with his bare hands.

This ain't your sister's vampire book.

Because, yeah, you need to be very clear up front that it ain't Paranormal Romance. Then again, now that I look at it in print, it seems a little more Saxton Hale than I'm actually going for.

Here we see Mr. Hale volunteering with Girl Scouts

One change I think I'm gonna make is, currently several of my vampires are Nosferatu, resembling the one from the film; but it's pretty much a given that there is no such type of vampire. Nosferatu—or rather, Nesuferâtul, "the Intolerable One"—is a title of the Devil, in Romania, and by extension, all evil spirits (including vampires because, again, ghosts). So I think I'm gonna have it be a nickname of the main villain—he was a Romanian nobleman, indeed a rival of Vlad III, and Romanian nobles were known by nicknames. Aside from Vlad II the Dragon and Vlad III the Impaler, there's Michael the Brave, Radu the Handsome, Vlad IV the Monk, Vlad I the Usurper, Mihnea the Evil (yes really), Bogdan the Blind, Radu the Bald, and Alexander the Good. Besides, isn't Stefan Nesuferâtul an awesome name for a villain?

So, basically, I have three types of Romanian vampire: strigoi, pricolici, and moroi, or OCD pretty-boys, the ones who can turn into bats and wolves, and living people with vampire powers. In my second book I also have the Vârcolaci, the vampire werewolf who eats the moon and causes eclipses, but that comes later.

I think I will shorten one scene (and coincidentally delete a superfluous POV character), and (ojala) add a scene about handloading silver bullets (it's not cast, did you know? nope, ground on a lathe). Because, frankly, in terms of "Gun Porn", this series, even more than my SF one, probably ought to be read in a private booth.

Every single one of my characters has a specific gun he uses: my main heroine uses an M1911A1, the male and female vampire-hunters use a .40 S&W P226 and .357 SIG Glock 31 respectively (before they both had Glocks, but that would get confusing), and the priest uses a Smith & Wesson .357 magnum M&P R8, the one with an accessory rail (think he uses a tactical light, rather than a laser). They all use shooting earplugs, I think the double-ended kind, where you put 'em in one way, they filter out sudden loud noises while allowing normal hearing, and put 'em in the other way, they block out all noise. Hey, both the guys I just mentioned are headbangers, and electric guitar is in the same frequency range as gunfire, they can't afford to lose that.

Now that I think about it, I'm not sure what I'm gonna do with my hero, the albino werewolf, RE: guns. Before, he only used a katana in the first book—katanas being the most easily-obtainable military-grade sword you can reasonably find training for—because, as an albino, his vision is far from ideal for guns. But then in the second book, he uses a laser-sight with a pistol (I don't remember if I'd picked anything, but let's assume we can have our 'druthers, and give him a Beretta Px4 Storm, because it's pretty). But then I thought hey, what about a shotgun? Not only can buckshot make short work of the head and the heart, but precision aim isn't necessary (I said precision aim, shotguns ain't magic death-wall launchers like you idgits seem to think), pump-action'll let him take advantage of his supernatural speed. Maybe this one, a Mossberg 590A1 Special Purpose 9-shot 12 gauge:And it's only $608.

Other than that, I'm gonna update the setting—lot of its pop-culture references are 2006, and that's a little too far back.