Tag: Vampire Legal Thriller

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In Which I Ring in the New Year with… Old Ideas?

In college, my wife introduced me to Leonard Cohen, whom I only knew through the song “Everybody Knows,” featured in the movie “Pump Up the Volume.” He was a heck of a poet and songwriter, somehow able to sound melodious and golden-voiced while at the same time bringing up images of a guy who only took the cigarette from his mouth long enough to insert shots of bourbon.

The last album of his that I bought is just called “Old Ideas.” I could relate. Sometimes a piece, be it a story or a painting or a song, just doesn’t gel 100%. Maybe it got crowded out by other songs that worked better, faster. Maybe it just got rejected by the market you thought it was perfect for.

It gets put on the shelf like an old bill, only to be filed away when there’s nothing else to do and only rediscovered when you move. But when that rediscovery happens, it’s amazing. You’ve forgotten something that once meant a lot to you, and it’s like connecting with a friend you haven’t seen in years. You don’t need to start over totally fresh… you don’t need to pitch yourself to them. You just pick up where you left off.

Here Come the (Anti-) Heroes

That’s what happened when I saw an anthology call for something called Pinup Noir: High Class Muscle. It was going to be 10 stories of gumshoes and enforcers with a moral code they just won’t break. I thought, “I had a story like that once…” and dug through my computer to find it. The catch was, I’d written it college. Even won a little undergraduate writing award for it from Asimov’s Science Fiction. Did I still have it, even after the last (mumble) years?

Oh, yes. Yes, I did.

Fast-forward to today. High Class Muscle has stories from Arizona gumshoes set in the 1940s, but now it’s also got my cyberpunk noir called “This Thing of Darkness.” It’s about Louis Whitworth, a chipped-up enforcer with a heavy martial arts background. He’s steeped in bushido, but the violent life of a samurai wears on him. He has attachments, which as Zen Buddhism tells us, are the cause of pain.

And by the end of the story, there’s a lot of pain.

A bearded bodyguard with a gun takes center stage on the cover of "High Class Muscle."

High Class Muscle just released, so here’s the link to it. By all means, shower it with reviews. Good… bad… they’re the guys with the guns.

Whoops. Meant to say “good review, bad review, doesn’t matter,” when I channeled Ash Williams from Army of Darkness. Ash does get beat up and kiss dames, but I’m holding off on calling him a noir hero.

EDIT: Having gotten my hands on a contributor’s copy, I can now add a shot of the original artwork that precedes the story. Here’s an artist’s interpretation of Louis!

A trenchcoat-clad African-American punk with long claws jutting out of his cybernetic right hand.

But wait, there’s more!

Did I Mention the Free Urban Fantasy Books?

In other news, my November and December were filled with refreshing progress on Civil Blood‘s sequel. I’m about 80% of the way through it now. It’s clocking in at 130,000 words, but I expect to add another 10-20k before edits slim it down to about 130k for a good first draft.

And it so happens Civil Blood will be part of the “Urban Fantasy Free for All” happening January 10th (which as of this writing is tomorrow). The organizers have over 100 urban fantasy authors who’ve agreed to give away their e-books for free for one day only.

Like UF? Find your next read there, and stock up with the next and the next. Like my writing? Download Civil Blood for free. Already got it? Tell some friends: a feeding frenzy would be awesome. You can sort by spice (i.e. from “cozy” all the way to “paranormal romance horny”) or tropes like “antihero,” “enemies to lovers,” or “Touch Them And You Die.” Check out the list of UF stories here at www.urbanfantasyaddict.com.

And as Butch Asks in Pulp Fiction, “What Now?”

I’m head-down in studying (more on that in a future post), and still trying to get more gainfully employed. That led to me updating my LinkedIn with all my publications, which I didn’t have on there before. So I’ve spent the last two days going down Memory Lane and posting links to the games I’ve detailed in my Writing Tour page.

