MVF Interviews: Christopher Beucheler
Two is trapped: hooked on heroin, held as property, forced to sell her body to feed the addiction. Time brings her ever closer to what seems an inevitable death and Two waits, uncaring, longing only for the next fix.
That’s when Theroen arrives, beckoning to his Ferrari and grinning his inscrutable grin. He is handsome. Confident. Eager to help lift her out of the life that’s grinding her down.
The only problem? Theroen is a vampire.
His blood can cure her addiction, grant her powers she has never had, change her forever into something greater than she was. But when he sinks his teeth into her neck, Theroen also thrusts Two into a world of danger, violence, madness and despair. The powerful, twisted elder Abraham will use her arrival to shatter the uneasy peace that exists in his mansion, bringing an end to the dark game he has been playing for centuries.
The Blood That Bonds has probably been one of my favorite books of 2010. It immediately hooked me from the summary and once I started reading, I didn’t want to stop. The main character, Two, is trapped in a dark and gritty lifestyle, so when Theroen shows you, you can’t help but want him to whisk her away to something better. Even if that something better is the life of a vampire. The story goes from gritty to elegant to tragic and finally ending on a serene note that left a smile on my face.
A few of the things that I loved about this story was the vignette-like telling of the each of the character’s back stories. You get the story in bits and peices and really feel like a part of Two’s journey. I enjoyed the fresh take on the vampire legend, in which you don’t automatically stay a vampire once you are “turned” – you must continue to drink human blood at regular intervals or else you slowly regain your “humanness”. The story isn’t without it’s bad guys, and they are both written extremely well.
I was only a few pages in when I decided to try and contact the author, Christopher Buecheler, and ask if I could interview him for this site. He was more than willing, and I’m excited to give you all the interview now! Once you read his responses to my questions, make sure to check out The Blood that Bonds. You really will love it!
1) How long have you been writing fiction, and have you always written paranormal?
I took my first stab at writing fiction in 1986, when I was nine years old. My parents purchased a PC, and it came with word processing software. I started with short stories, mostly horror-themed at first, and slowly moved on to longer works. I finished my first novel-length work at fifteen, created the character who would eventually star in The Blood That Bonds a year or two later, and wrote the original The Blood That Bonds novella in 1996, when I was nineteen.
I took a break from writing fiction in the first half of my twenties, working mostly on non-fiction articles in the video game field, but eventually returned to fiction with a series of short stories; most of them mainstream fiction about relationships, addiction, and other subjects. Eventually I decided to turn The Blood That Bonds into a full novel. I started that process in 2003, and since then I’ve written several more short stories, the first drafts of two more novels, and two full drafts of Blood Hunt – the mammoth sequel to The Blood That Bonds.
So basically I’ve been writing from 1986 – 2011, with a four-year break starting in 1998. I haven’t always written paranormal, but “modern fantasy” is probably my most-used genre. This includes everything from vampires, to superheroes, to retellings of Greek myths set in 2000-era New York City.
2) You have taken a non-traditional approach to publishing. Can you tell our readers a little bit more about your journey to become published?
I spent three years shopping The Blood That Bonds to agents and publishers with no success before deciding to go the eBook route. By that time, Twilight had come out, and I knew that whichever publishers weren’t getting “vampire fatigue” would probably be looking for young adult, Twilight-esque books, which The Blood That Bonds really isn’t. After years working in the internet industry, the glacially slow pace of print publishing was frustrating me, and I didn’t see any reason that I couldn’t put my skills as a web designer and developer to use in formatting the eBook, and promoting it once I released it.
In October of 2009, I made the book available for download, and in the past 14 months it’s gained an unexpectedly large fan-base! It’s been downloaded more than ten thousand times, and has great reviews on a wide variety of sites. It has a vocal Facebook fan community and I get feedback emails from new readers almost every day. This success has provided motivation which, in combination with a conscious effort beginning in 2008 to start giving my fiction writing more of my time, has really allowed me to speed up the pace of my production … though it’s also cost me a lot of nights and weekends!
I’m just now putting the finishing touches on a print-on-demand version of The Blood That Bonds. Once that’s available, my entire focus will be on performing a quick “polishing” draft on Blood Hunt, and then I begin the cycle of submitting it to agents and publishers. I’m hoping that the success The Blood That Bonds has had, in addition to the fact that Blood Hunt is frankly a better book, will gain me some interest where I couldn’t find any before.
3) The Blood that Bonds is a different spin on the vampire mythos; have you always been a fan of the vampire genre or is it relatively new to you?
I’ve been a vampire fan for a long, long time. I can’t pinpoint a specific book as being the first vampire book I ever read, but I can definitely highlight my favorites along the way: Dracula, Salem’s Lot, Interview with the Vampire, Necroscope and its first two sequels, an early 90’s compendium of vampire-themed short stories that includes a couple of brilliant works, and I Am Legend. I also enjoy most vampire movies, even ones of questionable value, like Underworld and Blade. I can’t help it. Vampires aren’t my only literary love, but they’re certainly one of the major ones!
