My publisher told me today that the galley for my upcoming book
Blood of her Fathers is
ready. In case you don't know what this publishing term means, or
you think that it's the nautical term for a ship's kitchen, a
proof, originally one set from type in a galley, taken before thematerial has been made up into pages and usually printed as a singlecolumn of type with wide margins for marking corrections.
Www.dictionary/reference.com.
In other words, it is the final coppy of the book before the final
published version.
This, to me, was a sign that I'd
better publish a blog to my Blogger account, My Life in
Publishing as soon as possible.
The novel, in 27 chapters, is due for release on March 5th.
I first got the idea for the novel in 2007 after the publication of
my story about werewolves during the Yuletide season in a small
Minnesota town. I researched for this book quite thoroughly. I
bought 2 rather encyclopedic books about vampires, and saw not only
Bela Lugosi's portrayal of Dracula, but also the Hammer films of the
50s into the 70s that expounded on the Dracula myth, and carried it
further. I decided to use the classical literature to provide me
with plot devices in my story. My vampire would not be related to
Vlad Tepesh Dracula, but would be from the same region as he, born 2
centuries after Dracula. My vampire hunter, however, would be a
scion of the famous Van Helsing family, and I even went so far as to
trace out a family tree for her, although it would not be included in
the book.
The points-of-view I used turned
out to be a daunting task. I used three points of view: My vampire
hunter, Jamie Van Helsing, who is dragged into the family business
after her best friends are killed and turned, leaving their two young
children in her care; thevampire Armand Ragoczy, an alchemist and
merchant from old Romania; and Denton Charles, a police detective
with a dangerous secret. I think that's why I left it for so long.
But now it's done, and I'm ready to release it out into the wide
world. Well, the Internet, which is my world, these days.
Since I first got published so
late in life, I decided never to become blasé about the experience,
no matter how many I may get published in the future. So I am very
excited about this one at last getting to see the light of day. I
know that, unlike my vampire character in the book, it will not burn.
It will be available from Crimson Frost Books on March 5th.
Stay tuned to this space for more links where you can purchase this
long awaited opus.
