Charlie: Revised OUT NOW

I'm going to put wrote I wrote in the Author's Note of Charlie: Revised.

AUTHOR’S NOTE

I think the first real storytelling I ever did was playing Dungeons and Dragons with my friends in the sixth grade. I liked playing, and I was happy to let others take the reins when it came to running the game and leading the storytelling, but when it was my turn to be the Dungeon Master, I took it very seriously. Not so much the rules and stats, but the storytelling. I learned quickly that I very much enjoy creating a sandbox for characters to play in, and then seeing what happens when those characters are let loose.

I can remember going to the Role-Playing Game section of Walden Books at the Bear Valley Mall in Victorville, California and seeing the green cover of the first edition of Vampire: the Masquerade. Coming across that book in 1991 changed the trajectory of my life. I learned, by setting up Vampire games, that I really, really like telling stories about vampires.

I also learned that I especially like telling stories about troubled, emotionally conflicted vampires. I like my vampires to have a point of view. I like them to think about what they’re doing and why, in the way that any of us would if we were put in the position they're in.

It was also through this storytelling that I discovered a vampire teenage girl named Charlie. When I first started developing Charlie as a character, she was an Irish girl who was attacked by a soldier and discovered dying by a vampire who took pity on her and turned her into a vampire to save her life.

Around the time that I was developing this character and the story around her, I was also enamored with Kathryn Bigelow’s film Near Dark, which featured a raggedy group of nomadic desert dwelling vampires running around in an RV with painted black windows. I thought that was just about the coolest version of a vampire there could be. In that movie, there’s a character named Homer, played by Joshua Miller, and he’s an old vampire in a young person’s body, and I thought that was a neat idea. Having this cynical, bitter old man in the body of a child was a fun, ironic character.

As the years went on, and my interests shifted more to film, I wrote my vampire stories into a screenplay. It was a ridiculous, nearly three-hour monstrosity, with multiple interconnected stories all happening nonlinearly and concurrently. It was, as screenplays go, a mess.

Eventually my Hollywood aspirations fizzled out. Towards the end of my twenties, I discovered that I’m far too socially awkward to handle that job. After a period of mourning, I picked myself up and started writing fiction. I was working at a convenience store here in Victoria, and in my down time I wrote the stories that would become my first three vampire novels.

That was around the same time my wife and I stopped trying to have kids, after a series of losses. I was processing a lot, as a wrote about Charlie and her life and death and rebirth. I was dealing with letting go of the idea of kids. I was also deeply into my therapy journey, so there’s a lot that went into Charlie (both the book and the character) that’s very raw, and even bitter and a bit cynical. I put Charlie through a lot, and frankly, part of me regretted some of it. Not because I felt bad for Charlie (though I do) but because I’m not in that place anymore, and the writing I did when I was in that place was very angry. I don’t care for me when I’m angry, so I had mixed feelings about Charlie as a book.

While I appreciate the story, and I love the characters, the things Charlie goes through are sometimes hard to read. Both because they’re upsetting, and because they come from such a wounded, angry place.

I wanted to fix my relationship with this book. I felt like both she and I deserved that. Which brings us to Charlie: Revised. I reread this book not too long ago and started making notes of things I would do differently if I were to write this book today. By the time I was done, I had enough ideas to justify a revision. Not just updating a line or two, but a real revisiting of the story and characters. I added a prologue introducing Caroline, and the tone of the book. I changed a lot of the first third of the book. I took bits out, added bits in, and I gave Charlie some more agency. I felt like, the first time around, Charlie was very afraid and reacted to things in a passive way. Now, she’s still afraid, but she’s also determined and brave. She has issues, no doubt, and she’s no perfect specimen of mental health, but she is more rounded. I feel like she has more purpose now.

That makes the story better, in my eyes. I’m proud of this story, and I would happily give it to most any fan of the genre to read. It tells the story I want to tell; without a lot of the baggage that it carried before. Which isn’t to say there isn’t still emotional weight and trauma in this story. It’s loaded with it. It’s just not exactly always that flavor of angry. It’s more nuanced now.

Plus, I wanted to illustrate it. When Stephen King revised and updated The Stand in the 1990s, he got legendary comic book artist Bernie Wrightson to draw illustrations for it. I obviously don’t have access to Bernie Wrightson, but I can draw, so I got my iPad and some stock photos and I started drawing. I’m happy with what I came up with, and I hope you enjoy the illustrations. If not, well, what can you do?

So that’s why I chose to revise and rerelease Charlie. That’s one of the joys of self-publishing: I can do what I want. Since I wasn’t happy with Charlie before, I fixed it, and now I’m happy. That’s a good place to be.

Thank you for reading my book. It’s extremely precious to me and it takes a lot of trust and vulnerability to put a book like this out, so I hope you connect with it.

— Joe Humphrey,

September 22, 2026

You can get it here, in paperback and on Kindle.