Crafting my own vampires that were different from what I’d read before, while still containing elements of the classics, was part of the fun of writing The Blood That Bonds, and especially Blood Hunt, the latter of which was preceded by several months of research and development where I fleshed out all four major vampire races and their origins, including building a timeline tracing all the way back to ancient Mesopotamia!
4) At what point did you decide to commit to writing?
Well, I’m not a full-time writer at this point. My day job as a Web Designer / Developer pays my bills, and I’m also spending a good chunk of my time forming a small web company with a friend called Dart Publishing. I did make a serious commitment to doing more writing in early 2008, however, and it has paid huge dividends in the past two years. I’ve completed more writing projects in that time than at any point since my early teens, when I was just cranking stuff out without any regard to quality. If I ever won the lottery, though, and didn’t have to work anymore, writing is what I’d do with my life.
Now that I have a fan base (a fact which still strikes me as incredibly weird sometimes!), I sort of feel like I have to keep providing them with new stuff, either in the form of updates, or new writing. That’s one of the reasons I launched my writing website.
5) Your website contains a great deal of insights about writing, and the process of finishing and editing a novel. What do you think is the one most important piece of advice you could give to an aspiring writer?
It’s so cliché, but: write every day. Set yourself a schedule, and stick to it. Whether you write 50 words, 500, or 5000 … just write. I do take breaks in between projects, but when I’m actively working on something – especially a first draft of a new story – I try to write at least a little bit every single day. Some days it’s not much more than a sentence or two, but I usually find that if I can only manage 500 words on day 1, I can manage 1000 on day 2, and then 1500 on day 3, and so forth. Eventually I hit my stride, which seems to be about 2000 words a day for first drafts, and once I’m moving at that pace, it’s pretty easy to keep it up.
Writing gets easier the more you do it … like push-ups, except with less sweating!
6) MyVampFiction has a great deal of readers who are aspiring writers that have discovered a love of writing through writing fan fiction. Have you ever written fan fiction, and what are your thoughts on the genre in general?
I’ve never written fan fiction, but I’m not opposed to it. I can certainly understand the draw. There are certain stories, settings, and universes that are just so amazing and fun that you can’t help but want to add your own stories to them. Stephen King’s Dark Tower books, JK Rowling’s Harry Potter books, and recently the HBO series Deadwood (I’m just now making my way through the first season) have all made me go “man, I really would like to write some stories set in that world.”
I’ve never done it because I have so many ideas of my own that I feel mildly guilty spending time on any world that’s not mine. Like: I still have the final book in the II AM trilogy to write. I know what happens … I just need to write it. I also have a book about a serial killer from 1986-era Brooklyn in my head. And a book about New York City after global warming floods half of it in 2058. And a book about a girl from a small town in Iowa who decides one day to get on a bus and head for California, for no reason except that she can’t stand her small town for one more day. Also there are the two novels already that I’ve written first drafts for, which need second drafts.
I just don’t feel like I can work in somebody else’s universe when I have so many universes of my own that need exploring. That’s the main thing that’s kept me from writing fan fiction.
7) Where did you get the idea for The Blood that Bonds?
It’s kind of a long story. When I was about fifteen, I thought I was going to write and draw comic books for a living. So I sketched. A lot. One day I drew a picture of an “alternative”-looking girl with her big, burly friend. For some reason I tossed a “II AM” logo above the pic, and forgot about it for a while. Later, flipping back through, I started thinking of a back-story for this girl … how she was named “Two” and her friend was named “Rhes.”
As her back-story came together in my head, over the course of a few months, I started to think of potential adversaries for her. I decided that she would be homeless, a teenage girl living on the street but doing all right for herself, and that she would come into contact with a vampire. At first she would simply be amazed and curious, following him around, but she would come to realize he was a dangerous and evil person, a killer, and vow to stop him. Eventually they would face each other. This inspired a series of comic-book-like cover sketches, and even a couple of aborted attempts at writing a story. At the time I had about a billion projects going, and The Blood That Bonds (the name I’d chosen for the comics) ended up on the back burner.
A few years later, working at a summer job which involved sitting around while an incredibly slow scanner did its work, I took to drawing things out while waiting to feed the next sheet of paper into the device. I decided to go ahead and rough out a comic version of The Blood That Bonds. By then I wasn’t as interested in my initial story idea, but I still liked Two, so I came up with a setting in which she was trapped, dragged into prostitution and forced addiction. In this original comic version, and in the novella which I wrote a couple of years later, the vampire she encountered was the villain.
