Diary

History and Villainy

McKay

dod-posterWhen we were thinking about a possible villain for Blood Bathory: Like the Night, we knew we didn’t want to use Dracula/Vlad Tepes because he’s been done to death *rimshot*. I can’t remember how we settled on using Elizabeth Bathory, but I do remember that we liked the idea of using her because while she has been used as a villain in some movies and books, she hasn’t been used nearly as much as ol’ Drac.

Mostly, she appears as the villain in B-grade 1970s horror movies like the one Evan mentions. He gets the name of the movie wrong (a deliberate mistake on our part); it’s called Daughters of Darkness (1971), and it does indeed star John Karlen, known for playing Willie Loomis on Dark Shadows.

Elizabeth’s alleged penchant for bathing in the blood of young women to preserve her beauty made her a perfect candidate for being cast as a vampire, and we didn’t see her working in the fashion industry as too much of a stretch either. She’d be surrounded by beautiful young people whom she could either turn into vampires or feed on as she pleased.

But Elizabeth isn’t the only historical figure we decided to use to our fictional advantage.  Anna is based on the historical Elizabeth’s eldest daughter by Ferenc Nadasdy, and Janos is based on Janos Ujvary, Elizabeth’s servant who was arrested as one of her accomplices and executed in 1611.  Multiple sources describe him as “dwarf-like”.

In keeping with our trend of using historical figures as villains, we’re introducing another one in the second Blood Bathory novel. Well, technically, we’re introducing three, but two of them are dead long before the action begins, and they’re only mentioned. One of them is Vlad Tepes because we couldn’t leave him out entirely, but the other two… you’ll just have to wait and see!

Evan and Will are returning for significant roles in the second novel, but they won’t be at center stage this time. Our leading men this time are Adam Carson and Tyr Gustavson, who are lost souls trying to find a place to belong after experiencing tremendous loss. Together, they face a threat even greater than Elizabeth Bathory… who is not the biggest, baddest vampire out there. After all, she may have created Evan, but someone else created her.

erzsebet-cachtice-museum

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Torquere Sale!

arionrhod

End of Summer Sale!

Summer is almost over, and we’re having a sale so you can get those last
summer reads in! We’re offering you 20% off your purchases. Just put
‘endofsummer’ in the coupon code box any time you check out at Torquere
Books (www.torquerebooks.com) before midnight on Sunday to get 20% off your
order.

Sale good now through Sunday August 18 at Midnight est.

Enjoy the rest of the summer with some books from Torquere Press today — including our works Blood Bathory: Like the Night, and the Recipe for Romance series!

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Where does the time go?

arionrhod

I can’t believe Shore Leave has been over for a week already! McKay and I had a great time at the “Meet the Pros” event, it was so exciting to be able to talk to people and sign copies of Blood Bathory and Heart of Stone.  I hope we get to do events like that again, they are really interesting and fun.

On the writing front, I’ve been plugging away about Blood Bathory: Absence of the Sun. We finished the draft a while ago, but it’s our practice to put works of that length on the back burner for a little time before coming back and beginning the edits, just so that we can look at things with fresh eyes and pick up any flaws. I already see a few things I want to tweak in the main story line, but they aren’t major changes, mostly just additions to better explain what’s going on. Then we have to start filling in the subplots, which are sketched out but not complete, and then final edits and we should be ready to send it in to Torquere. 😀

The other thing we have in the works is a Gothic. I won’t say too much about it, other than *SQUEE* — GOTHIC! 😀 As a huge H. P. Lovecraft fan, it’s really exciting to be doing something like this, which is different in a lot of ways from anything we’ve ever written before. I just hope it gets picked up and published. 😉

Happy Monday! I hope everyone gets off to a great start on their week!

Diary

Southern Comfort food

McKay

“Ginger and  Gentlemen”, the third story in the Recipe for Romance series, is coming out from Torquere Press tomorrow, so I thought I’d talk a bit about cooking and recipes since those are central themes to the series.

The series is set in South Carolina, which both Ari and I are familiar with; we aren’t South Carolinians, but we are Southerners, and we both like Southern comfort food. Okay, I admit it: I don’t like collards, a fact that has gotten me threatened with expulsion from my family more than once. But that’s my biggest “do not want” when it comes to Southern cuisine.

