Today, I am, featuring a guest post from paranormal author Kathryn Meyer Griffith. From her official bio:
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 fourteen (nine
romantic horror, one historical romance, one romantic suspense, one romantic
time travel and two murder mysteries) previous novels and eight short
stories published from Zebra Books, Leisure Books, Avalon Books, The Wild Rose Press,
Damnation Books and Eternal Press.
What is so interesting about her perspective is that she has been writing and publishing for a long time; long enough that her books are being re-released to a new generation of fans. In this guest post, Kathryn Meyer Griffith gives the back story to her first novels.
This is not only a great post for any aspiring writers, but also for readers who enjoy learning about how authors create.
At the end of the post, you can find more links to order her books or keep up with what's new for Kathryn Meyer Griffith.
Why I Wrote Evil Stalks the Night
…and also The Heart of
the Rose
Evil
Stalks the Night-Revised
Author’s Edition is special to me for many reasons. It was my first
published novel in 1984 and as it comes out again on June 1, 2012, rereleased
from Damnation Books for the first time in nearly thirty years, it’ll bring my
over forty year writing career full
circle. With its publication all
fourteen, and one novella, of my old books will be out again for the first time
in decades. Sure, it’s been a grueling, tedious two-and- a-half year job
rewriting and editing these new versions but I’m thrilled it’s over. I have my
babies reborn and out in the world again…and all in e books for the first time
ever. Now, perfectionist that I am, I can finally move forward and write new
stories.
I’ll start at the very beginning because, though Evil Stalks the Night was my first
published novel, it wasn’t my first written one.
That first book was The Heart of the Rose. I began writing it after my only child,
James, was born in late 1971. I was staying home with him, no longer going to
college, not yet working full time, and was bored out of my skin. I read an
historical romance one day I believed was horrible and thought I can do
better than that!
So I got out my borrowed typewriter with the keys
that stuck, my bottles of White-Out, carbon paper for copies, and started
clicking away. I’d tentatively called that first book King’s Witch because it was about a 15th century healer who
was falsely believed to be a witch but who was loved by Edward the Fourth. At
the library, no computers or Internet back then, I did tedious research into
that time in English history: the War of the Roses, the poverty, the civil and
political strife between the Red (Lancasters) and White Rose (Yorks); the infamous
Earl of Warwick and Edward the Fourth. Edward’s
brother Richard the Third. A real saga.
Well, all that was big back then. I was way out of my league, though. Didn’t
know what the heck I was doing. I just wrote page after page, emotions high
believing I could create a whole book. So naïve of me. Reading that old version
now (a 1985 Leisure Books paperback) I have to laugh. Ironically, like that
historical novel I’d thought in 1971 was so bad, it was pretty awful. That
archaic language I’d used–all the rage back in the 80’s–sounds so stilted now.
Yikes! Yet people, mainly women, had loved it.
And so my writing career began. Over 40 years ago
now. Oh my goodness, where has the time gone? Flown away like some wild bird. It
took me 12 years to get that first book published as I got sidetracked with a
divorce, raising a son, getting a real job and finding the true love of my life
and marrying him. Life, as it always seemed to do and still does, got in the
way. The manuscript was tossed into a drawer and forgotten for a time.
Then years later I rediscovered it and decided to
rewrite it; try again. I bundled up the revised pile of printed copy pages,
tucked it into an empty copy paper box and took it to the Post Office. Plastered
it with stamps. I sent it everywhere The Writer’s Market of that year said I
could. And waited. Months and months and months. In those days it could take up
to a year or more to sell a novel, shipping it here and there to publishers, in
between revising and rewriting to please any editor that’d make suggestions or
comments on how it could be better. Snail mail took forever, too, and was
expensive. But eventually, as you shall see, it sold.
Now to Evil Stalks the Night.
In the meantime, as I waited for the mail, I’d written
another book. Kind of a fictionalized look back at my childhood in a large (6
brothers and sisters) poor but loving family in the 1950’s and 60’s. I started
sending that one out as well. Then one day an editor suggested that since my writing had such a spooky ambiance to it anyway, why didn’t I just turn the story into
a horror novel…like Stephen King was doing? Ordinary people under supernatural
circumstances. A book like that would sell easily, she said.
Hmmm. Well, it was worth a try, so I added
something scary in the woods in the main character’s childhood past that she
had to return to and face in her adult life, using some of my childhood and my
young adult life–my heartbreaking divorce, raising my young son alone, my new
love–as hers. It was more of a romantic horror when I’d finished, than a horror
novel. I retitled it Evil Stalks the Night and began sending it out. That
editor was right, it sold quickly to a mass market paperback publisher called
Towers Publishing.
But right in the middle of editing Towers went
bankrupt and was bought out by another publisher! What terrible luck, I
remember brooding. The book was lost somewhere in the stacks of unedited slush
in a company undergoing massive changes as the new publisher took over. I had a
contract, didn’t know what to do and didn’t know how to break it. Heaven knows,
I couldn’t afford a lawyer. My life with a new husband, my son and my
minimum-wage assistant billing job was one step above poverty at times. In
those days, too, I was so clueless how to deal with the publishing industry.
