Wandering through my playing cards

Music: Mark Isham, Many ChinasMark Isham, Many ChinasMark Isham,
Mood: Reflective

I stayed up late last night, drinking single-malt Scotch and divining the future with the help of a deck of Tarot cards.

I’ve owned a Tarot deck for four or five years now. I didn’t intend to use it when I bought it. I needed the deck for research. I wanted to describe a Tarot card in the book I was working on and was looking for something as reference, as it were. I bought a Rider-Waite deck, thinking it was “the” Tarot deck. At the time, I flipped through the cards, read the reference booklet, and put it all aside.

It takes a certain amount of work to use a deck of Tarot cards. There are 78 cards, divided into the Major and Minor Arcana. There are many meanings to memorize. It isn’t exactly cool to reach for the booklet to figure out whether the Death card means something good … or bad … is about to befall the earnest subject of your reading.

The deck sat on a bookshelf. Every once in a while I’d pick them up and look at them. I don’t know what made me decide to have a go at them a month back.

Karma…

Boredom…

The Devil whispering in my ear…

No, definitely not the Devil. I don’t have any truck with Mr. Scratch. Some court the dark side, but not me. Still, I have born-again friends who say you are as good as dabbling in Satanism by even having a deck of Tarot cards in your house. I confess that I can’t look through the deck without getting a certain uneasy sense that there is something just beyond the realm of understanding, not necessarily something frightening, and yet maybe. If you have a deck of Tarot cards, you might know what I’m talking about, even if I can’t put it into words.

My early efforts with the deck were unsatisfactory. The divinations were all depressingly negative. The cards told me my path was blocked. I was plagued with treachery. Progress was futile. Things were not destined to come to fruition for me.

None of it made any sense.

While life is filled with the usual frustrations and disappointments – as the Buddha taught, nothing is satisfactory, everything ends, and we’re all trapped by our endless grasping – things have been going well for me. My editor likes the new book. My latest novel, “The Vampire’s Violin,” has been nominated for a Stoker Award. We have a new sailboat – actually, it more properly falls under the category of “good old sailboat” – tucked away in one of the barns on the farm, waiting for warm weather.

So why was the Tarot deck giving me a knuckle sandwich whenever I got it out to play?

After using the deck for a while out of sheer doggedness, I decided that part of the answer was that Tarot cards need time to warm up to you, and visa versa. There’s a break-in period.

I found a couple of good Tarot resources on the Web – www.aeclectic.net and www.tarotpassages.com -- that gave me different ways to use the cards. It seems there are a lot of things I didn’t know about Tarot. (It’s a sign of the ego run amuck when your base assumption is that you know everything.) Not only are there hundreds of different decks (like the “Gothic Tarot of the Vampires”!), but there also are different ways to read the cards, known as “spreads.” In addition to the classic spread the booklet that comes with Rider teaches, there are readings such as the Story Teller Spread, the Creative Process Spread, and the Moon Spread, which is useful for investigating where you’re at in a cycle. (I’ve always been into cycles.)

Can Tarot cards foretell the future?

I don’t know. But they definitely work the same way a Rorschach ink blot test does: Each card gives you an image, and each image has an interpretation, but ultimately it is up to you to determine what it really means to you. (Horoscopes work the same way: “Yes, that is true; this next thing seems completely wrong, but maybe what it really means is …”)

My thinking is that a deck of Tarot cards can be a useful tool for a writer, The cards use metaphors, symbols and archetypes to access the subconscious, the realm of dreams, the land from whence all art is born.

Have a Happy New Year's.

Selah,

Michael


Posted by Michael on 12.31.03 @ 02:39 PM CST [link]

David Parker's Haunts

Here's a photo of the fire-damaged antique shop David Parker passed while listening to the mysterious voice of the blood whispering in his head. The cloud of crows circling above the 19th-century structure are not visible in this photo -- black birds against a black sky do not show up well in photographs.