Incidentally, I tried to fix Civil Blood‘s old and ugly product details, with some success. I’m not sure why, but the details (i.e. back cover copy) on the Kindle version have never looked good on a PC, and I suspect they looked ugly on a phone, too. I can only imagine it’s been turning off potential readers for who-knows-how-long.

New Year. New face to put on things.

And when it comes to old ideas, let us keep only the good ones.

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In Which My Novel’s Sequel Starts Actually Happening

Longtime readers may remember my novel Civil Blood, and particularly attentive readers may remember the reasons I hadn’t started working on a sequel yet. Long story short, I promised my family I’d only begin work once I had accumulated a nest egg big enough to pay for a cover and editor(s), assuming costs in the same neighborhood as my previous self-publishing venture. The catch was, this nest egg would solely be financed by my other personal writing, and my path to that was A) novel sales, and B) short story sales. Since I have little in the way of advertising budget and thus a very meagre novel-based income, I ended up relying on “B.”

Well… with a final anthology sale coming out in 2022, approach “B” has finally put the numbers over the top. So now I have a little news: I’m finally working on a sequel to Civil Blood. Here’s what I can say:

  • I am currently in the outlining stage. It will take me a few months before I start the rough draft. I should warn the reader that it takes me years to write a novel.
  • I have tentatively titled it with another blood-related Shakespearian phrase (again, with echoes of the play, but the specific title may give away some of the parallelism in the plot, so I’ll be mum on that for now).
  • The story will deal with an American presidential election in the time of VIHPS. Though I hesitate to use the word “pandemic,” the vampire virus is the top issue on the minds of the electorate. It is not, however, the only issue, and part of the political dealings is that Infinity and Ranath will have to choose whom to support despite the candidates not matching up with their every ideal.
  • The main characters of Civil Blood will be the main characters in this story as well. There will be many familiar faces, and a few names only hinted at in Civil Blood will have some stage time in this one.
  • I might be able to make this story comprehensible if you haven’t read Civil Blood, but I’m not betting on it. As I work on the outline, I realize that trying to sum up why a character is not only a doctor but also a hitman and also has his hands on potentially world-changing research that he didn’t actually do just stretches credulity. I may have to highlight that it’s “The Skia Project, Book 2” and just roll with that.
  • Ideally it will not have a cliffhanger ending, because at this moment I don’t know the chances of making a third installment. Also, I like books to have enough of a satisfying thematic resolution that they can stand on their own. So, less The Empire Strikes Back and more Terminator 2.

To all the fans of CB that have stuck with me this far… thank you. I hope to make you happy once more.

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In Which Underdog Vampires Defeat the Amazon Overlord

Okay, okay, this post isn’t about a  battle between vampires and a mind-controlled Queen Wonder Woman. It’s just a colorful way to announce that my vampire rights novel Civil Blood is now available in non-Amazon stores.

Thanks to the lovely people and hard-working computer code at Draft2Digital, Civil Blood is now available on Barnes & Noble’s Nook, Kobo, and Apple’s iTunes. It will also be purchaseable through Bibliotheca if you want to include it in a library collection.

It’s $2.99 on these e-reader platforms, and I’m lowering the Kindle price down permanently to match it.

The books are available to be delivered September 21st, 2018. They also feature a few typo corrections and formatting changes that I did while reviewing the manuscript. Anyway, on to the links!

Nook Link

Kobo Link

iTunes/Apple iBooks Link

And don’t forget the Kindle Link for those still reading at the behest of the behemoth. (It’s okay, I own one, too.)

Happy reading!

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In Which Parallel Evolution Rears Its Head

One of the things the late, great, and very angry Harlan Ellison was good at was titles. He had stories with names like:

  • “Repent, Harlequin!” Said the Ticktockman
  • The Beast That Shouted Love at the Heart of the World
  • I Have No Mouth and I Must Scream
  • Paladin of the Last Hour
  • and of course, his Star Trek episode City on the Edge of Forever

The titles put a question in the reader’s mind, namely, “What the hell does that mean?” Pretty soon, they’d read to find out what’s going on, just to erase the dissonance in their heads. But there’s another, more practical reason to have unusual titles and unusual subject matter to go with them, and it’s to avoid problems like mine.