That story again sat for several years while I went off and did the web design thing. When I got back to writing in 2002-ish, I found that I still really liked Two and her story. I started out just planning on rewriting the novella and fleshing it out … and it just grew and grew. Only the first and last chapters of The Blood That Bonds bear any real resemblance to the novella, at this point, though there are little bits and pieces that survived all the way through.
8) Are you an avid reader? What are some of your favorites books and authors?
I have less time for reading lately than I would like, and a lot of what reading time I do have is taken up by non-fiction books (many relating to my various hobbies). That said, I try to always make time for fiction, and always will. You can’t be a good writer if you don’t read.
My all-time favorite author is Stephen King. I started reading his work when I was … I don’t know, eight? All I know is that by the time I started writing I was already a fan. I’ve read well more than three quarters of the books he’s written, and while I’ll acknowledge that he’s not the most literary author out there, I nonetheless love his stuff. His “voice” more than any other is echoed in my own work – there are occasional times when I go back and re-read an old King book and see a particular turn of phrase or sentence structure and think “that’s exactly how I would’ve written that” … I’ve never made a conscious effort to write like him, but he has had a massive influence nonetheless.
Apart from King, I’m also a fan of Tolkien, early Anne Rice, Christopher Moore, Chuck Palahniuk, JK Rowling … I’ve always loved William Golding’s Lord of the Flies, James Clavell’s Shogun, George Orwell’s 1984, Tennessee Williams’s A Streetcar Named Desire, and Michael Crichton’s Eaters of the Dead. Currently I’m enjoying China Miéville’s work, and I have books from Clive Barker and Diana Laurence sitting on my desk waiting to be read.
9) What is your favorite part of writing a book?
It’s an even split: first there’s the rush of raw creation that happens early in a first draft, when you’re first expanding upon ideas that have been bouncing around in your head for some time, and it practically feels like the book is writing itself, and you don’t know what’s going to happen next but it’s going to be awesome. Second is going back over my work after taking some time off, and encountering all the little bits and pieces that I don’t even remember writing, but which make me laugh, or think “that’s really good!” or just resonate with me in the right way. It’s a wonderful, amazing, affirming feeling to read back through a completed work and find yourself actually enjoying it.
10) Do you have a particular process you follow when you write? Do you outline, listen to music, etc.?
Generally speaking, I don’t outline or even keep a lot of notes for a first draft. In some instances I’ll do some research – usually via the internet – before starting on something, but for the most part I try not to over-prepare in the early going. With novels, I usually let the ideas bounce around in my head for a while, sometimes for years. In the case of my upcoming book The Broken God Machine, I literally had the story in mind for four years before I started writing it. I’ve been thinking about the third book in the II AM trilogy (The Children of the Sun) for a couple of years now, and am just about ready to start it.
Once I’m ready, I like to schedule my time, as in: “I’m going to write from 8pm to 10pm every weeknight, and on the weekends I’m going to go to the coffee shop during the afternoon and write for at least two hours” or similar. Then I just crank on the thing until it’s done. Some days this means sitting at the coffee shop staring at my laptop and grimacing, hating the 250 words I’ve managed to squeak out, but most of the time I get into the groove and really enjoy it.
I almost always listen to music when I’m writing. I’m not ashamed to say that much of the first draft of The Blood That Bonds was written at my office, late at night, while drinking red wine directly from the bottle and cranking Stone Temple Pilots (once so loud that it set off the alarms and the police showed up). Each draft of each story has a couple of albums that I strongly associate with it. Not sure if they wear off on the writing or not, but it wouldn’t surprise me!
11) Do you have any upcoming projects you would like to tell our readers about?
Oh, certainly. For one thing, I’m within a week or two of making the print edition of The Blood That Bonds available for sale. It’s a 6”x9” paperback with a cover illustrated by a fabulous artist I located online, and the layout is very professional. I’m planning on charging as little as I can for it, and any profits I make will go directly toward editing and production costs for future titles. In addition, I’m going to be shopping Blood Hunt to agents and publishers this year, and will be updating my blog, my writing twitter (@cwbwriting), and the The Blood That Bonds Facebook page frequently with reports on that.
While I’m shopping Blood Hunt, I’ll be writing the second draft of my sci-fi novel The Broken God Machine, which I’m also hoping to shop this year. When I finish that, I will be starting in on the third and final book of the II AM series, The Children of the Sun, about which I can say little except that, well … nothing is ever easy for Two!
I’d also like to mention that for anyone interested in my work, there’s lot of it available at my writing blog including two novellas and a bunch of short stories. It’s all free – I don’t even have ads on the site!
That’s about it, I think. Thanks very much for the opportunity to do this interview!
Places to visit:
Personal twitter (cocktails, beer, music, web design, etc)
Writing twitter
Personal blog
Writing blog
TBTB Facebook Fan Page (beware: potential spoilers!)
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