Alas, I think my giddy announcement of having finished My Fair Vampire was premature. I got to an end but it wasn’t the right end. My lovely beta reader confirmed this for me. I am not done.
To end the novel based on its current trajectory means I either need to use my writer’s time machine and rewrite earlier chapters OR I need to finish the story started and scrap the current ending. You ever try to draw a really long horizontal line but your ruler is shorter than the width of your canvas? You underscore a bit on the left and you repeat on the right, then go back and forth until, hopefully, the lines connect somewhere in the middle. My lines missed each other because they were never on the same plane to begin with. That’s the penalty for non sequential writing and writing without an outline.
Back at the drawing board, I’ve already pumped the word count up to 93k but still have tons of plot in my head. Dear God, I never thought I’d be one of those writers with the 200k word bloated tick of a manuscript who wrings her hands when she’d done and says, “how will I ever cut it down to make it marketable?”.
My other issue is my genre. My Fair Vampire was originally going to be a paranormal romance. As I add more elements of intrigue and move farther and farther away from the de rigeur HEA (Happily Ever After) required in a romance novel, I find myself drifting into Urban Fantasy land. Uh-oh, Toto, we aren’t in Kansas anymore…. Life is much grittier here, but I think it will be a hell of a ride.
So, I’m off to adjust my goals, mentally reset my timer and rename my novel (cause My Fair Vampire sounds waaaay too wussy for Urban Fantasy) for starters. Maybe I’ll even do a new Teaser Friday next week….we’ll see.
Claire Gillian 
Aw, I like My Fair Vampire. Of course, I haven’t read much of your story besides the small teasers you’ve posted. From your title, it almost seems like your book is a parody, making fun of vampire romance novels. Actually, there’s a movie coming out like that soon. Is your book heavier in romance or paranormal? I’d be interested to read it!
It’s heavier on the paranormal and though I had every intention of it being a vampire version of My Fair Lady, the gent I wanted the heroine to end up with romantically wasn’t “cooked enough” for that to happen and neither was Dori.
The story is about identity–figuring out who and what you are–more than anything so I didn’t want the romance to cloud that journey for the heroine. I can’t tell you how many times I’ve been tempted to make it YA but I didn’t think I could make Dori’s voice younger. I do still poke fun at the vampire genre throughout and that’s the parody you’ve picked up. (And I have seen the commercials for Vampires Suck. Looks funny)
I’d love you beta read it for me when it’s ready! 🙂
That other title you suggested would fit beautifully, by the way, inside Urban Fantasy. At least IMO. 🙂
There is a great horror/thriller/romance thread running through the True Blood books, and that has massive crossover appeal – which is, in no small part, thanks to the ground work Buffy TVS did in the 90s. Even as far back as the granddaddy of all modern vampire fiction, Dracula had elements of so many genres fighting for space that it is expected by readers that there will be a certain depth of world and character to anything which has the undead – the least said about the Twilight books in relation to these expectations the better.
I can’t wait to get my hands on a copy of this, whatever it turns out to be called. 😀
Thanks, Gary. You’re very kind. I hope to one day get a copy across the pond to you. I’m a huge Charlaine Harris fan so if I can achieve even a fraction of her crossover genre success, I’d be a happy camper. This thing won’t be a Twilight story, that I can reassure everyone of. I’m not a Mormon, for starters. LOL