That was 1983, but luckily that take-over publisher
was Leisure Books, now also known as Dorchester Publishing. A publisher that
quickly became huge. Talk about karma.
As often as has happened to me over my writing
career, though, fate stepped in and the Tower’s editor, before she left, who’d bought
my book told one of Leisure’s editors about it and asked her to give it a read.
She believed in it that much.
Out of the blue, in 1984, when I’d completely given
up on Evil Stalks the Night, Leisure Books sent me a letter
offering to buy it! Then, miracle of
miracles, my new editor asked if I had any other ideas or books she could look
at. I sent her The Heart of the
Rose and, liking it, too, she also bought it in 1985; asking me to sex it
up some, so they could release it as an historical bodice-ripper (remember
those…the sexy knockoffs of Rosemary Rogers and Kathleen Woodiwiss’s
provocative novels?). It wasn’t a lot of
money. A thousand dollar advance each and only 4% royalties on the paperbacks. But
in those days the publishers had a huge distribution and thousands and
thousands of the paperbacks were printed, sent to bookstores and warehoused. So
4% of all those books over the next couple of years did add up.
Thus my career began. I slowly, and like-pulling-teeth,
sold ten more novels and various short stories over the next 25 years–as I was
working full time, raising a family and living my hard-scramble life. Some did
well, my Leisure and Zebra paperbacks, and some didn’t. Most of them, over the
years, eventually went out of print.
And twenty-seven
years later, when publisher Kim Richards Gilchrist at Damnation Books
contracted my 13th and 14th novels, BEFORE THE END: A Time of Demons, an apocalyptic end-of-days-novel, and The Woman in Crimson, a vampire book, she asked if I’d like to
rerelease (with new covers and rewritten, of course–and all in ebooks for the
first time ever) my 7 out-of-print paperbacks, including Evil Stalks the Night–I gave her a resounding yes!
Of
course, I had to totally rewrite Evil Stalks
the Night for the
resurrected edition, as well as my other early novels, because I discovered my writing when I was twenty-something had
been immature and unpolished; and not having a computer and the Internet had
made the original writing so much harder. Also in those days, editors told an
author what to change and the writer only saw the manuscript once to final
proof it. There were so many mistakes in
those early books. Typos. Grammar. Lost plot and detail threads. In the rewrite
I also decided to keep the time frame (1960-1984) the same. The book’s essence would have lost too much if
I’d updated it.
As
I finished the final editing I couldn’t help but reminisce about all the life
changes I’ve had since I’d first began writing it so many years ago. Though it
was actually published in 1984, I’d started writing it many years before;
closer to 1978 or 1979. I’m as old as my Grandmother Fehrt, my mother’s mother
and who the grandmother in the story was loosely based on, was back then. While
I was first writing it so long ago, I was a young married woman with a small
child holding down my first real job and trying to do it all. Now…my
Grandmother, mother and father have all passed to the other side. Many other
family and friends I’ve left behind, too. I miss them all, especially my mom
and dad. It’s strange how revising my old books reminded me of certain times of
my life. Some of the memories I hid from and some of them made me laugh or cry.
This book, though, is the most autobiographical of all my novels as it contains
details of my childhood, my devastating divorce, and what my life was like when
I first met my second husband, Russell, who’s turned out to be my true love.
We’ve been happily married for thirty-four years and counting. Ah, but how
quickly the years have clicked by. Too quickly. I want to reach out, at times,
and stop time. I want more. I have so much more life to live and many more
stories to write.
So Evil Stalks the Night-Revised Author’s Edition
republished by Damnation Books/Eternal Press will be out again for the first
time in nearly thirty years on June 1, 2012, and I hope it’s a better book than
it was in 1984. It should be…I’ve had over thirty more years of life and
experiences to help make it so.
Written
this 1st day of June, 2012 by the author Kathryn Meyer Griffith
***
A
writer for over 40 years I’ve had 14 novels, 1 novella and 7 short stories
published with Zebra Books, Leisure Books, Avalon Books, the Wild Rose Press,
Damnation Books and Eternal Press since 1984. And my romantic
end-of-the-world horror novel THE LAST
VAMPIRE-Revised Author's Edition was
a 2012 EPIC EBOOK AWARDS FINALIST NOMINEE.
My books (all out again from Damnation
Books and Eternal Press : Evil Stalks the Night, The Heart of the Rose, Blood Forge, Vampire
Blood, The Last Vampire, Witches, The Nameless One short story, The Calling,
Scraps of Paper, All Things Slip Away, Egyptian Heart, Winter's Journey, The
Ice Bridge, Don't Look Back, Agnes novella, In This House short story,
BEFORE THE END: A Time of Demons, The Woman in Crimson, The Guide to Writing
Paranormal Fiction: Volume 1 (I did the Introduction)
You
can keep up with me on my Facebook page, my Author’s Den
or my My Space
. 
, 
