GUEST BLOGGER: THE EVOLUTION OF CRYSTAL

Hello to you all, and a big thank you to Erica for giving me the chance to guest blog on her site!

As you already know, Erica and I have been teamed up for a vampire book collection called Twice Bitten, which features reissues of our first Bombshells. You’re no doubt familiar with Erica’s Urban Legend, but maybe you haven’t read my contribution, The Huntress. While her book features a crime-fighting city vampire, my heroine is the flipside in her own search for justice: Camille Howard is a vamp hunter who has her own very personal reasons for tracking a tribe of female creatures into the dark wilds of Transylvania. See, her boyfriend was captured by this feral group, and she’ll do anything to get him back. But, along the way, Camille has to contend with a rival hunter, a man who wants to destroy just about anything that has to do with fangs—and that includes her captive boyfriend.

This story was a real departure for me, since I had concentrated mainly on women’s fiction/romance (Special Edition and Blaze) before writing The Huntress. But this was one of those ideas that just grabbed me and wouldn’t let go. When I finished, I knew I’d reached a turning point in my career. In fact, I immediately thought of another vampire story idea—one that was bigger than just a single book—and ended up selling the trilogy to Berkley. It’s about a stuntwoman on the skids whose father goes missing in L.A. Much to her shock, she finds that he was working with a paranormal investigation agency, so she teams up with them in order to find him, but what they discover along the way is a secretive, erotically charged vampire world. I’m waiting on a slot date, but the first book has been written and accepted. The trilogy is called “Vampire Underground,” and my editor (who also works with Laurell K. Hamilton) calls it a “mystery-noir vampire fantasy.”

So how did a girl who was first published in warmhearted family dramas (Special Edition) end up here? It’s not really a surprise. When I was a kid, I used to watch that Leonard Nemoy series In Search Of… (Remember? How fun was it?!?) and I would thrill to those stories of ghosts, monsters, and mysteries. But a certain episode left an indelible impression on me: it was about vampires. One of the clearest memories I have of childhood is watching a clip from the show: the shadow of a bald creature inching over a wall, its form warped and growing with every step it took up the stairs. Its fingers looked like gnarled branches that scratch against a window in the middle of the night, its nails like blades. And then…its face.

Oh, my God, its face.

The clip was from the silent version of Nosferatu, and from that moment on, I started sleeping with the covers around my neck.

My writing began to reflect my new awareness of what could creep out of the dark to attack me. I think I was about seven or eight when I created a tale about a weird “Lottery”-esque nature festival where the villagers did something for their communal feast that I won’t even mention here. It upset my dad when he read it, but that didn’t stop me. In the following years, I wrote short stories about ghosts and vamps. At times, my poetry inspired my friends give me long, considering looks. I wrote the requisite “Who was Jack the Ripper?” story. At nineteen, I embarked on a historical romance that had elements of voodoo (and it will never, ever see the light of day—I promise you that.). All in all, I suppose a perfect metaphor for my personality is reflected in a Halloween costume I wore one year: a bride with a face-covering veil. But, underneath, I sported the pale make-up of a vampire, fangs and all. At a party, I remember a girl walking up to me and saying, “Oh, how prett--” Then she caught a glimpse of what was beneath the veil. When she freaked out, I felt like my mission for the night had been completed.

So, it’s no surprise that a dark story like The Huntress came to me. The minute I saw that Bombshell was looking for a vampire hunter book, images blasted into my mind. It was the word “hunter” that did it: I saw dark castles and woods, sharp archaic weapons and blood. I knew it would have to take place in “the old country” and that my female protagonist would have to be pitted against other females at first. And I knew there’d have to be a touch of Buffy, Van Helsing, and Bruce Wayne in Camille Howard.

And I knew I really liked what I was writing….

I hope you’ll visit my site (www.crystal-green.com) to double your chances of winning the contest Erica and I are hosting. That “wild rose” necklace is almost worth dying for, IMHO. Good luck, and thanks for letting me hang out.