I've often said I write so I don't become the beast, and this helps clarifiy and support my reason why...
I was impacted by it way too much. I need to sit with it, for a while.
But at the moment, I'm glad I'm alone and to myself, considering where my brain has been going this year...
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.
We are now what we always will be, until we end. While there is nothing but change around us.
Rather Existentialistic, I think. But a true observation of the state of vampires, be they Blood Angels or not. Eight-hundred years after Léon was turned, he looks the same. As do Gregory, Stephane, Loronce, Reyndahl, Tellis and Doric, in his pack...all of whom are hundreds of years older.
Same for the Oiym, who are the oldest ones. They remained as they are while around them buildings crumbled, civilizations collapsed, and generations of human beings passed them by.
This is different from Anne Rice's Interview With the Vampire, which was more about Louis' search for himself and how to deal with the suffering he caused.
In the section I just rewrote, it hits Léon that he actually has changed in his outlook. He's more open to causing pain and terror. He still has his moral code of going after only those who deserve to die, but now he's considering committing torture to the mix, to bring out the horror of his victims' end.
I may play with him being able to do that because he's a Blood Angel and not merely a vampire. Not sure yet....but it could add some tension to his pack. He can change but they cannot?
I dunno...just me having thoughts...
They're both under my name, and if you Google me (full name; there's an actor named just Kyle Sullivan who's half my age) what comes up quickest is lists of the titles of my books. Beginning with How to Rape a Straight Guy and Rape in Holding Cell 6 and such. So I'm not hiding them.
I just write what I write. Most of it's gay-oriented but not all. The Alice '65 and A Place of Safety have little MM stuff in them as opposed to The Vanishing of Owen Taylor, which has a gay man investigating the disappearance of his gay uncle in Palm Springs.
Once my books are done and published, I usually like what I've done with them. I can see mistakes I made and try to improve on the next book, but overall I'm not disappointed in how they turned out. And my vague attempt to keep them timely usually works quite well.
The Vanishing of Owen Taylor was written 10 years ago but still reads right for current day, with the anti-gay push of the MAGAt Cult and duplicity of politics and religion. I'm going to start pushing it more on FB and Instagram. Pull back on the politics...because when it comes to that I feel like I'm screaming into the void.
And after a while you have to accept that all you're doing is giving yourself a sore throat and headache...while VoT lays out the points you're making very clearly and neatly in a simple murder mystery.
I read a story on Instagram about a philosopher in Ancient China who was so impressed with his intelligence and awareness, he wrote a long, pretentious poem about how enlightened he was. How he was rooted in honesty and reality, and that not even the eight winds can move me.
He sent a copy to a friend, across a lake. And the friend responded with a single word. Fart (in Chinese, of course). Elegant Cantonese, I'm sure, with finely etched images to accompany the words.
Well, that infuriated the philosopher, so he got himself a boat and traveled across that lake to chew his friend out. But when he arrived, his friend just laughed and said, "The eight winds cannot move you, but one fart sent you across a lake."
I'm both of those guys. Pompous and bit full of myself over my writing, characters and stories. But also willing to stick a pin in my hot air balloon before I float off into the stratosphere. With mood swings as extreme as someone deep into schizophrenia.
I know I wonder if I'm cowardly about my writing, at times, but I continue to do it and publish it under my name. No hiding.
That should count for something in my view of myself.
I should write a song about myself. Something like:
Or some such shit. I dunno. I'm a total nutcase, right now. This kind of crap probably means something only to me. But I'm finding ways to keep going forward, at least. Haven't retreated into my library of DVDs, yet.
Maybe Dmitriy and one or two of the Oiym join him. Have a little kaffeeklatsch around the window. All cloaking themselves from Gabrielle's awareness.
Or...maybe they think they are hidden but she's stronger than that and knows and is enjoying showing off her seductive abilities. And Franz's prowess.
Hits the kink register, it does. And since Léon is the one telling the story, we get his irritation and jealousy and sadness at seeing what Franz has to offer that is not available to him...except through force. Something he's perfectly willing and able to do.
Maybe he decides to join them and makes Franz the meat in their sandwich, giving witness to Gabrielle turning him into another Blood Angel.
Anne Rice, eat your heart out...
I returned to Blood Angel-4 A Long Journey and rewrote Léon's rape and murder of a young American marine in 1871. Made it as horrifying as I could. Painful. Deserving, because that marine had participated in the rape and murder of a peasant Korean girl and her father. And I let it be as satisfying as possible to Léon.