Posted by Michael on 12.30.03 @ 12:34 PM CST [link]

Interview with a Vampire Writer

Music: Touch of Grey
Mood: It kind of suits me anyway

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HELLNOTES NEWSLETTER
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Volume 7 Number 37


MICHAEL MCCARTY TALKS WITH MICHAEL ROMKEY

Bettendorf, Iowa writer Michael Romkey is a mild newspaperman during the day-associate editor at The Moline Dispatch and Rock Island Argus and editor at The Leader-and vampire writer at night. He is the author of seven Ballantine/Del Rey novels about the undead: I, VAMPIRE; THE VAMPIRE PAPERS; THE VAMPIRE PRINCESS; THE VAMPIRE VIRUS; THE VAMPIRE HUNTERS; THE LONDON VAMPIRE PANIC; and his latest THE VAMPIRE'S VIOLIN.

HELLNOTES: Your musical vampire, Ludwig Beethoven, who was in THE VAMPIRE PAPERS, re-appeared as one of the lead characters in THE VAMPIRE VIRUS. What was it about Beethoven that you brought him back for that book?

MICHAEL ROMKEY: Beethoven is a perfect vampire character, at least to suit my imagination. He was brilliant, passionate, romantic and intense, with fierce eyes, a glowering brow, and long flowing hair. But there was also a tragic aspect to his personality. The real Beethoven was not an especially happy person. His father drove him to excel at music. He wasn't what we think of as a friendly person, and I think he was probably rather lonely and unhappy. Again, this fits my idea of what a vampire is: Alone, brooding, a solitary rogue marooned outside the comforting bonds of society, living a life beyond the pale.

HN: What was your favorite vampire book you have written so far?

MR: I always have three favorites. The first is I, VAMPIRE because it was the first and got some themes out there that I've continued to explore. But my other favorites are always the newest book, in this case THE VAMPIRE'S VIOLIN, and the one I'm writing that will come out next. I'm always convinced the new book will be huge. So beneath all the darkness and violence, there's my basic optimism.

HN: THE LONDON VAMPIRE PANIC and THE VAMPIRE PAPERS both have several different narratives just like Bram Stoker's DRACULA did. Was that a conscious decision to follow in Stoker's footsteps?

MR: I get bored easily, and I think modern readers do, so changing points of view is a way to keep the pace going. One of my pet obsessions is that nobody ever really knows what's going on. They only have their interpretation of what they've experienced. Switching narrative voices gives you a chance to see how different people react to the same set of events as they evolve. That being said, I should point out I love 19th Century fiction. I'm not especially a fan of Stoker, but I'm addicted to (Herman) Melville, (Nathaniel) Hawthorne, (Henry) James, and all their brother fossils. I recently read VANITY FAIR-not Tom Wolfe's version but the one (William Makepeace) Thackeray wrote back in the 1850s. (The novel explored the ethical and social pretensions of largely amoral Victorian characters.) It's great fun. Of course, so was Wolfe's modern version about greed in New York City. And I do read "Vanity Fair" magazine, which is sort of a "National Enquirer" for upper-middle-class people with too much money, and those who aspire to be the same. I'm sorry, but I think I've totally digressed.

HN: The violin concerto is one of the most intense and passionate concertos in all of classical music. Is that the reason you chose the violin for the instrument of the vampire in THE VAMPIRE'S VIOLIN?

MR: A great question! You said it perfectly. Vampires are creatures of great sensitivity and passion. And the violin is the instrument with the greatest range of emotion and color, second only to the human voice in expressiveness. It is the ideal instrument for a vampire. The mandolin is second. The piano is third. A huge church pipe organ would be in there somewhere, if it weren't such a cliché.

HN: Do you have any plans to use the characters Maggie O'Hara, Dylan Glyndwr, or Maria Rainer from THE VAMPIRE'S VIOLIN in future novels?

