Saturday, December 1, 2012

MY IMMORTAL sample chapter & author notes. #samplesunday



Sometimes book ideas come from the strangest places. MY IMMORTAL started with a comment made by, or to, my best friend of three decades, during one of our all-night IM-a-thons. We have logged numerous hours chatting with each other over the Internet to the wee hours of the morning, and it wasn’t uncommon for us to finally log off and go to bed when the sun came up. This night was no different. Someone made the comment, “We must have been vampires in a past life,” and that was all it took. Within a day I had crafted a complete plot around the idea: what would happen if a vampire had been reincarnated?

Sure, it works as a scary story. I personally find vampires especially frightening, which made writing the whole thing a test of my will. But something else began to emerge, something completely unexpected: this is a story that explores the timeless endurance of true love. The only reason I could see for a vampire to die in such a redeemed state that it would be reincarnated was if it sacrificed itself for the love of another. This became the driving theme behind the story, especially what we would be willing to sacrifice for those we love.

“If you love him, you will do it.”

By the time I wrote this story in 2005, I was on my second marriage. My two husbands were completely different: Daniel was the exciting one, the adventurous one, the dangerous one; Steven was (is) steadfast, loyal, and stable. I went from marrying my hero to marrying my best friend, but I truly believe an argument could be made they were both my soul mates. My aforementioned best friend, Jeff, believes that we keep meeting our most important people in life after life, in significant ways. Maybe in a past life he was my brother or my father, and in this incarnation he is now my lifelong friend. Since I was exploring the idea of reincarnation anyway, I wanted to dig a little deeper into that concept, on how we continually meet up with the people we are meant to love.

Since I had lost Dan in 2003, the idea that he wasn’t really lost at all ended up being central to the love story of MY IMMORTAL, which makes it immensely personal. This paranormal romance explored themes of sacrifice, but most importantly – redemption. I crafted my heroine as someone who was an emotional mess, so that she would have the most to redeem (and sacrifice) throughout her journey. Adele Lumas was so flawed, so imperfect and so broken that her weight never really was an issue upon first writing her. Later, after I decided to change her into a full-figured heroine, it dawned on me that what made a woman attractive hundreds of years ago would not be the same thing that makes someone attractive today. In this sense Adele is truly the most Rubenesque heroine I’ve written, even though she was never intended to be Rubenesque at all. The man who had spent centuries looking for her would find her more generous proportions his romantic ideal; even detractors to the Rubenesque genre couldn’t argue this. But honestly, changing the book wasn’t that difficult to do because her character is so complex that I never really focused on her appearance at all – which is how I choose to handle all my heroines outside the Rubunesque genre. If I don’t mention a size, then I don’t feel it’s worth mentioning.

We’re more than our sizes. That’s the moral I wish to impart with each and every book.

Trivia: I was inspired heavily by the song "My Immortal" to write this book, and in fact music came to mean so very much in the creative process. This is the second book where I actually had a long soundtrack to keep me motivated with the movie in my head. (The first was my first book, which has yet to be rewritten and published.)



You can read more about how personal a love note this story is for me here.

And you can read a sample chapter here.

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