Civil Blood is a very thematic title for my vampire rights novel. It comes from the opening lines of Romeo and Juliet, making it a little apropos just because there is a conflict between vampires and vampire hunters, and a little romance across those lines. But it also works in a second dimension, using the exact wording of the source material (quoted to the reader in Chapter 2 of the novel):

Two houses, both alike in dignity/In fair Verona, where we lay our scene/Where ancient grudge break to new mutiny/And civil blood makes civil hands unclean.

So the novel is not simply “Romeo and Juliet with vampires,” it has a theme of violence polluting the political process in the place where the story is set (Washington, D.C.). On top of that, there’s another meaning to the “civil” part, since the class-action lawsuit at the centerpiece of the book is a civil trial rather than a criminal one.

All this hopefully adds up to some unique layers, which is a really good thing, because not only are there a number of books out there with star-crossed vampires, there is now another one called Civil Blood.

Author V. Renae has written a young adult novel for New Traditions Publishing, and here’s the spiffy cover.

It’s coming out October 1st, 2018. The back cover copy is here.  I haven’t read it yet, but I wish the author well. If you ever tried to Google my novel title, you know that both of us will be fighting for space with several other books called Civil Blood.

First, there’s Ann McMillan’s 2001 Civil War mystery about  a smallpox outbreak in Richmond that may be deliberately caused.

And then there’s Civil Bloods, another Civil War-era story by Steve Nelson. Two brothers fighting for the South in the Civil War are captured and make their way to Wisconsin, in what sounds kind of like a Western.

But surely I’m safe if I tell everybody I have the world’s only vampire legal thriller, right?

I thought so, too, for all the years I worked on it. And then, this summer, just as I was polishing an ad that might use that phrase, I Googled it just to make sure. That led me to this article: “It’s Time to Look at the Vampire Novel as Legal Thriller.”

This is about when my heart stopped. Hearing that another author, who is an actual lawyer, was publishing a book about vampire Supreme Court cases and had the backing of a mainstream publishing house was so specific that it made me wonder if there was plagiarism going on. Of course, there wasn’t. I ordered the book straight away, and found it and Civil Blood were completely unrelated.

The book, A People’s History of the Vampire Uprising, is a lot more closely related to World War Z than Civil Blood. I wouldn’t call it a legal thriller at all, honestly. Most of the action takes place from the points of view of an FBI agent, a CDC doctor, and a Catholic priest. It winds up more Dan Brown than John Grisham.

The legal and supernatural differences of the vampires are significant, but what matters most is that the novels evoke different feels. A People’s History devotes two to three chapters to the Supreme Court decision, mostly from a law school perspective reviewing the documents years after the fact.

Now, while I really admired the world-building in A People’s History, I’m of course partial to my own approach. I put protagonists on the stand, with their fate resting on the verdict. I wrote the chants of the mobs on the National Mall. And, of course, since I can’t write a court document like a legal scholar, I just grabbed the most stirring parts of Law & Order as an inspiration and wrote a transcript of the closing arguments of each side.

There’s a lesson here, I think, that I have heard from authors before. When they say write the book only you could write, it’s for times like these. A People’s History has scenes set in Washington, D.C., but its action keeps coming back to the American Southwest and the Vatican, where the author knows his stuff. Similarly, had I written a YA Civil Blood instead of the R-rated gritty material I love so much, I’d be fighting with V. Renae rather than smiling and giving her book the shout-outs it needs. Because as Juliet might say, a name really isn’t as important as the love you put behind it.

Okay, she says that in iambic pentameter, but that’s the gist.