I also think I made the guy's death difficult for anyone who has any form of empathy. And added a level of horror to it in that Léon made sure another marine who was involved in the girl's death is watching him do it...knowing he will be next.
Just not right away.
I won't say it was easy to do, but now that I have it worked out I can make it read better and add more depth to it to make it as conflicting as possible. That's me loving what Hitchcock would do by making the audience sympathize with the villain. Identify with the villain.
That's not to say Léon is a villain in this book. He's the lead character and he has his moral code, but that makes him judge and jury to whoever it is he chooses to feed upon. And there are plenty of people out there who would fit well into his requirements for his sustenance.
All of this has been true since the dawn of civilization. Men and women crushing others for their own gain. Wars used to wipe out towns and genocide committed over and over and over. The vampire community is not the evil in the world; they merely feed upon it. Use it to survive.
Maybe that's what BA is all about -- monsters are the way of the world, not angels.
I read a post on facebook by a fellow writer and she discussed how her own traumas led her to write books that were dark as night. And how hard that was to reconcile in herself.
Which apparently pissed off part of me and some hard questions were asked of myself by myself. Which I know sounds crazy and may well be, but that's what happened.
Blood Angel is about a gay vampire making his way through existence. He's a nice guy. His unlife is good. He's a royal prince and his pack is a group of courtiers who, while not of the same level as he, are fun to be around. Still he never feels completely part of them. He thought he found someone to share his world...but realized he was fooling himself.
So now he's pissed and hurt and angry at his own stupidity and...and he's a fucking vampire! Why am I trying to make him act like a teenaged boy?! He drinks human blood! Kills people while doing it! And I'm all touchy-feely about how awful that is, even though I make sure to note he only goes after bad people? And then I whimper and whine and wonder do I really want to continue writing such a mean story?
Well...first questions to hit me from within were, Why did you choose to write it in the first place? Why start something you don't want to finish?
And that's what the argument was about. You chose a vampire as the main character of your story, Kyle. And you minimized what he was as much as you could. Why? If you're going to be such a coward about being honest to the story and character, why start it? Are you a writer who faces the truth of your characters? Or are you a wimp? And if the latter, why should any character trust you to deal honestly with them if things become too difficult for you?
And my response? I'm afraid to touch the darkness in me. Which is answered by, Vampires are vampires. Deal with it or hide in your shadows and take up macrame, for crying out loud.
No. I can't. I won't. I'm not that weak...and macrame's boring.
If I had the money, I'd go to England...to parts I've never visited. Even Scotland and Wales.. I'd wander. I like to wander, sometimes. It gives me an odd sense of stability. I've already been all over Ireland and now feel satiated with her.
It seems that I'm at a crossroads and don't really know where the paths before me lead. Which one I want to follow. I'm heavily invested in MM horror, like with Blood Angel...but there is a gentleness I've found, occasionally, in my writing that I want to explore more.
I know those who claim to understand writing say that conflict is drama and drama is storytelling, but that bores me. I hate made-up conflict. That's one reason I let A Place of Safety follow brendan's path. He leads the reader through his story with as much quiet emotion as there can be. And I know some people just don't get it, that they think more has to be happening, but it's his story not theirs.
I don't have the feeling Léonidès cares if I tell his tale or not. And truth is, I'm weary of the violence and death it involves.
I'm beginning to think maybe Dair's Window is restructuring itself to remove the fake parts of the narrative I'd started to build and take us on a different journey to reveal the story of Dair and Adam.
Maybe...
Hopefully...
He posted this clip on his Facebook and Instagram pages that cut into me. It's not just how lovely he is, but how joyously alive he is in it. And how callous and cold I feel I'm being in writing that scene, even though it's to be expected in a vampire story.
It just strikes me as wrong. As a waste of what I can do. Doesn't hurt that my emotions, right now, are exacerbated by the death and destruction being wrought by Russia, the US and ZAS (formerly Israel).
So I basically recoiled from writing a fictional death. I have, before. When Bobby decided to kill himself in Bobby Carapisi, I fought against that for months before giving in. And it hurt as I wrote it. I felt like I'd lost someone I actually knew.
In other books, I've skirted the issue in cute or careful ways. Even in A Place of Safety's volumes, I avoided having to deal with it. Initially, Brendan was going to execute Father Jack as a traitor at the end of Home Not Home...and he didn't want to. And I went along with it because to me the ending the book now has is much, much better in its quiet tenderness.
So I guess I'll have to step back from Blood Angel, for a while, and see how it settles. I don't know what else to do.
I just can't face it, right now.
