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Don Massenzio It’s time for the next subject for my 2018 author interview series. Author interviews are posted every Friday throughout the year. I am honored to continue this series with author Billy Ray Chitwood. You can catch up with … Continue reading
I was going to wait until Sunday until a few things came to mind:
This means I only have to finish the edits and I’ll be hitting publish next Friday (April 6th) night. I’d do it earlier, but my son’s Spring Break would make promoting a challenge. Anyway, let’s do the reveal:
Vampire Dwarf
Where to even start with General Kenneth Decker? Well, the first thing is that he acts like a bridge between worlds. He is a trusted soldier of Xavier Tempest who is his maker and an ‘unofficial’ member of Clyde’s gang. This gives him an interesting dynamic where he needs to act two different ways. He has to be more polite and civil around the nobles while he can be freer in speech and opinion with the gang. It makes for an interesting scene when he has to handle Clyde and Xavier at the same time. Because of this Decker, tends to come off as the more serious member of the cast. He’s always on guard with his behavior and finding ways to be authoritative while not starting a fight. Kind of weird for a dwarf, which he wasn’t prior to the books. So, what was he first?
Remember me mentioning the soldier that did a number on the game version of Xavier Tempest’s storyline? This was when he was Alucard Tepes and you really don’t need the details here. Decker was the other character that caused the derailment, which was well within his character for the game. My friend, who had enlisted around the time he made the character, played this guy as a serious, tactician that loved to get involved in fights and cut loose. He tended to look at every player in terms of combat use, which caused issues with my guy because he didn’t use guns and was rather archaic. They got along, but butted heads a bunch. In the end, Decker tended to steal the show because the player has one of those personalities. You always know he’s there, but not in a negative way. It also results in people expecting him to be a lot taller than he actually is.
Because of all that, Decker was turned into a dwarf and ends up being the only vampire character with a magical weapon. While the others use natural and unenchanted weapons, he has an axe that he can charge with various elements. Vampires typically don’t do this because it can be a drain on their blood and feel awkward, but Decker shrugs that off rather easily. While it hasn’t been questioned in the book, the reason is that axe is a backup in case he’s in the sun and loses his powers. This is another aspect of the character in that he, like his game counterpart, is a fan of precautions and plans where he maintains control. At the very least, he ensures that he will not be found weak and vulnerable, which makes him highly dangerous.
The decision to make Decker the ‘child’ of Xavier came by accident while I was writing, but I wanted to have him be more than a simple soldier of Nyte. This helped make him more of a bridge between the two worlds that are working together. Yet, I did have to change some things because the original Decker personality wouldn’t mesh at all with that of Clyde. I removed a lot of his take charge habits and made him more of a wise adviser/trusted friend. He will do what he thinks is right, but he won’t force Clyde to accept his plan or go along if they’re disagreeing. There’s a lot of trust between them to the point where they can let the other get away with a lot. In fact, another character and Decker tend to argue because he isn’t really a thief like the rest of the gang. This is an odd sticking point for some characters because it creates a sense of uncertainty with a character who is all about being sure of himself and the situation.
The best Decker story I have is an odd one because it was more between the player and another one. That other one was my wife who decided to step out of her comfort zone of physical fighters, casters, and superhuman teens. She created a vampire prostitute who gathered information. Decker comes in because the the player and my wife tended to verbally spar with each other. This time it was doubt that she could pull of a seductive character because, as much as I love her, she’s never been that type. This led to her accepting the challenge and going all out on her character description and introduction to Decker. We all got a pretty good laugh about it since she pulled it off and his only reaction was ‘Damn’.
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Okay, the quote isn’t very funny, but you can’t find much that deals with humor being based around immortality. At best, you get jokes and running gags with the characters dying repeatedly in increasingly bizarre ways . . . Wait . . . I know of something:
He’s not technically immortal since it’s a time loop episode, but you can see how humor can be used. Now, this becomes important to me because I tend to add some level of comedy to my stories. Sight gags, puns, and banter always manage to slip into my writing and War of Nytefall is no exception. Yet, it’s not the easiest thing to put human senses of humor on vampires. They’re monsters that live for centuries, which means they can become fairly serious or adopt their own taste of comedy. This could be overthinking though since they’re still individuals. Everyone has loves and hates when it comes to styles of humor.
First, I learned from the early readers that the jokes don’t always carry over. I’ve tried a bit more with the puns and sarcasm, which occasionally fell flat. Especially with the chummy Vengeance Hounds. I’ve tried my best to redo them, but I did realize that there was always a violent undertone. For example, joking around about massive injuries that they had endured in the past. With enough blood and time, they can regrow limbs or even reattach them if they can hold onto them. So, the loss of a limb is almost the equivalent of us seeing a human bonk their head on a low ceiling. It was a weird jump to make in terms of things the characters find funny.
In terms of humor for the reader, I came to the same conclusion along with another subject. The violence aspect came from vampires doing things that resulted in injury by accident with no real care. The best example is something with Mab and Clyde that would kill a human, but they kind of casually rolled their eyes at. Don’t really want to spoil this one, so I shouldn’t use it as an example. Anyway, we kind of chuckle at shows where a character to something stupid and gets smacked upside the head. With the Windemere vampires, that wouldn’t be enough, so it’s more dismemberment or other things that they can shrug off as easily as we would a small headache.
