Writer-centric ramblings about When Darkness Falls

So really honestly, this isn’t so much about ego and patting myself on the back, but more about being completely amazed at this story, and that I wrote it at all, and that it’s turning out the way it’s turning out.

For one thing, I never, EVER thought I’d write about vampires. I mean… no, not my thing. I did love Sookie Stackhouse’s vampires (though Eric turned out to be a huge disappointment), and I adore Christine Feehan’s Carpathian non-vampires, but most vampire “romances” generally tend to make me cringe. Write them myself? nu-uh. No way. Sorry. Just not anything I ever saw myself interested in.

For another thing… 15th century? Uh, nope. Again, not my thing. Not that I’m not a history buff, because I am, but, like vampires, you can enjoy reading about something, without in the least wanting to write about it yourself, you know? The picture below, an artist’s rendition of a place called Crack de Chevalier, is almost exactly how I envision the lower levels of Al Khair, my walled desert city.

Then, too, even once the idea came to me, the entire story stalled out for 2 *years*, because I coudlnt’ figure out how to have a happy ever after between a human… who is also a Royal Scribe and passionately loyal to the ruler… and a vampire… who is ancient and claims lordship over the lands where the city is built.  Conflict in romance, of course, is good, but it has to be *resolvable* conflict, and I couldn’t see  how to resolve it into HEA without him turning her into a vampire also (CLICHE! CLICHE!) or “taming” him into a not-bad-boy (CLICHE! CLICHE!). Oh… and I hate cliche, btw.

And I also never, EVER thought I’d be writing an “epic” or “sweeping” type story, certainly not one long enough for three books! now a series, with a different hero & heroine, and overlap in characters and story lines, that’s different. But this one just kind of… took on its own life, and it progressed from being a romance, to a romance whose outcome not only affects the entire city, but changes the entire dynamics of the relationship between the desert city dwellers and the vampires who also dwell there. I didn’t plan this, it just happened, sort of. Instead of writing a book… it became telling a story that needed to come into being.

So anyway, here I am, writing away on my sweeping saga, and just absolutely, entirely amazed at how the story is coming along, it’s writing itself, I swear. I just write along, and ideas are right there waiting around each corner, ready to be written. And I didn’t PLAN any of it! I swear I don’t know where half of this came from, and sometimes as I’m reading over a scene, my brain is just going, “I wrote this??? What? Where did this come from?!” It seems just so incredible I could have come up with all this (and I live alone, so I KNOW no one has snuck onto my computer and written it while I was sleeping, which is the only other possible explanation). I know I’m repeating myself here but it’s just… amazing!!! and I am LOVING every minute of it!

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