Galley Ho!

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 5^th. 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 5^th. Stay tuned to this space for more links where you can purchase this long awaited opus.