While The Cat’s Away Countdown – Day 8…

If you’ve been following my blog, you know that I’m presently sitting in a cottage somewhere near Seattle with five other multi-pubbed authors, hard at work. Since we were told the lakehouse doesn’t have Internet connection, I preposted blog entries to keep you all entertained while I’m gone. And to keep you coming back, I’m offering chances to win some of the books I’ll be featuring here. So, be sure to stop and read, then don’t forget to post a comment to enter!

Tomorrow’s posting will include a chance to win All Knight Long, which originally released in March 2004. What you may not know is that I used to keep a page on my old website for every book, called “The Story Behind the Book”.

Here’s what I wrote back in November 2004 when Joe and Lily’s story first came out!

I love old B-horror movies.

Honestly, the cheesier the better! And I’m not talking about slasher movies. Give me a vampire lurking behind the curtains, or an alien pod-person chasing a woman with his stiff-legged gait. I’ll never ask why she can’t outrun him—because I know she subconsciously wants to be captured!

Growing up, I rushed home from school each day to see the latest episode of the horror-soap Dark Shadows because Barnabas Collins gave me the shivers. “The Blob” was my favorite movie—I watched it so many times I could quote the dialogue. If Peter Cushing or Vincent Price were in the cast, I was glued to the tube. Those were seriously creepy dudes!

I considered myself a vampire and werewolf expert. By the time I was eight, I could tell you every way you could kill a vamp or become one. Before I ever understood what sensuality and desire were, I thought vampires were the perfect boyfriends—attentive, snappy dressers, and they could disappear from your bedroom in a whirl of mist if your mom poked her head inside your room at night.

I also had a favorite fantasy. I knew I wanted to meet a dark, dangerous vampire, be tied between two stakes, and forced by him to become his girlfriend. My fantasy always ended with his teeth piercing my neck because my little imagination thought the excitement ended there!

Of course, my fantasies changed as I grew older—the details about what happened after the bite grew more important. I worried about rug burns on werewolves’ haunches, how a teenage vampire might shower off the blood and be in bed before his parents discovered him missing for the night.

I also watched King Kong again and again. There was something intensely thrilling about that large, hairy male ape and his one-track obsession with Fay Ray. When she was draped over his large, dark palm in her negligee, she didn’t look like terror was the only emotion she was feeling.

Now I’m an adult—perhaps a little arrested in the maturity department—and a writer. Since I never outgrew daydreaming about monsters who stalked unawakened virgins through dark, deserted forests—I’m free now to revel in my imagination. Daydreaming is now a profitable activity!

When I sit at the dinner table, I may wear a little smile because Joe Garcia’s search for his humanity led him some interesting places. I let the poor guy indulge in all his manly-monstery impulses. And the best part is, I can keep “living” in my alternate reality as long as I don’t end the series!