MR: I'm going to have to think of a way to have everybody die at the end of each story, so people won't ask me when they're coming back! I don't know. They may come back, or they may not. I'm going to propose a series to my publisher that follows the same vampire characters through the Middle Ages. Like it or not-and as a writer, I tend to like it not-readers become invested in characters and want them to live on from book to book. After spending a year or more living with them, I am sick of them and only too happy to have them go away. To continue characters from book to book, you almost have to set out with the intention of writing a series, or you don't create enough unresolved questions to carry you through. When I started these books, my editors didn't want to hear anything about a series, though I managed to trick them into publishing a few books dealing with David Parker, I think, without anybody becoming the wiser. The market has changed to the degree that it's apparent readers of vampire novels are especially friendly to serial books.

HN: You are currently working on a new vampire novel. What can you tell us about that?

MR: It's called AMERICAN GOTHIC, and will have the word "vampire" somewhere in a subtitle so people won't think it's about Grant Wood. I'm pretty pumped about it because I've made a definite effort to concentrate on action. There will be very little introspection and back-story in this book, though plenty of atmosphere and mood. And lots of ... well, let's just call it "action." The book is in three parts: New Orleans in 1863; Haiti in 1914; and San Francisco today. To say any more would bring me bad karma. It should be out around April 2004. There will be updates at my website: www.thevampire.com.

HN: Last words?

MR: As long as I get to have the last word, I'm always happy. That's why I'm a writer.



Posted by Michael on 12.29.03 @ 10:34 AM CST [link]

David Parker’s Journal: 3

Music: Grateful Dead
Mood: Grateful I'm not dead

I stood just within the pool of light just inside the entry, commanding my heartbeat to slow as I peered upward into the yawning darkness.

A surreal atmosphere permeated Hibernian Hall. It was if I had opened the door and steeped into a dream that was on the verge of transforming itself into nightmare.

Who would draw me to such a place?

There was sense of great age about the old social hall, the feeling of time passing and time past. It came from more than just the century-and-a-half of dust settled deep into the walls and floorboards. People do not congregate in closed spaces for long without leaving something of themselves behind. So it was in this brick relic of a time before automobiles and air travel, before computers, telephones, and even electricity. The voices of the dead whispered indistinctly in the shadowy rooms overhead, a psychic residue, the human stain of pent up passion and despair, the afterimage of life that lingers behind on the mortal plane long after spirits depart.

Reaching again with my preternatural senses, I found no sign of another of my kind in the building, just the residual energy of the dead and the gibbering of the dozen or more ghosts trapped in the hall. Some of the ghosts were curious about me, some angry, some desperate to find the missing bit of understanding needed to free them from earthly bondage.

“No,” I whispered, making it plain that I refused to have anything to do with them that night. I had not been called there by them or for them, and I would not be diverted by their pleading or their threats. I was not frightened. There was nothing the dead can do to harm me.

The stairway rose steeply, the risers six-feet across ascending into the darkness with the dramatic verticality of a set built for a stage production of “Nosferatu.” A modern architect would never design a stairway so daunting to the healthy – and utterly impassible to the physically challenged. But Hibernian Hall was from another era, a time of few conveniences, when people were sturdier. Or had they be merely indifferent to weakness in the past? Partly, perhaps, I thought, but there was probably less need to take account of the infirm back then. In the 19th century, the weak died.

The walls along the stairs were decorated with advertisements for men and women’s clothing from the 1920s and 1930s. A sign painted on the door behind me indicated there was a shop on the second floor specializing in “antique & vintage” clothing.

I began to climb. The risers creaked loudly with each step, but there was no reason for stealth. Whoever else was there, hiding from my keen Vampiri senses, they already knew I was there because they had summoned me. The leading edge of each stair was covered with a rough black non-skid adhesive to prevent feet from slipping. A wise precaution, since a fall the length of the stairs would kill a mortal.

