Human No
Longer Backstory
By 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of those books were over twenty-five years old and very outdated.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.
***************************************************************************
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.
All
Kathryn Meyer Griffith’s Books available at Amazon.com here.
