“What happens next?”

That was what my daughter, Caroline, asked me after I finished reading her my (then) new novel, Tigerheart.  A reworking and reinterpretation of Peter Pan, Tigerheart told the story of a young boy named Paul who had a grand adventure.  And Caroline–seven years old at the time–was apparently quite taken by it.  At the end there were allusions to further adventures, and Caroline wanted to know what they were.

“You should do a story about his sister, Mary,” said Caroline without waiting for me to answer the question.

“Okay, well…what would you want to see happen to Mary?” I asked.

And she proceeded to tell me.  She told me all the major story elements she wanted to see.  The mythical country; her conveyance; Purl; Hunter.  All this and more came from Caroline’s boundless imagination, including the core concept:  Mary’s best friend’s imagination runs off and Mary has to go find it for her.

Every night I would read another chapter to Caroline and then get her thoughts for what happened next.  I came up with some of my own notions, but Caroline continued to be a font of ideas.  And over a period of time, Fearless came together.

You don’t have to have read Tigerheart to understand it, although I’d certainly recommend it.  Of all my novels, Tigerheart holds a special place in my heart.  And Fearless is right there with it.

Look for more details about Fearless, coming in print and digital formats later this month.

Sick of vampire books?  Movies?  TV shows?

Yeah.  So are we.

Sick of the entire unlife of vampires?

Yeah.  So is Vince Hammond.

Unfortunately, Vince is in it up to his (wait for it) neck.  Because Vince is a young vampire hunter who lives with his vampire hunter mother in an entire community of vampire hunters, who in turn are part of a cult of vampire hunters going back all the way to the French Revolution, which many believe to be an uprising of the poor against the rich but was actually a massive purging of vampires from the French nobility (hence the guillotine; way more efficient than shoving stakes into their hearts.)

And here’s Vince’s major problem:  he’s a vampire.  But he dare not “come out of the coffin,” as it were, and reveal his true nature, because his mother will literally kill him.  And if she doesn’t manage it, she has lots of friends and neighbors to help make sure that happens.

So instead Vince has to keep his head down and hunt his own kind while making sure not to actually kill them since, for the most part, vampires are law-abiding citizens who drink from eagerly volunteering “Wanna V’s”  hoping for their own shot at the night life.  But when some out-of-town hunters show up with a very personal connection to Vince, his two worlds are going to collide in a way that may wind up forcing Vince to run for the hills…assuming he can get far enough away before Mom hunts him down.

Pulling up Stakes is coming in August but you can try a sample right now.

Fans don’t always realize how much of what they get to read on the marketplace gets out there despite publisher preconceptions.  History is filled with any number of books, ranging from A Wrinkle in Time to Confederacy of Dunces to Harry Potter, that hit the market and left in their wake a host of rejections from various editors because the stories didn’t fit in with what they were looking for.

Pulling up Stakes first made its presence known at various conventions when I first started working on it.  I’d read sample chapters and enthused audiences begged to know when it was going to be done so that they could find out what happened next.

Yet when the book was circulated to editors, the reason for their passing on it were impressive, to say the least.

Stakes tells the skewed tale of Vincent Hammond, a twenty-something vampire stalker, who lives with his domineering mother in a small community of hunters tracing their lineage back to the French Revolution.  Vince, however, has a rather singular problem:  he’s a vampire.  And if his mother finds out, she’ll kill him.  Literally.  So he doesn’t dare come out of the coffin, so to speak and keeping his secret becomes further complicated when…

Well, we’ll get to that at a future date.

Little did I, or the fans who have loved the readings up to that point, know that that Pulling Up Stakes violated too many rules of the genre.  Editors who rejected it, however, didn’t hesitate to explain the problems.

First, if you have a vampire story, you have to have a female protagonist.

Second, men can’t write vampire stories.  That’s solely the arena of women writers.  Bram Stoker, Joss Whedon…you can suck it.

Third, humor doesn’t sell.  So apparently you’ve doomed yourself when your vampiric narrator says things like, “Sparklepires?  Come on.   Real vampires considered the Twilight books to be such a loose flow of unmitigated crap that they were typically referred to as ‘Vampirrhea.’”

So apparently by writing a humorous vampire story with a male protagonist, I managed to hit the trifecta of hopelessness.  No publisher would touch it.

And as you, dear reader, work on prying your slack jaw off the floor, consider how nice it would be to send a message to the publishers that maybe, just maybe, thinking outside the box now and then might be a nice idea, by letting everyone know that Pulling Up Stakes is going to be making its debut here at Crazy 8 Press in just a few weeks.  Because you can’t keep a good undead man down.