Ritual of Blood – The Story of the Story.
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Ritual of Blood was the first thing of any length that I wrote. It started out as an exercise to see if I could actually write a novel length story, which I started at the beginning of 2000. From the initial idea to finishing the first draft took me about 18 months. I basically wrote the book twice in that time as I would write a chapter out long-hand first before transfer it to my computer.
At the beginning I knew I wanted to write a vampire novel as I had a huge interest in vampires at the time. I’d grown up watching the vampire films by Hammer Horror, such as Dracula, and my favourite vampire film, Twins of Evil, and my favourite TV show was Buffy the Vampire Slayer. I set Ritual of Blood in 1873, this made gave me a setting that was not modern, but also not too far in the past that research would be too difficult to find.
As I started to create the characters of the novel, surprisingly, to me at least, it was the vampire, Lucinda, who was the first to become fully formed. I knew her backstory and the journey her character would take throughout the book. Small things changed during the writing of the novel, which obviously happens during the creative process, and she quickly became my favourite character to write. (In fact, throughout writing the trilogy of books she has always been my favourite character).
The next character, both in how they became formed and in my list of favourites, was Victor Drake. As the protagonist, in my mind I based him, to begin with at least, on myself. As the story went on, and through the subsequent drafts, he became more his own character. Though there are still things he says and does throughout the whole trilogy that I would see myself doing in the same circumstances.
The town of Edgewich, where the first two thirds of the book are set, I based on my hometown of Droitwich Spa. So much so that when my youngest brother read the book he’d feel a little scared every time he walked past some of the recognisable places I had set some of the vampire attacks.
Once I had completed the book, and had achieved my initial goal, I wondered how far I could go with it, and sent it out to publishers.
The book was first published in 2003, though I wasn’t totally happy with how it, or my next novel, Killing Time, came out. So once I received the publishing rights back I decided to self-publish the book the way I wanted it, which I released in 2009. And in 2013 I released a 10 year anniversary edition, which is the latest edition available at the moment.