The first landing: I came around the corner and froze, startled to see the couple standing there, staring at me with unblinking eyes. I had to laugh – silently – in spite of myself. It was a pair of mannequins, a man in a tuxedo and a woman decked out like a flapper from the Roaring Twenties. What was wrong with me? I wasn’t a six-year-old boy exploring the old hall. If anything, whoever else was in the hall should be afraid of me.

The dummies stood beside the doorway to the used clothing shop. I glanced at the tarnished brass lock set. I could open the lock easily enough with my mind, but I could sense that there was no one inside.

I continued down the hall toward the next landing, past locked office doors belonging to an astrologer, an acupuncturist, a masseuse. The doorway at the end of the hall had a strange pattern in the grain, the wood nearly black with age and grime. In the next moment a man’s face emerged upside down in the wood. The ghost grimaced, screaming soundlessly, begging me to help, as if there were anything I could have done to help.

The ghost of suicides are particularly unpleasant. Perhaps I find them so because I came so close to taking my own life when I lived in Chicago – if you could call it living, weighed down as I was by an unhappy marriage, a profession in the law that I loathed, and an unhealthy affection for cocaine.

The third floor landing opened expansively. (Why was it that the farther back in time you go, the more lavish people seemed to be when it came to space?) A statue of Buddha sat on a table in the corner, a white carnation balanced in its folded hands. The top floor of the hall was home to the local yoga school. I smiled inwardly. Even in the Midwest, here in this smallish city on the Mississippi, the human hunger for spiritual enlightenment continues its esoteric quest. I reached out and sensed nothing – no person, no vampire, no ghost. All was quite on the top floor of Hibernian Hall, the space made peaceful through asana and meditation.

The door to the school was open – not just locked but open, though there were no lights on inside.

I went it and found myself in a central reception area, perhaps fifteen feet across and twice as long, running before me to the front of the building and a bank of windows that reached to the ceiling, which was at least twenty feet above the floor. I took it all in with a single glance: The table with the recipe box filled with the students’ cards; the bookcase with yoga mats, books and tapes available for sale; the smaller table holding brochures listing class information and a small statue of Buddha; the coat rack made of metal pipe; two chairs and some low benches to sit while taking off shoes for class, or putting them on before descending back down the stairs and out into the chaos of the world.

A pair of sliding pocket doors opened to my right. Inside, I found a large room, carpeted, with a marble fireplace against the far wall and no furniture except for a fish tank. A yoga studio.

I crossed back through the entry and past curtains into an even larger studio at the opposite side. This room was not carpeted. The oak floor had been recently stripped and refinished. Even the little light spilling in from the street suffused the wood with a rich golden glow. It would have been a travesty to hide such a beautiful floor. Against the marble fireplace in this room leaned rolled up yoga mats.

I didn’t notice the ceiling when I came in, but now I stood with my hands on my hips, looking up at the observatory-like dome recessed deep into the ceiling. Even in the darkness my eyes saw the outline of the compass plastered over and painted, still enough of the outline remaining for a vampire’s keen sight to see the distinctive semiotics of the Freemasons.

Strange.

Parallels between the Freemasons and Illuminati are well known, though I have never been sure whether the members of the mortal organization were witting conspirators of the vampire brotherhood, or if it was merely a case of humans imitating something sublime and powerful beyond their comprehension.

If Hibernian Hall had once been a Masonic Temple, then there was a remote chance the Illuminati had once been through the city. The Vampiri tended to congregate in the most elegant, and ancient, cities of Europe and Asia, but with the Illuminati, anything was possible.

I should know.

I was once one of them, before my period of darkness – before they expelled me.

“David…”

I heard myself gasp. There was only one who said my name so sweetly: “Dah-veed.”

I spun and saw her standing in the corner behind me to the left, wrapped in a hooded cloak of black velvet that would have been perfectly at home in Russia in 1914 – or in Paris on a cold December night, where I had last seen my beloved.

