The teaser for "American Vampires: The Series" is out today and I hope everyone gives it a look. You can find it on my author page and here's the link to view it on youtube.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=l6E7So...

For those of you who don't yet know, American Vampires, my first book and the first in the American Vampires trilogy, is the basis for a web-series that I will be directing very soon.

The story follows a heroin addict named Delilah who, in an attempted suicide, is made into a vampire and must adapt to the idea of living forever after planning to die. At the same time, a vampire believing himself to be a messiah makes plans to usher in a new world order, push humans off the food chain and let vampires have their day in the (metaphorical) sun. The characters are some of the closest to my heart that I have ever written and I have been writing them for years.

A web-series is the perfect format, I feel, for me to tell this story on next to no budget whatsoever. It is small, yes, but it is still character driven and episodic. Each chapter of the book felt, to me, like a self-contained story, and so this new series seems a perfect fit. There will be changes between the two, I assure you. The book and the web series are different things, but they do compliment each other. Pretty well, too, I think.

I don't want to retread old ideas with this series. I want to examine vampires in new ways that I hope are relatively complex. When I initially wrote American Vampires, I was a much younger person, but I still believe in the core idea. There's so much in fiction exploring whether or not it is in human nature to kill. With vampires there is no question. It is in their nature to kill, and there are even more interesting questions if you just start there. If you must commit murder to survive, does it make you a bad person?

The psychotic tendencies of every character give me ample opportunity to explore gray areas I've always found interesting. There are two opposing forces at work in the book, and now the web-series. One preaches oppression, one preaches repression, and both of them are wrong. Sure, you'll find influences from Buffy in American Vampires, but you'll find just as many influences from Natural Born Killers and A Clockwork Orange. The things I'm trying to explore within American Vampires are stories you don't need a Michael Bay (or at times even Roger Corman) budget to tell. It's about exploring people and what this one thing (being a vampire) is like for different individuals. How do they sleep after a night of blood-drinking? Some can't. And some sleep very well.

All of this is what American Vampires means to me and it's what I can't wait to reveal to and unleash upon the viewers of this new series. To the loyal readers, a million thanks for carrying my little myth this far, because a new era begins right now.