It was for his wedding, most of which I missed because I was being chauffeur for various older people going back and forth to their hotels. God...nearly thirty years ago.
Once he and his (third) wife were gone and everything was done, it was mid-afternoon. So I drove around the city. Not the prettiest of places, but I did see an old church that fascinated me.
The Cathedral Basilica of St. Louis. In white stone and a lovely rose window. With two bell towers and steps up to the entrance, from the street. It was near Forest Park. And for some reason I thought of doing a version of Tristan and Isolde as a tragic vampire tale.
Where she finds a man she wants to join with her as undead but he's too locked into being human. The climax was to take place in the church tower, where he dies protecting her, or something, and she is so destroyed, she walks down the stairs up to the double doors and flings them open to be burned up by the setting sun.
Pretty overwrought. And would have been difficult, logistically, because the doors faced south, not east or west, in direct line with the sun. Didn't matter. I couldn't figure the story out.
Not until Katrina hit New Orleans. I shifted the location to there, and it fell into place as a screenplay. Tristan is a young jazz musician with a horrific past and Gabrielle is in the city making sure her company gets some of the rebuilding money. She connects with Tristan and slowly convinces him to join with her as a Blood Angel. Which he does under one condition: they leave New Orleans forever.
And from that, the whole of this series of novellas has grown.
