Slightly cheered - and on topic, no less - because Roz Kaveney liked my clowns story:
Debs, Sweetie,
This is, as you know, quite solidly good. It takes a standard fantasy trope and works its own spin on it - and I love the idea of the world being saved by a petulant teenager's principled stroppiness.
She got it, first time out; of course she did. Petulant teenager's principled stroppiness.
Roz can generally cheer me up with only a minimum of effort, but this time, it was fortuitous, and very good timing.
And my agent thinks I should write "The Burden of Memory" - the vampire novel in which vampires are not atop the food chain - with an ending that could lead to more of them, as in, another series.
So, yowza.
Oh, Yay on Roz's thumbs-up, Deb. And also hopping with anticipation on the vampire novel. There have been some thumpingly bad vampire novels. I want to read a good one! And another series? Oooh, steady income, if only it would, you know, come in, in timely fashion.
Heh. All I need to do now is finish the last bit of Matty Groves, do some stuff that I must do and send Plei, and then I can start the big pound-away at Dory and Gil (she was Dorotta, a not-quite-victim of the Blood Countess; she turned Gilles, depressed young intellectual, on Bastille Day, during the Terror).
I'm happy for you Deb.
You're just...like a machine...in the keeps-on-ticking productivity sense, not the cold, impersonal one...
The machine is a ratchety beast, though, erika. I'm fortunate to have never actually suffered from writers' block. And this? This would be a truly crapola time to start.
the vampire novel in which vampires are not atop the food chain
Loving this idea So. Much.
And wow on everyone's drabbles; this theme has produced some doozies.
I still want to learn to write a mystery, once I've written the fictionalized and (barely) sanitized story of my life...
Loving this idea So. Much.
Dani, it takes Roger Zelazny's short story about it and runs with it, basically; I'm postulating the POV mostly of these two vampires, a couple, who've learned over the years to be cautious. Basically, take as much as you need, never take it all, don't leave anyone dead, slip 'em a little herbal (or chemical) form of rohypnol so they don't remember how their wrists got so bruised, you get your blood, the vic is dizzy for a few days, all is well.
Until a generation of children - that is, a specific very small subset of a generation - is born with a protein-triggered deficiency which is hormonally linked, and kick in at puberty, a kind of anemia. They need human blood to stay healthy, and in its raw form, it can kill them. They aren't vampires. But the human blood they need, has to first be filtered, and the perfect filter is the vampire. Also, because nature rarely saddles a living creature with a need without providing some way of filling it, this nice normal human protein-triggered subset - who are shoe salesmen and waittresses and, of course, a few heartless wealthy "want take have" types - can literally smell a vampire.
And the story, with the big ethical questions attached, goes from there.
Roger Zelazny's short story
t perks up
Zelazny? The god of all things odd and twisted, who died too freaking young because, dammit, there were more Amber stories to tell?
