17 September 2012 @ 01:53 pm

I had the worst kind of beginning for this new novel, which is no idea at all. I had a character and a backstory, but no forward story. I didn’t want to set it in this world. I’ve been on a kick where I want to set everything in Canada, but for once that doesn’t work. If the bad guys did win and managed to influence the government of Canada…who would ultimately be affected? And how could you argue that this worst-case scenario hasn’t actually happened already? I didn’t want to set it in the science fiction world I already created for Slip. I wanted there to be ghosts and you just can’t have that meshing with a world of no ghosts.

So, it finally came to me that I was going to revisit my vampire world. That turning Alex into a proto-vampire that I’d already created for Kane in the vampire series was exactly what I wanted. I must have done 1500-2000 words of going nowhere at least four times in finding the beginning of the story, which is something I never used to do. I either knew the exact beginning moment by staring at the wall for months or started at the wrong spot and spent as much time building up the beginning as I did writing what was happening.

But I think I have my start, and I like it. Something very bad is behind the wall of Alex’s workplace, and it’s not going to be long before he finds out what that horrible thing is.