ABVH 01 - Guilty Pleasures
Page 30
Then I wrote a sequel to the book and the editor didn’t want it. The first book hadn’t sold well enough, and we’d had a little disagreement about my treatment. I was new and didn’t realize that brand new writers are treated like light bulbs; when one burns out, you can always buy more, screw the next one in, and it lights up just as bright. No, I am not being too harsh about how publishing treats new writers. If anything I’m toning it down. Sorry, for all you aspiring authors out there, but truth is truth, it is a hard business. Shine up the armor around your ego, harden your heart, keep your head down, and write.
I had one novel out, the sequel rejected, my third novel rejected even by my then agent, and no other prospects. (That rejected book was actually a two-hundred-page plot synopsis for what later turned out to be The Lunatic Cafe, book number four of Anita. Different characters but the plot was pretty much cannibalized.) So I looked through my short stories, unpublished, and found a piece about Anita Blake, though I think at that time her last name might have been Black. I’d have to go through my old files to find out for sure. (You do not want me to go into the catacombs and search, because I’d never get this piece finished!) I started a novel, because frankly I didn’t know what else to do.
I was so scared of failing again, of watching my life-long dream of being a writer go up in smoke, that I took the first seventy or so pages to a local Science Fiction convention, Archon. Melinda Snodgrass, who at that time was writing scripts for Star Trek, The Next Generation, was scheduled to do a reading, but for some reason couldn’t do it. So they gave me her room. I was an almost complete unknown, yet the room filled up, standing room only. It would take me a few months to realize that most of them thought I was Melinda Snodgrass, because they didn’t know what she looked like either. A packed room, and I had the first draft of an incomplete book, but I had to know, had to know if it worked, or if I was just wasting my time.
I started reading, and no one left. That crowd of people who had come to hear someone else entirely, read something else entirely different, stayed. Some of them stood for an hour, while I read. People would open the door from the hall, listen for a moment, and come inside to hear more. At the end of that hour I stopped reading because I’d run out of pages. No one clapped. My heart sank into my shoes. Then into that breathless silence came applause, shouts, laughter, cries of joy, and when will it be published, can we hear more? They couldn’t hear more because I’d read them all I had. I had no idea when it would be published because again, I hadn’t finished it. But in that moment, I knew I had something, something special, something that other people, besides just me, cared about, and wanted more of.
I finished the book, sent it off to my agent. She loved it. Then it took two more years for it to sell, because everyone liked it, but no one knew exactly what to do with it. The mystery editors thought it was horror, the horror editors thought it was science fiction or fantasy, the fantasy editors thought it was horror or science fiction, or mystery, well, you get the idea.
The book was rejected because the market would not bear one single more vampire book. The old monsters were dead, one editor told me. Since the Anita Blake, Vampire Hunter series is making the New York Times list on a fairly regular basis, that rejection amuses me now. It was not amusing at the time. Horror editors said the book wasn’t scary enough because my vamps are out of the closet, or coffin, as it were, and not a secret in Anita’s world. Mystery editors couldn’t swallow the monsters, no matter how strong the mystery.
We finally found a home at Ace, an imprint of Penguin Putnam, thanks to Ginjer Buchanan, a far-seeing editor, who has a real eye for new talent. I say that not just because she rescued Anita from the slush pile, but because she’s made a habit in her career of spotting first-time authors with potential. Credit where credit is due.
It was a three-book contract, so I knew that there would be more Anita Blake adventures. I had a contract and money in hand. Yeaha!
I don’t know if Anita Blake, the main character of Guilty Pleasures, and currently ten other books, is me before therapy, or after therapy, if therapy included a lot of gun play, and a high body count. It doesn’t really matter because from the moment she stepped on stage, I’ve loved her. I love Anita. I love how tough she talks, and how tough she truly is. I love that writing her has pushed me to research things I knew nothing about before she came along, like guns, police work, the military, forensics, murder, crime in general, and certain areas of sex that were so very new to me. I have asked questions that Barbara Walters wouldn’t have touched with a ten-foot pole, but not having a misspent youth myself I had to find people who were willing to talk about theirs.
I love the ongoing cast of characters that surrounds Anita. I love Willie McCoy with his loud suits, and uglier ties. He proves the rule that being a vampire doesn’t automatically make you sexy, suave, or debonair. I love Sergeant Rudolph (Dolph) Storr, the ultimate good cop, and Zerbrowski with his ribald sense of humor and his messy fashion sense. In this book I love Phillip and his pain. I did not love Jean-Claude in this book. There were tons of sexy romantic vampires out there. I had no intention of contributing to what I saw as a problem. I mean, they are walking corpses, what the hell is so sexy about that? I just didn’t get it. It would take me two more books before I began to understand that I couldn’t kill Jean-Claude off, that losing him would hurt both Anita and me.
In Guilty Pleasures I was still betting good money, loudly, to anyone who asked, that Jean-Claude was not a romantic lead. Damnit.
I saw the series as a mystery series that had vampires, werewolves, and zombies in it. That is how the series is arranged, each book self-contained, the mystery solved, character development from one book to the other, but each book complete in and of itself. I hate coming to the end of someone else’s book, and finding that it doesn’t really end and I’m going to have to wait a year or so to read the rest. I hate that. So I promise, as much as possible, not to do it to anyone else.
Guilty Pleasures is a hard-boiled detective mystery. It is also a dark fantasy, or a horror novel, because it has vampires, zombies, ghouls, werewolves, and a few other shapeshifters, I think. I had a great deal of fun with this first book. I did everything I wanted to do, played with monsters, guns, and had a female protagonist that was as tough as the men, maybe tougher. But I was also careful that she does nothing that she’s not physically capable of. The further out on the edge you ask the reader to follow you, the stronger your reality better be.
Welcome to Anita’s slice of reality. Watch your step, check that the guns are loaded with silver ammo, pick your holy item of choice, and never look a vampire directly in the eyes, even if those eyes are the drowning blue of midnight skies.