Ed Calkins Reads "Before The Blood"...

...and Nancy Calkins has started on BTB, too - as well as The Adventures of Cornell Dyer.

Yes, this "telegram" is very different in tone from the usual ones Ed sends from his fictional Steward of Tara character to me, using one of the titles he gave me ("Goddess" or "Mistress of My Immortality").

In this case, Ed, the real Ed, sent me, the real me, a real, actual email. Imagine that!

Apparently, instead of writing his sequel to Ruthless, he and his wife Nancy have been catching up on BryonySeries books.

None of it will make any sense to you if this is your first stop at the blog. The quick story is that Ed Calkins is a real person who created fictional character of himself that wound up (legally) as a character in the BryonySeries "drop of blood" trilogy and recently released his first novel for the BryonySeries that features all of these elements as Ed, as well as some BryonySeries characters and some new characters.

Here are his comments:

Dear Denise,

              Just checking in.

              I have stopped all writing in favor of reading your “Before the Blood” series which has revealed so much about the characters that I’ve read and written about. I am immensely enjoying a book that ISN’T all about me. Is that even possible?  I understand now what you meant by ‘back story’ and might have gone in a different direction if I read "Before the Blood" first. That direction is still "the road not taken" that I have "saved for another day" with the same doubt about [my writing abilities] ever returning. ("The Road Not Taken," Robert Frost). This story line is so much bigger than its writer and readers and I wonder if your vision of it is in line with its devotees as I am becoming one.

              I believe you’ve created a franchise. I just got it now! When you named John-Peter Simons were you thinking Simon Peter, the apostle? Were you thinking of the youngest apostle, John?

              Despite some divergence, my Irish luck kicked in when your treated time the same way as "Ruthless" did as well as some pieces of vampirism, Mathews, and the cruelties of the distant past.

              There is so much more to be written in all directions…futures, pasts, and sideways. I think of a Trudy that has read "Before the Blood" in some figurative way and is worried about an assault from Kellen who has been already destroyed from her perspective, but he could have could into the future and devoured all of Munsonville leaving John Simon, Henry Mathews and Ed Calkins nothing to eat but…well crow. In "Before the Blood," Kellen gets so confused about time that he needs a psychologist to remember who he is, where he is, and what (or who) he’s doing (eating), but that is NOT Deep Time psychosis…Ed Calkins has something more severe as does Dr Roslyn. I’m not yet completely sure of what this severity means to behavior, but I’m quite sure Ed Calkins crawls to his own - way too easy for Michaela’s liking - staking.

              I like that you call the process of becoming a vampire as "turning."

              Are our readers going to need psychologists to explain the book, blood, and backstories? We could include LSD blotters on our covers. And willing necks…are we going to need a hotline for people wanting to get bitten?

              You may be writing books faster than I can read them, but I’m retired now (not really, I haven’t had a full week yet of not working). I should be able to read faster.

              My sequel has no plot yet, but it has ideas yet unwritten. I had worked on a piece about a serial killer ghost that is a younger Ed Calkins Vampire without the humor that had half angels in it, but I abandoned as too dark…but now I’m emboldened by Kellen. That may latter have connection to the franchise. I know you’re writing about sirens now and I’ve yet to read the books about your ghost hunter (i.e. Cornell Dyer, illustrated below) as described without spoilers by my wife, who’s read three of them already and is reading behind me, the "Before the Blood" books. (I’m in the middle of Bryony Marseilles, she’s finished John Simons.)

              As far as ghosts, I’m going to repeat the "this time, you first mommy" phrase from the last sentence of that new fantasy writing in her piece about the hatching dragon. In other words, I’m going to read more of your books before I start that one.

                                    You Go, Girl,

                                        Ed Calkins....super fan and steward