V. Renae’s Facebook page is here and Tumblr here. Her Civil Blood comes out October 1st, 2018.

Raymond A. Villareal’s A People’s History of the Vampire Uprising is on Amazon here. It’s available now.

And if you’re searching for my Civil Blood, use its subtitle, Civil Blood: The Vampire Rights Case that Changed a Nation. It’ll get you to the pages that matter much faster than just “Civil Blood,” which will take you to pages of Shakespearean analysis.

 

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In Which I Promo “Salem’s Lot Meets Law & Order”

The life of an author post-launch is a world of promotion. The life of a self-published author post-launch is a world of degrading promotion.

My consolation at the moment is that every author I’ve ever read says something along the lines of “I didn’t expect reviews as good as I got, or sales as poor as I got.” I’m right there with you. This week, I’m throwing around a few bucks for Facebook ads, experimenting with what works and what doesn’t.

I find Kindle sales vastly easier than lowering the price on my Amazon paperback, due to Amazon’s strange rules. So for all this week (8/20-8/26) Civil Blood is available on Kindle for $2.99. Yep. I spent years on this thing, and it’s available for the price of a soda at a restaurant.

Would you like Civil Blood? Here’s my short pitch in quiz form:

You’ve just been infected with a vampire virus. Your first question is:
A) “Can I get laid and high on blood whenever I want?”
B) “What idiot is criminally liable for letting loose a biohazard?”
C) “Am I still legally human, or is some suit in Washington going to pass a law?”
D) “Who’s the richest motherf***er I can sue over this?”
E) “I never really thought about it, but I should ask all of these questions in rapid succession.”

If you answered A, B, C or D, you might like Civil Blood. If you answered E, you’d definitely like Civil Blood. 

That’s it. That’s my promo for now, as I try to scare up some Amazon, Goodreads, and Booklikes reviewers. I’m lacking in that department — my friends help retweet and do Facebook posts, but reviews are as rare as Sam Kinison pantomime routines. I actually went so far as to post a review of my own book where it was allowed.

Do I feel shame in giving myself a five-star review? Yes. I wish I didn’t have to, and I delayed about a month before I did it. My reasoning is this:

1) I didn’t try to hide it. I straight-up said I don’t think the book is flawless, but I want to advocate for its strengths.

2) As Louis Armstrong once said, “you got to toot your own horn, because nobody else is gonna toot it for you.”

3) Nobody says a politician can’t vote for themselves. They’re citizens, too.

4) If I’m getting so few reviews that one 5-star review is going to blow the curve, that book needs all the help it can get.

That’s all. Now back to your regularly scheduled urban fantasies with their teenage angst and Byronic heroes and small-town witch heroines solving mysteries. I like those books, too… I just didn’t write one.

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In Which “Salem’s Lot” Meets “Law and Order”

[Want the “too long, didn’t read” version? My novel’s now available here.]

Once upon a time at a university, I took a class called “Making Monsters.” It was about teratology, the study of monsters and the history of medical aberrations. We read about hoaxes where women supposedly gave birth to rabbits, documents about feral children like the Wild Boy of Aveyron, and read the diary of Hercule Barbin, a French hermaphrodite.

The class’s focus was on medical cases, but I managed to persuade my professor that I could do a term paper on the myth of the vampire. After all, I nerdily pointed out, the word “monster” is from the same Latin root as “demonstrate,” monstrare or “to show.” And in my paper, I was going to show off the societal uses of whipping up fear and exorcising it to reassure the citizens that monsters will be slain.

Fun fact, vampires as a myth evolve with what the audience has historically feared. Originally, they were ruddy-faced, bloated corpses like a peasant might find in a coffin that was being exhumed. Along the way, they gained powers and limitations here and there until we ended up with the pale, misunderstood superheroes we have today. In the 1990s, vampirism was being written about like it was a disease, and the AIDS crisis was never far from any reader’s mind when reading about a sexy lover who you want so badly, but oh, they might just kill you.