Stephen’s kitchen produces more upscale dishes, but Ian Pierce’s diner is strictly food like Mama and Grandmama used to make. I can see his menu featuring collards, fried chicken, cornbread, hushpuppies, corn (on the cob and creamed), sweet potato casserole, fried green tomatoes, okra (fried and stewed), and seafood. Lots and lots of fresh seafood!

Two dishes in particular feature predominately in the story, so I thought I’d share recipes for both of them. I’ve never made a seafood boil myself, so I combed through regional cookbooks when we were writing the story to find something that sounded like Ian might make it. The recipe for Ian’s gingersnaps is actually my recipe. I’ve been making them for years during the winter and tinkered with the recipe until I got the level of “snap” I wanted.

Continue reading “Southern Comfort food”

Diary

Giveaway! And other stuff!

McKay

“Ginger and Gentlemen”, the third novella in the Recipe for Romance series, is coming out next week! It’ll be out July 24 from Torquere Press, and we’re hosting a chance to win a free digital copy here. Enter to win between now and July 24!

Some of our readers have mentioned their fondness for our snarky executive chef, Stephen Pierce, so his fans may be glad to know that while this isn’t his and Robert’s story (that’s “Cinnamon and Seduction”, which will be coming out November 6), Stephen plays a larger role in this story than he has in the previous two.

In “Ginger and Gentlemen”, Stephen is filming a special for the Gourmet Network with Max Boyd as his director, and he’s suggested featuring his little brother’s restaurant. Ian Pierce owns his own diner, The Filling Station, in Hickory Bend, SC, which specializes in classic Southern comfort food like chicken and pastry, collards, and seafood boils. The food and the setting are both perfect for Stephen’s show, but unfortunately, the brothers haven’t been on good terms since… Well, ever.

Nine years apart, they had little in common while growing up, and their father drove a wedge between them when he focused all of his time and attention on molding Stephen into the perfect chef to continue the Pierce legacy and ignored Ian. Now Ian has to try to put aside all of his anger, jealousy, and resentment in order to work with Stephen because he’s in danger of losing his diner, and he desperately needs the money that doing the show will bring.

For Ian, the diner represents more than a means of earning a living. It’s his lifelong dream, and it’s his way of thumbing his nose at his father and brother. After a lifetime of being compared to Stephen and found lacking, he’s desperate to prove he’s capable of emerging from under Stephen’s shadow and succeeding as a chef in his own right.

Meanwhile, Ian’s best friend, Matt Davis, is working his own angle, convincing Max to add a bonus to Ian’s contract and putting up the money for it himself because he’ll do anything to help Ian avoid losing his diner. But Ian is fiercely proud and independent, determined to succeed on his own, and if he finds out that Matt has gone behind his back like this, it could spell the end of their friendship — and Matt will lose the man he loves.

For this story, I wrote Ian, and I have to say, he’s one of the most fun characters I’ve ever written. Ian is snarky and outspoken, and he constantly surprised me with the uninhibited dialogue that popped out of his mouth. That may sound weird, but I’m sure there are plenty of writers out there who know exactly what I mean when I say Ian is one of those characters who has a mind of his own, and I didn’t so much write him as hand over the keys, sit quietly in the passenger seat, and hold on while he took over the ride.

This boy knew what he wanted, and he made sure to tell me as well as the other characters in the story. Fortunately, Matt is much more easy-going, and he didn’t mind Ian’s forcefulness. Like Stephen and Robert, they’re very much a yin-yang match, but even if Matt had balked, Ian knows all he has to do is whip up a batch of gingersnaps using his own secret recipe, designed and perfected just for Matt, to make Matt come running.

As an aside, I’d like to point to our various social media accounts. Some of them see more use than others, because hours in the day, etc. but we do try to keep fairly involved!

Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/pages/Ari-Mckay/266185570179748
Twitter: https://twitter.com/AriMcKay1
Goodreads: http://www.goodreads.com/author/show/6153630.Ari_McKay
Amazon: http://www.amazon.com/Ari-McKay/e/B00CHBT3NA
Pinterest: http://pinterest.com/arimckay/boards/

I’ve also added widgets from Goodreads on our short stories, novellas, and novels pages so that each individual entry has a button that will let you add that story/novella/novel to your Goodreads shelf right from our site!