Getting the Most Bang for Your Buck

Buy This Time Next Year HERE

By Catherine Peace

I was the kid who read Mary Shelley just for the heck of it. I was the one who researched monsters for nothing better to do. So when I decided to write for 1Night Stand, I went to my comfort zone—vampires. Which is funny because when I was really young, I used to pull the covers up to my chin in fear of vampires, and I’ve always had love for a sword.

But my vampire slaying never came to fruition. Instead, thanks to Anne Rice, I fell in love with them. She presented a different kind of vampire—a more human, more relatable, sexy-as-hell kind. Love her or hate her, you have to admit that she’s done a lot for our favorite nocturnal, fanged hunters.

Since my reading of the Vampire Chronicles (including a very thorough reading of The Vampire Lestat), my fictional world has been filled with these creatures of the night. I loooooooooooove writing vampire stories, I love the society, the world, the rules, the rules I get to break, the interplay between vampires and humans. There’s a huge amount of material to tap.

And tap it I did.

Though This Time Next Year is a short read, I wanted to bring some of those aspects into the story to give it as big a feel as I could. I wanted to provide the biggest bang for your buck, so to speak, by giving as much detail as possible without overwhelming the story or the reader. Thanks to some fantastic editing from Miss Valerie, I got to do just that.

Googling vampire myths, I ran across a couple of things that I knew would translate well into the story’s flow. Rather than go ye olde route of “pain, bloodlust, etc etc etc,” I found the “comatose state” and “possible feral vampire” routes to be much more interesting. In some cultures, when someone is undergoing a vampiric transformation, they enter into a death-like state, which often leads to them being buried…well…pseudo-alive (hence vampires sleeping in coffins).

The feral vampires thing was the bigger one that I loved—LOVED—because it fit so perfectly into the narrative. Moira’s parents were killed by a feral vampire, setting the entire story into motion. This upped the stakes like nothing I could have come up with on my own. How do these fit in? You’ll have to read to find out!