I never made it a secret that writing Blood Fever was easy. It wasn’t. I struggled with the story a lot to get the right sense of the characters. The core of the story stayed the same throughout – Evande illegally turns Logan and they both flee the Elders. Quinn is the one to give them shelter. Pretty simple really. Gotta say, it was anything but simple to get the story in the format that was released a few weeks ago. But I am very proud of how the book turned out.

For something a little different, I thought you may like to see the very first draft of the first chapter of Blood Fever – which at the time I started writing it, was called Rebirth ( and now you know where the title of the series came from, other than the obvious use the term in the books ). Please note, this is unedited and raw – straight off my hard-drive, it’s not something I would actually submit:

Do you ever get tired of looking at your own face in the mirror? Wish you had a new one to try on for a while, sort of like a new set of clothes? They’re okay for a while when they are shiny and new. After a few washes things just aren’t as colorful anymore. They begin to look haggard and worn.
I’m not just talking about the image that’s reflected back at you either, the outer shell you show to the everyday world. No, I’m talking about the one you keep hidden, buried inside so deeply that you only get brief glimpses of it yourself.
That’s my everyday life, for the past four hundred and some odd years no less. It never changed but I suppose the bright side should be that it never gets any worse either.
If you saw me in the street, you’d think I was nobody special. I wasn’t, truly. Average height, shoulder length obsidian hair, fairly normal build. I was all about the law of averages. Except for when it came to my skin and eyes. I was about as far from the rule of averages as there is. Porcelain white skin paired with sparkling icy blue eyes tended to turn a few heads whether or not you wanted it to.
If those staring only knew the truth though, they’d be the ones running and screaming to get away from me.
Utter what I was and most humans did. Can’t say I blamed them. I wouldn’t want something walking down the street next to me baring fangs and sporting a healthy lust for the blood flowing through my veins.
Thank God I was one of them.
Speak the word vampire and you’ll be greeted with a wide array of behaviors. It evokes panic in some while admiration in others. There isn’t any way to tell either so it’s best just to keep your mouth firmly shut. Let the crazies come to you as it were.
Since we’ve gotten onto the vampire topic though, let’s get some things straight.
No coffins.
There was an ocean of a bed in my bedroom. One of those king sized platform numbers. A seek and sophisticated affair, or some such bullshit the sales guy at the furniture store had tried to feed to me. I didn’t care if it was fashionable or not. It was comfortable and where I spent huge quantities of my time.
My bedding choice aside, that whole coffin thing is kind of morbid to be perfectly honest. I’m immortal—not a corpse.
Sunlight? I regularly watched the sunrise every morning while sipping a mug full of steaming hot coffee. So it’s safe to say that vampires are perfectly capable of walking around in the daylight. Some of us wear sunglasses during the more intense hours of the day, but I honestly feel it’s little more than just an excuse to model the latest eyewear out of Paris.
Even we’re not above being snobs.
Since I mentioned coffee, it does bring up another good point, food. I eat the same foods that humans do. All the flavor and none of the fat.
Hate me now, don’t you?
It’s more of a novelty to eat human food than anything else. It doesn’t provide any nutritional value to me at all. There are some of us that don’t bother. Me? I find that I enjoy the humanness of it.
Plus, no one’s going to keep me away from chocolate—I am still a woman.
Stake through the heart? If only it were that simple. There are a few bloodsuckers that I would have liked to use that little trick on if it worked. We’d all be better off without them, human and vampire alike. That doesn’t stop some of those humans stupid enough to try it. They get a nasty little surprise when our skin just knits itself right back together and they now have one pissed off vampire on their hands.
That’s what you people get for believing Bram Stroker and Francis Ford Coppala. I’ve got no pity for you if you put all your faith into that fake horror crap that Hollywood shoves down your throats—they’ve got it all wrong.
Crosses and garlic.
There’s a large teak cross hanging over my fireplace that my best friend gave me about three hundred and some odd years ago and I had a garlic marinade over my steak last night—if that tells you anything.
Crosses are good for little more than artwork and garlic was made to be heavily flavoring whatever I was eating that night.
One of my weaknesses was garlic.
Let’s see, what is left of all those silly beliefs humans hold about us? Holy water. A religious zealot’s favorite. Sorry to disappoint, but I could soak in a tub if I was so inclined. I’m not that overly frivolous, but you get the idea. It’s pretty much just like tap water that’s out of the faucet to me.
I regularly use a mirror to do my hair, if you’re wondering about that as well. Plus there are some pictures in the closet of me somewhere. I’m rather fond of getting my picture taken should the occasion present itself. However, it doesn’t happen often because when you live a few hundred years, you realize the complication of having your picture snapped. Better to avoid the flash when it leaves an imprint of yourself that is nearly as immortal as you are.
That whole bat thing too is a bunch of guano—so to speak.
None of us have wings or any such nonsense either. We can move so swiftly that human eyes can’t trace our movements, which is probably where that whole flying thing came from.
I’ve got an uncanny knack of disappearing into the shadows but I equate that more to being alive for the past five hundred years than to being a vampire. Live long enough and you figure out how to vanish into the darkness.
Look, easiest thing is just to throw out everything that you thought you knew about vampires.
One of the things that is right—the whole drinking blood business. Human blood is the tastiest, ran through your veins like a drug, but in a pinch, animal’s blood works just as well. When the mood strikes, you can easily find a vamp that’s willing to trade a few red cells. I’d have to be pretty desperate to go to those lengths though as, in my opinion, it’s nothing more than vampire prostitution.
The easiest way is to have a wiling human donor who regularly offers themselves up, if you felt that you couldn’t do without the high human blood offered. Bit too intimate for me, though. I mainly utilize my contacts that I’ve developed over the years. They supply me with blood and I supply them with my dazzling pointy smile.
Despite as easy as I make it sound, life for me is fairly complicated. I had to learn how to disassociate myself to humans. For the longest time I wanted to reach out and help them but our laws forbid it.
Actually, there are a lot of things our laws prohibit now that I think about it. Vampires are allowed to only have relationships, and sex, with their own kind. Doesn’t mean that those rebels among our numbers don’t try to toe the line. A vamp trying to have a relationship with a human treads on sticky ground and lots of problems can arise from it. If you think about it, would you really want to sit around and watch the one that you love with all your heart slowly die a little each day right before your eyes? All while you stayed your perfect and pristine self? Yeah, most of us wouldn’t either and don’t mind that law in the least.
The ones in power right now strictly control our numbers too. At first, it was an annoyance because you must watch so many around you die. But then you realize it’s necessary to control not only human population but also our own. The larger number there are of you, the easier you are to discover.
So, it was decided that only once every hundred years would it be allowed for a human to be turned. It would also only be done by the eldest of our kind. This is to ensure the easiest transition possible with the highest success rate.
Turning vamp was hard enough without all the Fates on your side. Excruciatingly painful as well come to think about it from what I remember of mine. The human needed to be a willing participate and know exactly what they were being offered. We didn’t gloss things up with any smoke and mirrors about this type of life. Of course, that also meant if they turned it down—they were the main course that evening for the elder who made the selection.
Needless to say it was rare for a human to turn down the opportunity. Would you turn down a chance at immortal life?
Our newest member, Valdis, was turned just forty-three years ago. He lived somewhere in Alaska last I’d heard. Raising sled dogs to race in the Iditarod, I believe.
A new rebirthing would be allowed to occur for another fifty-seven years.
Or so I thought.

If you haven’t actually read the book, you can read the first chapter, as published in the book here and see the differences for yourself.