For a thirty-year old, Dieter knew too much about loss and now he had lost one more time. Wolfgang, the great-uncle that raised him and his brother, was dead. When they went to shut the old family farm down, they found a mysterious box. His brother tossed it aside as trash. Innes, his friend, warned him that is was a dark and powerful object. No one knew what was really inside. No one could predict what he would find: family and his dark love.
“Dark Love,” a paranormal story with romance and mature themes, is a work in progress by Stephen del Mar and is part of the Stories from Bennett Bay collection.
Well I swore I wouldn’t do NaNo (National Novel Writing Month) this year. I was actually listing the reasons in my head as I found myself filling out the form online late in the evening on November first. One of the reasons I didn’t want to do it, is I’m still trying to finish up the novel from last year. I really like that story and the characters in it are pretty core to my Bennett Bay series. Well the non-paranormal characters that live by the Bay. I’ve been cranking out some shorts that for some reason have been exploring the apparent spooky and funky side of the area. Yeah, apparently there are ghost, vodou practitioners, dragons, witches, and fairies out there in the swamp. Something the Chamber of Commerce will not be including in their material! So I really want to finish Return to Cooter Crossing, but all the shorts I’ve published kept pushing it out of the way.
I just published “Slay me,” said the dragon last month and I didn’t want any more distractions. And then something happened, something I swore I’d never do. I had an idea for a vampire story. Now don’t get me wrong. I love me a good vamp tale. Buffy is a cultural phenom and I have to tell you, I just lap up the True Blood show on HBO.
But the fang-boys have been so over done; I wasn’t interested in adding to the pile. I mean the ones that sparkle nearly put me off the whole genera all together. (Although, the hot homoerotic werewolves, made it possible for me to sit through one or two of the movies. I mean they had all of these hot native-American looking guys running around in nothing but cut-off jeans and you really expect me to NOT believe they aren’t going at it doggy style out in the woods? That is more unbelievable than sparkly vampires.) Okay—back to the post, I had this idea of a vamp-like story. I thought about it. Thought it was another short story pushing its way in. Thought it might be stretched out a bit more and when I woke up there was drool on my keyboard and the damn form for this year’s NaNo had been filled out. (I blame the fairies—not the ones with wings. The group of cute and rather femie gay boys that hang out at my Starbucks. Them or sunspots.)
So, I’m hopped up on the word count fever (NaNo is all about cranking out 50K words in 30 days), as you can no doubt tell by the rambling nature of this post. And find myself, on day eleven, 32K words into a very rough draft about a man losing and finding family. There is a witch, a Gypsy, a Hag (of the Fag variety), a male stripper and a bear cub and his daddy. Oh there is also another witch, her magic crow and a bunch of little blue fairies (the kind with wings) flitting around the woods, but some readers get confused by the number of characters in my stories so I don’t want to bring them up. Oh, there are no dragons in this story but we do drive by their house.
So, that is what I’m doing this November. What are you up to? If you have time, go buy the dragon story. People have said good things about it. Buy one for a friend! The damn peppermint mocha at Starbucks is expensive! Okay, what was I doing?