That’s when I got the idea for a novel. Because my experience was just slightly different than the fiction I was reading and the games I was playing.

This is because while I was taking that course, my wife was in another one on constitutional law. And it detailed a case of a woman who was clinically diagnosed with sex addiction. She had been involuntarily confined in a mental ward for treatment. The doctors wanted to hold her there indefinitely. She was suing for her release.

Why hold her over that? Well, she was HIV-positive. There was no doubt in the doctors’ minds that if they let her out, she’d infect people, probably without telling them of her condition. That qualified as a “danger to herself and others,” enabling them to keep her imprisoned as long as they wanted.

So my wife and I debated this scenario. Was it violating this woman’s civil rights to keep her locked up? Or should she be, for public safety? Is her addiction voluntary enough that she can be trusted to manage it?

Naturally, in the United States, we have a presumption of innocence until a person is proven guilty, but once they’ve infected once, and *are* guilty, where do you draw the line when trying to reform them? Do we make laws and policies expecting the worst of people, or the best?

I think you’re guessing where I’m going with this. Because those questions never really left my mind. Whenever I was frustrated at my day job, I went home and scratched away at the keyboard, working on a novel. It’s a story about vampires and what we fear in the modern day, and the dominant fear I see is of becoming a permanent political underclass.

And now, after many years, that novel, Civil Blood, is finished and available for you to read.

It’s a cross between a legal thriller and an urban fantasy, a little bit Salem’s Lot, a little bit Law and Order and a little Shadowrun. It’s set in Washington, D.C., where you can’t do anything without a doctor or a lawyer present, vampire hunting included.

The back cover copy and first two chapters are on the Civil Blood page here.  You can pre-order the Kindle version now — it will be delivered on the official book birthday of June 21. I intend to hype the book regularly until then and have a little launch event on Twitter the day it arrives. However, due to a quirk of Amazon’s Createspace publishing, you can order the print version right now (no pre-order, just plain order) and get it as soon as it can be shipped.

I’ve been fleshing out the book’s universe on this site, visible on the “propaganda” page. Reading the page isn’t necessary to read the book, but if you’re going to make a world, you should really show it off a little bit.

It’s what the word “monster” is all about.

Showtime.

A Writing Tour






This is is where I show off promotional materials, excerpts from books, links to published or produced works, and so forth. My LinkedIn page covers my specific responsibilities for the collaborative projects.

(Writing samples are at the bottom — just scroll down.)

I have also spoken at the Game Developers’ Conference on the topic of writer research skills. If you’re an attendee, you can find my 2016 lecture “What Wikipedia Doesn’t Know Can Hurt You,” in the GDC Vault.

Video Games

Pirates of the Caribbean

Relics of Gods

The Mass Effect Trilogy

Star Wars: The Old Republic

FableLabs Projects

My Loft

Wayfinder

Novels

Civil Blood: The Vampire Rights Case that Changed a Nation

Short Fiction

“The 10:40 Appointment at the NYC Department of Superhero Registration”

“The Torturer of Camelot”

“High Water Mark”

“This Thing of Darkness”

Television

The Agency

Tabletop Role-Playing Games

Legend of the Five Rings

Shadowrun

Earthdawn

Paranoia

“The Shot Glass of Nostalgia” — Tabletop Stories to Help Your Games

Comics

Mythkillers

M.I.T.H.

Writing Samples

These are resume fodder: YouTube videos of my video game work, and interactive fiction in small, digestible chunks.

A Twine Writing Sample:

“A Hell of Heaven” — A Cyberpunk-Genre Twine Mission (15 minute read)

A choose-your-own-adventure in interactive prose. “A Hell of Heaven” is in the vein of Cyberpunk, Shadowrun, or similar games that occur twenty minutes into the future. If technology allows our brain to be edited by others, what makes our decisions ours?

Videos:

A Question of Motivation Part 1 (MMO Quest Giving)

A short and sweet side-quest as it originally appeared in Star Wars: The Old Republic. Takes about 5 minutes to watch, which is why I put it first.

