A Writer's Tale

After I’d finally decided which stories to use, I needed to figure out some sort of order to put them in. I certainly didn’t want them arranged in chronological or alphabetical order. I decided to arrange them by content, so that there would be a lot of variety: a scary story here, a darkly humorous story there, a long one, a short one, a new one, an old one, and so on.

Though I made major revisions in Ravished to come up with “Fiends,” I did not change the other stories to any significant extent. (If you start really revising, where do you stop?) I corrected a few spelling errors, changed a punctuation mark here or there, and made a few minor fixes (very few) to clear up the meaning of a confusing sentence.

It took me a few weeks, working part-time while I was writing Bite, to transform Ravished into “Fiends” and to prepare the accompanying short stories. I mailed the manuscript to Bob Tanner on January 5, 1996.

I decided not to tell anyone, including my agent and editor, that the anchoring novella was actually a revision of a novel that I’d written more than twenty years earlier.

For one thing, I figured that a previous knowledge of the situation might create a pre-conception about its merits. For another, I wanted to see whether anyone would notice a difference in quality.

Could “Fiends” stand on its own two feet?

It did.

For me, the publication of Fiends had special meaning. It wasn’t just a collection of short fiction; it also marked the resurrection of Dark Road, He’s Out There in the Night, and Ravished, a novel that I’d spent a long time writing and revising back in the days before the sale of my first novel… in the days when I was an aspiring writer, and pretty much of a failure.

To have the story published was like recovering several lost years of my life. Those years hadn’t been a waste of time, after all. I hadn’t thrown them away writing worthless crap; I’d spent them on a novel that would be published more than twenty years later.

At some point after the deal had been made for Headline to publish Fiends, I was talking to Dean Koontz on the phone. He mentioned that a small press publisher had asked him to write an introduction for a special limited edition of my novella, “Wilds” (which would eventually not be brought out by that publisher). I said to Dean, “Hey, if you feel like writing an introduction, how about doing it for Fiends, instead?”

He agreed to that, and wrote a splendid introduction for my story collection. While much of the introduction was tongue-in-cheek, he wrote a lovely little piece about my daughter, Kelly. For me, what Dean wrote about Kelly was the highlight of the introduction.

Headline published Fiends in 1997, and Book Club Associates printed 14,000 copies of it as a double-book with Bite.

AFTER MIDNIGHT

I finished writing Bite on May 1, 1996. On May 6, I once again embarked on the third book of the Beast House series.

Once again, I experienced a false start. On June 9, however, I came up with an entirely new concept for the The Cellar III. I called my new version, The Midnight Tour. I worked on it until September 4, then stopped again, this time 180 pages into the manuscript.

Why did I stop?

Because I was informed that, due to scheduling problems, the book club intended to postpone publication of Bite and print it as a double-book with my next novel.

My “next novel” would have been The Midnight Tour. And I didn’t want the third book of the Beast House trilogy to be brought out by the book club as a double-book with Bite.

So I decided to stop working on The Midnight Tour and write a book specifically designed to accompany Bite.

The result was After Midnight.

When I made my first notes for After Midnight, the story was about a teenaged boy who sees a mysterious young woman in his back yard in the middle of the night.

I wasn’t completely happy with that.

I thought, “What if I turn it around?”

What if a young woman, late at night, looks outside and watches a mysterious young man come wandering into the yard?

This seemed like a much better idea.

But there was a hitch.

The nature of the story required for it to be told in the first person viewpoint. If I made the main character a female, I would need to write the novel as if it had been written by her.

A woman.

I’d already written a couple of novels, Savage and Island, entirely in the first person viewpoints.

But the viewpoint characters had been guys.

This would have to be gal.

Could I do it in a convincing way?

After giving the situation a little thought, I realized that I’d been writing large portions of many novels, over the years, in which I depicted female characters: how they acted, how they talked, how they thought and felt about what was going on. Those books had worked out just fine.