It is my pleasure to introduce this great author's story about her book. It is very interesting so enjoy.
Human No Longer Backstory
By Kathryn Meyer Griffith
Amazon Kindle address: http://www.amazon.com/Human-No-Longer-ebook/dp/B00AU50VD6/ref=sr_1_9?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1356736168&sr=1-9&keywords=Kathryn+Meyer+Griffith
Human No
Longer. It’s my 17th published book – yeah! – and my fourth vampire
novel. First, let me tell you where I got the idea for it. About five years
ago, I was still trying to please the agent (who I no longer have) who’d sold
four of my earlier paperback novels to Zebra in the 1990’s and, because she
didn’t seem to like any of my new potential concepts, I asked her what she
would like to see. Out of nowhere, she
said, “You know your 1991 Zebra vampire novel, Vampire Blood? I liked that one a lot. The characters. Well, how
about writing me a sort of sequel with basically the same cast, but with this
premise: A woman, a mother, after being turned into a bloodthirsty vampire,
must learn to adapt to the human world and still be a good mother. You know,
how would she deal with everything when she had children she loved; didn’t want
to hurt or leave them…but still had the need to feed on blood? Still had all
the urges and desires of a vampire?
Yikes. I
hated the idea but, to please her, I went ahead and begrudgingly wrote the
book. I tentatively called it The
Vampire’s Children or The Vampire
Mother or something like that. I finished it. Not too happy with it. I had
never liked writing what other people wanted me to write. Stubborn, I guess.
My agent, in the meantime, had begun her own online
erotic (which I don’t much care to write) publishing company and when I’d
gotten done with the novel she was too busy to even read the finished book. She
handed it off to an apprentice intern. An intern? What? Who didn’t like it at
all. Duh. So, disgusted, I tucked the file away on my computer and, fed up with
the whole agent thing, returned to writing what I wanted to write. An end of
days novel called A Time of Demons
and a new vampire novel where the evil vampire wasn’t a mother. In 2010 I went
with a new publisher, Kim Richards at Damnation Books/Eternal Press, and she
contracted not only those two books but asked me if I’d like to rewrite, update
and rerelease all 7 of my older out-of-print Leisure and Zebra paperbacks going
back to 1984. Heck yes, I said! So for the next 2 years I was busy doing that.
Some of those books were over twenty-five years old and very outdated. Their rewriting,
editing and rereleasing took a lot of work and time.
Then, in late 2012, I decided to take a very old book
of mine (Predator) which was contracted to Zebra Paperbacks in 1993 but, in the
end, never actually released, and just for the heck of it, as my 16th
novel, self-publish it to Amazon Kindle Direct. Just in ebook form. A kind of
grand experiment. The first time I’ve ever tried self-publishing. See how it’d
sell. Dinosaur Lake. A story about a
hungry mutant dinosaur loose in the waters of Crater Lake that goes on a
rampage. Hey, I wrote Dinosaur Lake before Jurassic Park, the book, ever came
out! Really. I had my cover artist, Dawne Dominique make a cover for it…and it
was stunning with a dinosaur roaring
on the front. And I did everything else myself. Editing. Proofing. Formatting.
With forty years and endless publishers behind me I felt I was capable. And
it’d been selling so well I decided
to self-publish another one…and I remembered the mother/vampire book. Hmmm. So
I revamped (ha, ha, inside joke), polished, and self-published it, as well. I
retitled it Human No Longer. Got my
fabulous cover artist, Dawne Dominique, to make me a lovely haunting cover with
a troubled-looking woman standing outside a spooky house, with two children
behind her in its shadows, on the front and voila! All in all, I don’t think
the book turned out half bad. In fact, with the changes I made I think it’s not
bad at all. Now I just hope my readers will like it.
So that’s the story of Human No Longer. My 17th
published novel.***
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About Kathryn Meyer Griffith...
Since childhood
I’ve always been an artist and worked as a graphic designer in the corporate
world and for newspapers for twenty-three years before I quit to write full
time. I began writing novels at 21, over forty years ago now, and have had
seventeen (ten romantic horror, two romantic SF horror, one romantic suspense,
one romantic time travel, one historical romance and two murder mysteries)
previous novels, two novellas and twelve short stories published from Zebra Books, Leisure Books, Avalon Books,
The Wild Rose Press, Damnation Books/Eternal Press and Amazon Kindle Direct.
I’ve been
married to Russell for almost thirty-five years; have a son, James, and two
grandchildren, Joshua and Caitlyn, and I live in a small quaint town in
Illinois called Columbia, which is right across the JB Bridge from St. Louis,
Mo. We have three quirky cats, ghost cat Sasha, live cats Cleo and Sasha (Too),
and the five of us live happily in an old house in the heart of town. Though
I’ve been an artist, and a folk singer in my youth with my brother Jim, writing
has always been my greatest passion, my butterfly stage, and I’ll probably
write stories until the day I die…or until my memory goes.
Here is an excerpt from Human No Longer
*****
Blurb of Human No Longer, a vampire novel by Kathryn Meyer
Griffith:
Jenny and Jeff Sanders become victims of a bizarre crime; leaving Jeff dead and Jenny in a temporary coma. She returns to her children. With Jeff’s death she must move back to
her childhood home, a haunted farmhouse, in Summer Haven, Florida, where once they destroyed a family of vampires.
Jenny has no appetite. She’s edgy. Her eyes hurt. She thinks it could be trauma or grief. Until one night she can’t resist the night woods or the overpowering urge to drink warm animals’ blood –and accepts the truth. Her attackers were vampires.