It was Tatiana.
Posted by Michael on 12.26.03 @ 01:37 PM CST [link]

Stoker Award Nomination

Music: The Gods Enter into Valhalla
Mood: Eternal

"The Vampire's Violin" has been nominated for the HWA Stoker Award! How's that for a Christmas present? Thank you to the Horror Writers of America.
Posted by Michael on 12.25.03 @ 12:23 PM CST [link]

Home for the holidays

Music: Wrap
Mood: Pre-Christmas determination

I have about four hours of present wrapping ahead of me, so there won’t be much of a blog today. May you all have a merry and peaceful Christmas. Come back Friday for the third entry in David Parker’s Journal.
Posted by Michael on 12.24.03 @ 10:14 AM CST [link]

Unstuck in time

Music: The coffee maker
Mood: Dawn

One weird aspect of writing books is the temporal disconnect.

What? Let me explain.

I finished the manuscript for AMERICAN GOTHIC last summer. Now I’m working on the DARK AGES trilogy, though my agent is still ironing out the deal for that. Yesterday, I had to pull my head out of DARK AGES to spend the day making minor revisions to AMERICAN GOTHIC.

As far as I’m concerned, AMERICAN GOTHIC is more than done and in my past. However, for my editor, it’s his current project. For readers, it’s something they’re waiting on and won’t see until next April.

When AMERICAN GOTHIC comes out in the spring, it will be time for me to temporarily abandon DARK AGES – which I’ll be deeply into at that point – and put myself back in the frame of mind I was in about a year earlier while working on AM GOTH, in order to do some promotion for the “new” book.

Sometimes I get so confused…

Selah.


Posted by Michael on 12.23.03 @ 07:56 AM CST [link]

Happy Winter Solstice

Music: Fox News
Mood: Signs of the apocalypse Signs of the apocalypse Signs of the apocalypse

Oh, mama, can this really be the end?

It seems this is a good time to be hunkered down in Iowa, though maybe we’re not safe even here. The terror alert is up. There are extra police on the streets in New York and Washington. Patrols have been stepped up on the Golden Gate Bridge. Flights are being restricted over downtown Chicago. Terrorist paranoia is infecting people headed for football bowl games. At this very moment, the announcer on Fox News is babbling about worry that terrorists will hijack gasoline trucks and crashing them into innocents.

The world has gone mad. We don’t need horror writers scare us out of our wits. Pick up the newspaper or turn on the television.

The truly amazing thing is to realize that today, at the edge of 2004, religious fanaticism has us all wondering where the slaughter will be next. I’m researching a vampire trilogy set in the Dark Ages, but I don’t need to look very hard to find fresh material.

What the hell is wrong with the human race?

* * *

Today is the winter solstice. A day of respite, the astrologers say.

“Change is in the air, but within this movement we can create a day of quiet rest.”

I plan to be home this week and the balance of the next. I shall try to make good use of this opportunity to take stock of my “life and set new priorities.” Mercury is aligning opposite Saturn, promising “a double whammy of responsibility and commitment.”

The shortest day of the year. Today an end; tomorrow a beginning. The great wheel of being begins another revolution.

It’s like Jerry Garcia sang: “If the thunder don’t get you, the lightning will.”

Selah.

Posted by Michael on 12.22.03 @ 10:59 AM CST [link]

David Parker’s Journal: 2

Music: Funeral March
Mood: Danger lurking

It was already dark at 5:30 p.m. The winter solstice arrives three days from now, the shortest day of the year … and the darkest.

Following the blood, listening to its mysterious whispers, if found myself downtown. I have lived in this old river city for the past year. Do not ask me why, because I wouldn’t be able to tell you. Everybody has to be somewhere. I am here.

I turned the corner, the river now behind me. A biting wind blew down off the bluff, my face stinging from the ice crystals in the air. Across the street to the left, an old Catholic church, its walls built of fieldstone that glowed ghostly white in the darkness. On my side of the street, a block of brick buildings dating from the 1800s.

