War of Nytefall Cover Art by Alison Hunt

As long as everything goes smoothly, I gearing up for my first release of 2019 and it’s going to be War of Nytefall: Rivalry.  It’s been awhile, so I might be a bit rusty at this hyping thing, but here we go.

First, I’m always looking for people to help promote the book when it goes live.  Feel free to send an email or comment if you want to help.  I have my basic promo that I put up here and can do some guest posts.  Due to time issues, I don’t think I can do a back-and-forth without only working on it during the weekends.  I’d much prefer being given a topic or discussing one then writing up a quick one.  Again, I always have the basic ‘Book is Live’ post that can work in a pinch.  Let’s get to the origin.

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This one had a stranger origin than many of the others.  Keep in mind that Clyde and the other Dawn Fangs began as Earth-based characters.  When I began using sunlight immune vampires in Windemere, I decided that I should just switch him over.  This helped clear up a lot of issues I had with his series, which ranged from tone to not being excited about the real world setting.  All of the stories got changed such as Lost being around from the beginning and a few characters being dropped due to not having enough meat to make it in Windemere.  War of Nytefall: Rivalry stemmed more from this change than any of the others, which is weird considering Lost got a major overhaul.  So, what makes this one stand out?

Originally, the Vampire Queen character was a good guy that joins Clyde’s gang and becomes his equal.  I’ll go more into this when I do her origin story in April, but she was going to be a more constant and major player.  This might have been the thing that irked me because I did it primarily to have her be a catalyst for Clyde being shunted to Windemere at the end of his original series.  It was a terrible reason to exist and it blocked Mab from evolving beyond the former lover/current partner.  There was always this sexual tension between Clyde and Mab, but the Vampire Queen’s existence stood in contrast to this plot point.  So, I made her a villain.

This is where things got really screwy with several outline attempts.  First, I kept having her go head-to-head with Clyde and act as his new arch-enemy.  This never worked, so I put her on the shelf and worked on the other volumes.  Upon going back, I considered that her real rival would be Mab.  As much as I wanted to draw out the ‘will they or won’t they’ thing with Mab and Clyde, it was clear from the first outline that I couldn’t hold that in reserve for very long.  The Vampire Queen would be the perfect catalyst for these two to either evolve or permanently cut off their relationship.  Not going to say what’s going to happen since there are so many options.  If you thought Nyx was resistant towards a relationship then Mab makes her look like Sari.  Once I focused more on Mab, the story really began to open up.

War of Nytefall: Rivalry has a lot of growth for various characters, but it was hard to balance the multiple locations.  I can’t go into too many details, but I had to balance 3-4 areas at once because of the divided forces.  There’s also a fairly straightforwardness to this story that made things over fairly quickly for me.  The Vampire Queen is a threat to Mab’s life and future, so she has to do something even though this is a character on Clyde’s power level.  It really helped me push Mab back up to the heroine level that she had in War of Nytefall: Loyalty.  This book is also where I began to wonder if this series would be more about her than Clyde.  If not one of them then both of them because a lot of attention falls on their relationship.

I will admit that once I settled the series into what it is now, this was the only outline that remained relatively untouched.  No new characters or twists were added to the original concept.  Focusing for so many years on the Vampire Queen and where she will go helped lock in everything around her.  She is ambitious, dangerous, conniving, and incredibly vain with an army of devoted followers.  That’s oddly simplistic compared to some of the other villains, especially since Xavier and Nadia haven’t always come off as fully evil to me.  This book might not help there since the Vampire Queen is going to be a threat to Nyte and Nytefall.  All I can really say now is that it’s going to be a fun adventure.