Now she'’s becoming what she once reviled. She can'’t abandon her children but must find a way to live in the human world. At night she hunts, in the day hides what she’'s becoming and attempts to fit in.
Then townspeople begin dying. Like years before. With her blackouts, she fears she may be the killer, or is it her vampire attackers? For they've found her and demand she joins them –or her family will die.
She resists until they kidnap her children. Then she has to find a way to outwit and ultimately destroy them.
***
EXCERPT 2 of Human
No Longer by Kathryn Meyer Griffith:
Shutting her eyes, she lingered at the door and
listened to the night animals beyond the glass. They were frolicking out there
in the autumn murkiness among the crispy leaves and cool dirt covered ground.
Little creatures, with nocturne eyes and speedy feet, full of hot blood.
The mother in her fretted over leaving her children
alone in the house but the hunger overpowered the mother and she snuck outside
into the darkness.
She told herself they’d be fine. She’d be back
shortly. That she should reward herself for her self-restraint all day. She
hadn’t attacked one living person. Hadn’t gone crazy or hung from the rafters
by her feet. She’d done well.
She told herself that killing innocent little animals
wasn’t all that creepy, wasn’t all that bad, considering the alternative. It
didn’t work. She loved animals and hated having to kill them at all for any
reason. Or had. But, she had to keep reminding herself, animals died every
minute of the day to fill humans’ stomachs. Right? Was what she did any worse
than that? All she wanted was their blood. It was her food.
She felt guilty only until she captured the large fox,
humanely snapped its neck to drink the blood (which tasted better than anything
she’d ever drank or eaten) and then was too exhilarated to think of anything
but further feeding her hunger; not even that she could run faster than she
ever had, could see like an owl through the darkness, smell her prey miles away
and that her teeth were changing. When she stuck her finger into her mouth she
could feel the points. Oh, great. Little fangs. Oh, Lord, could this get any
weirder? She thought about those horror movies she’d seen over the years where
some unlucky human had been bitten and was slowly turning into god-knows-what
and couldn’t believe or accept it. Was in shock. Now she knew exactly how
they’d felt.
Though, in the end, she did feel regret for killing
the poor fox and the one the night before. But, yes, it was better than
feeding off homo sapiens. Damn straight it was.
After ingesting the blood she felt as if there was
nothing she couldn’t deal with. No problem she couldn’t solve, no disaster she
couldn’t avert. She was superwoman.
This wasn’t so bad, was it? It’d occurred to her
perhaps if a good person became a vampire that might be the key. Good
person equals good vampire? Bad person equals bad vampire? She could only pray
that was the case. Oh, it could be worse. She could lust after human blood and
not be able to resist. Now that would be a deal breaker.
She absorbed the night poised beside a towering tree,
its limbs shifting in the wind; inhaled the dizzying perfumes of the forest.
Her lips on the verge of smiling. She felt better than she had since she’d come
out of the coma weeks ago.
Her new world revolved around her in slow motion. The
night birds cooed in their nests. The air danced among the dying leaves.
Insects skittered between limbs and under bushes. On the breeze there were
aromatic wisps of brewing coffee and chocolate (cake she thought), fresh baking
bread and as always now, blood. Animal blood in the small bustling creatures
hiding out all around her and in the distance the cloying scent of human blood.
Her children asleep in their beds. Amazing.
God, the night was beautiful.
That’s when she saw the pale figure hiding between the
trees to her left. A tall man dressed in drab clothes watched her.
She merged deeper into the woods among the thicker
underbrush but when she looked back, he was still on the fringe observing.
Waves of uneasiness rippled through her and the
vertigo was unbalancing. This man stalking her wasn’t her friend. This man was
dangerous. If he was a man.
She ran all the way home at a speed she never would
have imagined a human capable of. More like flying really. Her feet barely
touched the ground, her night eyes so keen she never once collided with a tree
or stumbled over a rock.
Within seconds she was inside the farmhouse peeking
out the windows; the mysterious stranger nowhere in sight. Thank God.***
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Novels
and short stories from Kathryn Meyer Griffith:
Evil Stalks the Night (Leisure, 1984; Damnation Books, 2012)
The Heart of the Rose (Leisure, 1985; Eternal Press Author’s Revised
Edition 2010)
Blood Forge (Leisure, 1989; Damnation Books Author’s
Revised Edition, 2012)
Vampire Blood (Zebra, 1991; Damnation Books Author’s Revised
Edition, 2011)
Witches (Zebra, 1993; Damnation Books Author’s Revised Edition
2011)
The Nameless One (short story in 1993 Zebra Anthology Dark
Seductions; Damnation Books Author’s Revised Edition, 2011)
The Calling (Zebra, 1994; Damnation Books Author’s Revised
Edition, 2011)
Scraps of Paper (Avalon Books Murder Mystery, 2003…soon to be
an Amazon Kindle Direct ebook)
All Things Slip Away (Avalon Books Murder Mystery, 2006; Amazon
Kindle Direct paperback & ebook 2012)
Egyptian Heart (The Wild Rose Press, 2007; Author’s Revised Edition,
Eternal Press 2011) My self-made
The Complete
Guide to Writing Paranormal Fiction: Volume 1 (I did
the Introduction)
Dinosaur Lake (from Amazon Kindle Direct 2012)
4 Spooky Short
Stories (Amazon Kindle 2012)
Telling
Tales of Terror(I did the chapter on the Putting the Occult into
your Fiction)
Human No Longer (Amazon Kindle 2012)
My Websites:
