Hello again, dear friends.
This is the final installment of the How I do Erotic Horror blog series! Did you enjoy all the other parts? Do you like the series thing? Were you bored? Is anyone reading this, anyone at all? I HOPE so, and I HOPE you’ll comment, because this is your last chance to enter for a free copy of Sinful Truth and a SCARY GOOD GIFT!!
Okay, so where were we? Oh yes! I’d figured out the who’s of it all. The heroine, Bryerly, the mysterious anti-hero, Verum, and the villain, Rafe. But was Rafe really the villain at all? Or was he part of something much larger?
I used to read a lot of Kristen Lamb’s blogs, and she had a great series on antagonists, or Big Bad Troublemakers, as she likes to call them. She used the Star Wars movies (the REAL ones, not those modern pieces of tripe) as an example.
In the first movie, Grand Moff Tarkin was the bad guy. In the second, Darth Vader. And then the third was the true and final BBT, Emperor Palpatine. See, Tarkin and Vader were antagonists, but the weren’t the true villain of the trilogy. They were like bad-guy puppets for Palpatine to do his dirty work through.
While Sinful Truth isn’t a trilogy, this is still a useful idea to keep in the back pocket. Rafe was A bad guy, I knew that, but was he THE bad guy? When you write someone, you get to know them. As Rafe came to life under my tippity-typing fingers, he showed me his character. Greedy. Petty. Full of fear and want. The kind of person that makes others feel small to puff himself up.
Was this the mastermind villain of my horror story? The more I wrote of him, the more I discovered that he wasn’t. There was someone else there, pulling the strings. Someone much more calculating, someone who was more confident and self-possessed. Someone who was willing to sacrifice anything to put himself at the top of the heap.
But serial killers aren’t exactly a new idea. And while I had brutal, bloody murders going on, the modern audience wouldn’t be impressed with such a simplistic display of violence. There was a cannibalistic element, yes, but why? Where’d it come from?
I despise it when you get to the end of a book and find out they were aliens all along, or something else out of left field. It irks the crap out of me. So I decided to tie another element in, an element that I’d already introduced via Verum. The Egyptian mythology element.
And THAT, my friends, is all I will say.
The women in Bryerly’s town are dying, one by one, their insides being eaten, not by wild dogs, but by men. The only chance Bryerly has to survive is Verum, the Truth Keeper. If you want to know how and why these horrific murders are occurring, then you’ll have to check out SINFUL TRUTH, releasing TOMORROW, April 20th, from Ellora’s Cave.
If you’d like to WIN a copy of ST, and a SCARILY GOOD GIFT, then you’ll post a comment below! I’ll announce the winner tomorrow. Good luck, and PLEASE let me know what you think of ST!
Writing Scary that’s Sexy- How I do Erotic Horror (part 1)
3 AprSo since SINFUL TRUTH releases in about, oh, seventeen days (GULP) I thought it might behoove me (yes, I used “behoove” in a sentence) to talk a little bit about erotic horror, and my process for writing it.
Then I realized in order for me to talk about the process, I’d have to actually have had one.
Then I realized that I did write it, so even though I didn’t think about having a process, I must have had one. Ergo, this blog to help me (and you!) figure out how I created this scary yet sexy brainchild.
It all started when my loverly editor Carrie said, “HEY. Write me an erotic horror. Kthxbai.” It might have been a bit more involved than that, but not a helluva lot. Erotic horror? Well, I’ve read and written a good bit of erotic, and I’d read a lot of horror in my teenage years, but I’d never read anything that combined the two before. But since I heart Carrie, and would grovel across fiery shards of broken glass just to please her, (it’s amazing what those tiny editor-shaped nuggets of praise will do for a writer) I jumped right in.
I started SINFUL TRUTH as I’ve started my last few books-with a blurb.
Huh?
Yes, that’s what I said. A blurb. Like the blob of interesting text on the back of the book? I write that first. It’s a lot easier to expand a three-paragraph blurb into a novel, short story, or novella, than it is to condense a 100K-word monster into three paragraphs.
So, for your delight and edification, this was the blurb that popped into my head at CarrieJEditor’s command:
Bryerly Keats did a bad, bad thing. Her boyfriend, Rafe, told her to stay with the car, but when she heard those screams, she couldn’t stay put. The murder she witnessed that night was just the first.
Rafe and his friends know Bry saw what they did. They can’t afford to let anyone know about their plans. They’ll silence her for good. When a whole town turns against Bry and her tales, she’ll have to depend on a complete stranger to save her life.
But the stranger doesn’t work for free. And his price is the one thing that Bry isn’t sure she can face:
An Eternity with the Truth Keeper
I sent it to Carrie with a “is this kind of what you were thinking?” note, and she fired back a yes, with a ton of questions, one of which was “What exactly is a Truth Keeper?” Well, yanno, I thought, I have no bloody idea.
Check back tomorrow for part TWO of the How I did it: Erotic Horror series. And be sure to leave a comment below! To show how much I appreciate each and every one of my blog commenters, I’ll be adding each of your names from now until SINFUL TRUTH releases (April 20th!) into a hat. Comment on multiple blog posts? Receive multiple entries. The winner will be selected via Random.org, and will receive a Scarily Good Gift plus a free copy of SINFUL TRUTH! So comment, ask questions, harass me, and generally have a good time.
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