Charlie Revisited

Charlie was my first novel. It was originally a short story, in a serialized thing I did a long time ago. I wrote a few of those stories, and they have mostly all been expanded and combined and retooled into the three Bloodletting novels that I've published so far. That's Charlie, Jack, and Danny. All of those stories had at least been started in short story format.

Charlie though, has been with me the longest. Charlie was my character when I played Vampire: the Masquerade in the 90s. She was quite different, but I named her Charlie because I liked that name for a feminine character, mostly because of Charlie McGee from Stephen King's novel Firestarter. I don't think I've ever actually talked about this, but yeah, Charlie was my RPG character, and she was based quite a lot on myself. Except, she was a girl, she was Irish (when I first came up with the character) and she was a fair bit older, as a vampire, but very young looking, because she was turned as a teenager.

I got that from the amazing, incredible vampire movie Near Dark. In it, Joshua Miller plays a kid vampire named Homer, and Lance Henriksen calls him "old man" a few times, which is cool to me because, by default, the "old man" in any movie Lance Henriksen is in is, in fact, Lance Henriksen.

Anyway, I thought the idea of a kid vampire who was actually middle aged or older, would be really interesting. So I made this Charlie character and I made her sixteen, because I wanted her to be my age, and that's how old I was.

My book Danny, in which Charlie is a character, opens with Charlie in a night club, killing someone, quite brutally. That was how I played that character when I was 16. So that scene in Danny, where Charlie kicks the bejesus out of a Los Angeles socialite in a night club bathroom before draining her blood and killing her, I'd been sitting on that since I was sixteen years old, and it took three books for me to get it out.

Now that it's out, and I feel like I've taken this journey (so far) with Charlie, and I've used up all of the material that I've got in the mental archive (short stories, RPG games, appearances in other books) and now I'm sailing out into uncharted waters.

It's going great by the way. I've written two more Bloodletting books, one of which is published, though not officially a part of the novel series, because it's more of a novella. I'm doing something else, that I want to talk to you about.

I went back and I reread Charlie, and it was very clear to me, that I was processing a LOT of personal shit when I wrote that book. It's stuff that I've talked about online, fairly openly, but it's also deeply emotional work I was doing.

I've been in therapy for a few years now. I'm not ashamed or embarrassed to say that, but I do say it for a reason. When I wrote Charlie, I was trying very hard to get some stuff out. And I did. Charlie, as she was at that point when I wrote her, was made to go through some pretty traumatic, awful stuff. I didn't write it to be edgy or out of any kind of attraction to just abusing the shit out of my main character. I think I was just giving Charlie my experiences and my fears and my trauma, and I wasn't holding back. I wasn't filtering it or making it palatable. To me, it was raw, it was real, and it was good writing.

I still think it was, for the most part, good writing. I'm proud of that book. I like what I wrote in Charlie, but in a lot of ways, it represents who I was before I decided to let Charlie have Charlie's life instead of mine.

I've had good therapy. I'm on good drugs. I'm mostly doing alright. I mean, I'm a mess, a lot of the time, but not like I was before. Not like when I wrote that book.

What does that mean?

Well, I'm going steal the Declaration of Independence.

Wait, no..

I'm going to revise Charlie.

In fact, I've actually already done it. I figure, if Stephen King can do it, with both The Stand and The Gunslinger, then there's no reason I can't go back and make my book better.

Is it better?

Yes. It's definitely better. It's much better. In fact, I'm so happy with how it's turned out. I can't wait to get it out there. I'm doing one last pass before I send it off to my good friend David to generously proofread a book he's already proofread. Then I finish the illustrations.

OH RIGHT

I'm doing illustrations! Like the aforementioned Stephen King has done from time to time, in fact, in both The Gunslinger and The Stand, he had black and white illustrations (the drawings in The Stand were by personal hero, Bernie Wrightson) and I plan to do the same! The difference is that I'm drawing these myself.

These aren't final, but here's some of the chapter headings I've drawn. I kind of think of it like Charlie and the Chocolate Factory. The old one with the racist illustrations is the one in my head, because that's what I read first, but any of them work really. Just little scribbly drawings of something from the book.

That's one. Or, at least, it is right now. I'll probably clean it up a bit before I finish. I've done a bunch actually.

That's a chapter header! This is gonna be sick. I'm really excited about it!

Anyway, that's what I'm working on and I wanted to share. I don't have a firm release date yet, because I need to see what the rules on Amazon are about revised versions of books. I think I'll have to replace the original Charlie, which I don't feel great about, but I also really prefer this new version. It fits with the rest of the books better, and it reads better, and it's a more interesting story now. Not that it wasn't before, I just think I really nailed it this time.

OH

One last thing.

Raechel Jordan, who has narrated the audiobooks for all of my Bloodletting novels, as well as the novella The Death Game, has offered to redo the Charlie audiobook, so that will be coming as well!

Very exciting times!

I'll let you know when I have an actual date for this!

That's it for now!

Thanks!