Okay, so another fun fact about me, I grew up on a steady diet of Danielle Steel and Stephen King, with a heaping helping of V.C. Andrews on the side. This probably explains A LOT. I like my love stories mired in angst, walking the line of what's accepted and what's not. I don't mind genre bending, so it's not uncommon to see me blend a couple of different elements, like love and death.
This brings us to MY IMMORTAL.
MY IMMORTAL I have classified as a paranormal romance, but it works as a Gothic love story or a tale of horror. I decided to write about vampires, but not so much to write about falling in love with one. The whole premise came to me while talking to my best friend late one night, when one of us remarked that we must have been vampires in our past lives, since we have always been constant night owls since we were kids.
A reincarnated vampire... with a delightful idea FULL of possibilities. That got the ol' brain working. How exactly WOULD a vampire be reincarnated? And to what point and purpose would a cursed soul get another chance to human? By dawn, I had the entire story in my head, ready to go.
I wrote it first as a screenplay, so it is no coincidence if it reads like a movie. I adapted it to book form for my first Nanowrimo, which I live-blogged on Myspace. (That should date it for ya.) The story has changed a lot since I gave birth to it in 2004, but the core story remains as poignant to me as ever.
I wrote it the year after my first husband died, so needless to say I was processing through a lot of stuff. Like most Gothic tales, it reads like a tragedy, but that's kind of the most beautiful thing about it. Not so surprisingly, it was inspired heavily by this song...
...which had become my song for Dan from the moment I first saw the video. Needless to say that the story itself is quite gray, in that there's a lot of murky emotion to wade through. Life and death. Sex and pain. Destiny and cursed reality. Motherhood. Childhood. Loss. Chasing down and confronting more emotional demons than I can count. And love. Powerful, overwhelming love. A love so strong it can penetrate the very fabric of time - and death - itself. A love so powerful that it makes all the other stuff worth it.
This isn't an easy read. It's a bloody and broken read. It was me at my weakest, trying to be strong. I have a lot in common with Adele.
Coming up with Nicholas wasn't that difficult to do. He had to be so compelling and so appealing that I myself couldn't say no to him, even as I contemplated the unthinkable - that my lead hero was a cold, bloodsucking killer. Vampires scare the shit out of me, more than any other lore, mostly because they compel you to your own death. You walk to it willingly because they are so seductive. These themes keep me twisted as a Scorpio. So I did what a lot of young writers tend to do. I cast someone in his place.
Of course this eight years before Barnabas Collins. I was also a few years off when I mentally cast Jim Carrey in my movie about the devil, two years before he got to play God. I suppose this means my instincts are good, even if my timing sucks.
Speaking of sucky timing, the character of Thaddeus Dragomir was HEAVILY inspired by David Bowie's Jareth from Labyrinth. In my dreams, he definitely would have played the part.
Hey, I dream big. That's what I do. This was also the first project I rewrote to include a part for Hal Sparks, which was kind of fitting. His debut album with his band Zero 1 ended up providing a lot of music for my mental soundtrack, adding to so many songs I can't even hear anymore without thinking of this story and the key scenes that they inspired. Like Nicholas's songs for Adele...
Adele's songs for herself...
(That last one hurts, too. The Grim Reaper is a fucker.)
And then there are Adele's songs for Nicholas.
And yes, I realize that song was used for another vampire love story, but trust me. The lyrics fit my story to a tee.
Like I said... I'm ahead of my time.
Still, Hal wins the prize with not one but four songs that fill in the quiet parts of my story. It's really kind of eerie. Sweetheart that he is, he gave me permission to use one of these songs for the official book trailer:
I actually had to upgrade his casting from Vincent, who I added just for Hal, to Michael. It's a priest, but it's not like he hasn't played the part before.
But thanks to this gorgeous, gorgeous song, Hal is as integral to this project as anything else.
So what can I tell you about Nicholas other than that? Not much. He is a man of many secrets, with the revelations unveiled slowly in the book. It's complicated, like life is complicated. Like love is complicated, and death, and goodbye...
All I can say is that he made it worth it, every bit as much as Dan made love worth it to me. And he is the reason I fearlessly told this story, and am proud to call it my own. His short life became the reason that I decided to go for broke and live the life of my dreams, one I had only dreamed about with him. And since then, I've made that dream come true in ways we never could have imagined when we were living out of our car so many years ago.
So check out MY IMMORTAL. It's free to read through Kindle Unlimited, but it is also available free for everyone on Amazon today only. I can only hope it means as much to you that it does to me.
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