The other subject is how the older they get, the less the vampires understand the new world. Clyde and Gregorio are the main targets of this. For Clyde, he’s been buried for 50 years and the world physically changed on him. So, he doesn’t always understand what’s going on. He counters this by listening to the others and following their lead, which minimizes the comedy. At the very least, it makes room for his arrogant snark and violent dispatches. Gregorio is simply ancient and has isolated himself, so his manners are also at a loss. You know how senior citizens sometimes lose their tact when speaking their mind and are brutally honest? Imagine a person who has been around for a few centuries and start doing this. I might have toned it down a bit, but I might up it in future volumes.
Only piece of advise I can really put here is to make sure the humor fits the mood of the overall story. Going full wacky in a serious, action adventure will make it more cartoonish and you can’t really come back from that. Dark humor and sarcasm can work without risking the more serious tone. So, you really need to find that balance and brace yourself for the possibility of jokes falling flat. An immortal character does give you some flexibility, but the core of timing and delivery are still there.
Once upon a time, I wrote this book called The Enhanced League. It’s my take on a baseball league where performance enhancing drugs are not banned. It’s a little bit science fiction, and a bit human drama.
I wrote it as a collection of short stories and micros. My personal growth plan was to have these stories all set in the same environment, and to tell an overarching story from cover to cover.
It seems like I’m always trying something new, and this book has a few pieces that I called Anthems. These are short bits in second person point of view. They were well received by the reviewers, so I wrote a new one for this post. (Personal theory: second person is best in small segments.)
I thought it deserved a bit of music, and video clips seem to be the simple way to add that in WordPress…
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War of Nytefall: Loyalty sketch by Alison Hunt
Since weekends tend to be slow, I’m going to make another quick post. It’s only a matter of weeks before I release War of Nytefall: Loyalty. Great chance it’ll be the weekend of April 7th, so I’ll be sending out guest posts the following week. I have a few volunteers, but I’m having trouble coming up with topics since I used so much for my own blog. So, I’ve come up with the two options:
I have no problem with either and am hoping this new series starts off with a bang that equals Legends of Windemere. Hard to follow that act. Anyway, let me know if you’re interested. Thanks.
You may remember the Rave Reviews Book Club, a club devoted to promoting, reviewing and generally supporting authors, from some of my previous posts. Today, I’m hosting the first ever ALL ABOUT THE SPONSORS BLOG HOP.
These kind members of the RAVE REVIEWS BOOK CLUB (RRBC) donated their support during the 2017 conference, in the way of a gift card and Kindle e-book donations for RRBC’s Gift Basket Raffle. They supported the Club and now we are showing our support of them by pushing their book.
We ask that you pick up a copy of the title listed and, after reading it, leave a review. There are several books on tour today, so please visit the HOP’S main page to follow along. For every comment that you leave along this tour, including on the HOP’S main page, your name will be entered into…
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Name? Wolfgang Feuerleiben – At least that is the name I am currently using.
Which book/world do you live in? So Many Nights, So Many Sins – part of the Nightly Bites II anthology
Tell us about yourself: I am a vampire, a ‘companion-in-darkness’ as some of my more idiotic acquaintances call us. I am a monster, a killer, a blood-drinker. I have lived for centuries – how many I am not quite sure. After a while the nights all seem much the same, history repeats itself and ennui becomes a constant companion. A human woman told me I am depressed, bored, cynical. All those things are true, but wouldn’t you be after so long?
How do you see your world? My world is long, dark and full of blood and death. Mortals die, often. Vampires die – often at my hand. I am not an avenging angel, far from…
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Gilgamesh
I’ve talked about immortals on my blog a lot due to Dariana and the challenges that came from her immortality. The same problems came about in War of Nytefall, but the solutions were a little easier to find. Then again, it also brought about some new wrinkles too. While Dariana was a sole immortal, aside from the Baron and Stephen, the entire cast of the new series are vampires. That means I’m dealing with heroes and villains that are really hard to kill and injure.
That isn’t to say have an immortal cast is a bad thing if you do it correctly. If they can still be killed then you can maintain the sense of danger. People tend to mistake immortality for invulnerable, but these characters typically have some kind of weakness. It could be a specific weapon, the destruction of their sole, or needing to be killed by one of their own kind. At the very least, you need to have a way to incapacitate them, especially if they’re villains. This fits into immortality not always coming with superhuman strength, so you can trap them like a normal person. All of these things were considered while designing the Dawn Fangs.
One of the benefits of the entire cast being immortal is that this puts them on even ground and it nearly negates each other. There’s no underdog in this arena because everyone has the same lifespan and regenerative abilities. It was halfway through the book that I stopped paying any attention to this too. This didn’t matter and the fight scenes took on a more violent and bloody tone. Why would an immortal care about defense when they could heal quickly? Not to mention losing an arm means less if they can still win and reattach it. Regeneration takes longer, but it’s doable. That means the vampires fight taking great risks and making really big splashes.
The character of Gregorio Roman brings up another aspect of immortals, which is anachronism. You have to consider how the passage of time effects these characters as far as their mentality and humanity. Some may become more monstrous because life is seen as fleeting and killing is the only thrill they can get. Others may become hermits because the new world doesn’t make any sense or bores them. With vampires, you have different generations among the immortals too. Younger vampires will have one opinion on the world while older ones see things from a more ancient and jaded view. It’s not much different than grandchildren to grandparents, but with the time periods being in centuries instead of decades. So, you have a generational issue among this society of immortals that can cause friction. It’s a fairly common one too, which is why I went more for a few characters being out of touch.
So, what do you think about books where all of the characters are immortals? Do you have a favorite immortal?