“Shoot the mouthy one” is a very Sith answer, but it does not avail the player here.

A Question of Motivation Part 2

The gameplay of the rest of the adventure, including the twist at 10:34 and decision/quest turn-in at 18:31. Total dialogue time about 5 more minutes.

Stomping giant insect-like Colicoids? You’re gonna need a bigger boot.

Companion Character: EDI Makes a Joke ~35 seconds

The Enhanced Defense Intelligence says this early on in her ME3 dialogues, so a lot of fans are familiar with this joke.

Hey, EDI, you do remember how Shepard died in ME2, right? Juuuuust checking.

Companion Character: EDI and Liara ~ 30 seconds
This ME3 scene plays if you never completed one particular ME2 DLC.

What is there to say but “Oops?”

Companion Character: EDI Compilation ~ 13 min

EDI goes through a lot: her installation in a human-like body prompts many questions about mortality and human behavior. It ultimately leads her to decide that destroying the Reapers is worth her own death. Here’s a supercut of many of her conversations.

“But it was something good.”

Priority: Citadel from Mass Effect 3 (Action Sample, RPG Video Game) ~ 30 min

Kai Leng’s first appearance, a showdown with the Virmire Survivor, and finally a use for those Citadel elevators. (Mayhem. Mayhem is the use.)

The variant lines possible in the Virmire Survivor face-off are quite complex under the hood.

Citadel DLC — Thane’s Memorial Service (Dialogue Sample, RPG Video Game) ~30 min

Didn’t feel like you got a proper goodbye to Thane in Mass Effect 3? DLC to the rescue!

A rare chance to revisit what I thought was a shortcoming in the main game.

Citadel DLC — Silver Coast Casino Infiltration ~ 30 min

A casino heist? In a game without stealth? We made it work! Here’s two versions.

This one is a walkthrough, so it has commentary. It includes the mission briefing.

I leveraged BioWare’s strength — dialogue — into our brief foray into stealth gameplay.

This one has no commentary, but does not have the mission briefing.

“Right, right… what did I say?”

(And just for fun, the Silver Coast Casino mission’s red carpet entrances — all 27 dialogue variations!)

“Needs a little something… now it’s perfect.”

Wayfinder‘s Traditions of Eventide (Seasonal MMO Content) ~ 15-47 min.

In a break from doom and gloom, I wrote gaming’s equivalent of the Hallmark Christmas Special, in which Lord Halar tries to assist his scientist granddaughter Avala during the winter holiday. The emotional beats at the end are all the more poignant if you know Avala is an Echo… in other words, like the player, she died and has returned to live an uncertain existence. The first mission is 15 minutes, but if you want the full 47-minute tour, I had my hands on every bit of dialogue in the patch.

“That’s not what ‘objectively’ means…”

Text and Worldbuilding:

Mass Effect Codex, Galaxy Map, Weapon and Item Entries

I headed up a lot of unglamorous-but-essential lore-building text on the Mass Effect Trilogy. (I helped a little bit on ME1, and took over for ME2 and ME3.)

First-Person Shooter Sample:

“Voice in the Ear” (Modern Military Shooter Level)

To demonstrate my skills with short, urgent dialogue (more so than the BioWare or Wayfinder samples) and to throw in a little level design, I added this documentation, adapted from a timed writing test. All names have been changed to protect the guilty.

Romance Genre Samples:

The Double (Contemporary Romance Fiction)

Pinning Him Down (Contemporary Romance Interactive Fiction in Twine)

I briefly wrote for I Got Games/AVGLife’s interactive romance novels, and would welcome the chance to revisit the romance genre. Twine makes it easier to simulate the flow of an interactive piece without starting my own studio.

Interactive Quizzes:

“What Do I Know About Video Games?” (A Twine Quiz)

And to end our tour, a little Web content, because I’ve done that, too!

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