Love Bites
After completing 1999 and submitting it to Headline, I sensed that something wasn't right.
There seemed to be absolutely no support from them and no enthusiasm about what I was doing; though the response from readers was still favourable, I got the impression that Headline now perceived me as an experiment that had not gone as they'd expected it to, so I wasn't entirely surprised when we parted company soon afterwards.
Naturally, I was disappointed, but I went on with what I've always done. By this stage, writing was such a compulsion that I really didn't know how to stop.
I'd wanted for a long time to do something about vampires... but not the camp and corny, cloak and fang type monsters of popular mythology. I wanted to write about vampires as they really are. (I can imagine eyebrows shooting up all over the place when people read these words... but my definition of a vampire is a person who kills so that he (or she) might drink the victim's blood and there have been many instances of this throughout history.) I also read an interesting contemporary case of a young female journalist who went missing when investigating a cult of S&M vampires who were frequenting some of the sleazier night-clubs in New York.
I of course, chose to relocate my story to er... Essex (Barkingside, to be precise, an area in which I lived for a few years) and I decided that I would try and push the envelope a bit further by making this story both bloody and funny - I took the movie American Werewolf In London as my blueprint. I also wanted to knock down another popular convention in this kind of fiction - that of the plucky and capable hero who somehow manages to battle the forces of evil. My hero, Duffy, is hapless, inadequate and incompetent (and so are most of his friends).
After spending some considerable time chasing after publishers and agents, I grew tired of messing around; and I'd been following with interest the rapidly evolving phenomenon of web publishing. Love Bites seemed to be the perfect vehicle in which to explore the new medium. Thus it is, that this novel is available (in paperback only) via xlibris.com.
FACT: When somebody pointed out to me that what I had written was Duffy The Vampire Slayer, I was nonplussed. Love Bites (and the character of Duffy) was conceived long before Buffy emerged into the spotlight and although its writing, I never made any connection. When the novel was going to press, I even considered revisiting the text and making sly reference to his illustrious American cousin, but in the end, decided against it. The book remains what is was always intended to be - a scream in every sense of the word.