Evolution of a Tale or How the Blood Vault Came to Be

Sometimes people will ask me where I get all my ideas, and the truth is that I have been blessed (or cursed) with an overactive imagination and I get way more ideas for stories than I'll ever have the time to write.

So at the risk of pulling back the curtain on the Great and Terrible Oz and ruining the magic by showing the gears and levers behind, I'll mention how the idea for The Blood Vault--a precursor story to my novel, Devil Take the Hindmost, came about.

In 2001, Chandra Levy, an intern for the Federal Bureau of Prisons in Washington DC, disappeared. It came out soon that she had recently confessed to relatives that she was having an affair with Democratic Congressman Gary Condit.















So of course, I immediately asked myself--"Self, what if Gary Condit is a vampire and he is keeping Chandra locked up in his lair?"

Now for me, this is only a natural conclusion based on a long study and exhaustive research into the facts of this particular case.

The next logical step for me was to introduce a vampire hunter, Damon St. Cloud, that was going to uncover this horrible crime and do his best to rescue the kidnapped intern--and then I wrote a story about it.

And voila (a fancy French word which means there it is) -- the genesis of the short story The Blood Vault.

In honor of Halloween and all things vampiric I'm going to run that short story here on my blog, in several parts beginning next week. In the meantime, do order up a copy of Devil Take the Hindmost. It's available at the Pulpwork Press website, Amazon.com, and in various electronic formats at Fictionwise.