The big building on the corner was an old hotel in the midst of an ambitious renovation that had been abandoned due a lack of funds some years earlier. Inside the first floor, the walls had been knocked down and scaffolding erected to the ceiling, which was bare down to the lathe.

Next to the hotel was the former home of a newspaper, the building now a business of some indeterminate nature. An antique shop was after that. I paused and looked in through the window, leaning into the wind as I turned up my collar. Someone had left a light on in a back room, and it cast just enough illumination to outline the old, dusty relics. Old lamps, tables, tea cups, toys – who buys these things?

The clutter was vaguely ominous: an array of possessions bought new by people long since dead. We are an acquisitive race – humans and vampires alike – yet what meaning do the objects we collect to define ourselves have once we’re gone and only our possessions remain as ghostly reminders?

The next building was three stories of brick with the words “Hibernian Hall” engraved over the doorway. An Irish social club, a small corner of Erin preserved in the new world. Except that now it, too, was nothing but an artifact, a relic left behind by the dead.

I walked on, wondering what it was that kept me out on an unfriendly December night.

A house dating from the 1840s stood apart from the social hall, the space between them wide enough for a man to pass. The front door and windows were boarded with plywood. I could smell the smoke in the air. There had been a fire recently, probably earlier in the day. The sky above the building rolled and roiled so that I thought the fire had rekindled itself until realizing it wasn’t smoke but a large flock of crows turning and turning above the building, darkness animated. A number of their brothers had perched along the edge of the roof. The creatures were as aware of me as I of them; they hopped about on their perches, cocking their heads to look down on me, the black pearls they have for eyes glittering reflections from the streetlight.

What attracted the birds to the burned building? Perhaps they were drawn to disaster. If I were to fall down on the sidewalk, I thought, the bravest birds would drop down beside me for a closer look, hoping for a chance to rip a bit of flesh from my body.

The back of my neck began to tingle.

I whirled around, my defenses up, sensing something -- a person, a thing, a sense of energy in motion.

The sidewalk was empty.

A crow shrieked and in the next moment they were all at it, filling the night sky with their grating song of warning or, perhaps, mockery.

My glance settled on the door leading into Hibernian Hall. I could tell that it was unlocked, which was strange, because ordinarily I notice that sort of thing when passing. (Even best vampire is always, at some perhaps unconscious level, on the hunt.)

In the next instant I realized that the door had been locked before but was now open – an indication, an invitation, for me to come inside.

Who or what waited for me inside?

I reached out with my senses, my thoughts passing effortlessly through the icy bricks, up the darkened staircase to what awaited beyond. I found no tell-tales indicating danger. Even stranger was the fact that I sensed nothing – not even the quick heartbeats of rats living in the walls.

I moved swiftly to the door and reached for the latch.

Posted by Michael on 12.19.03 @ 02:34 PM CST [link]

What Saddam planned to do with that $750,000...

Posted by Michael on 12.19.03 @ 11:06 AM CST [link]

Friday horrorscope

The Moon enters Scorpio, symbolizing our need to uncover the hidden and the mysterious. For those of us accustomed to living on the surface of things, this can be a scary proposition, for we are pushed into strange new territories. But for those of us who are attracted to the deeper and darker aspects of life or who are already on a spiritual path, now it’s time to get busy. There’s work to do in the secret spaces of our own minds. This is an opportunity to transform darkness into light.

David Parker's Journal entry to follow soon...
Posted by Michael on 12.19.03 @ 11:02 AM CST [link]

News From The Front

Music: Solas
Mood: Feeling like Jules after sampling a tasty burger in "Pulp Fiction"

From The Lance, the newspaper of record at North Scott High School:

AUTHOR VISITS CREATIVE WRITING CLASS

By Lindsey Drenter
Reporter

On Nov. 4, Michael Romkey visited Mr. Hennigan’s Creative Writing classes and gave a presentation on his career and his novels, which are about vampires.

Romkey lives in Bettendorf with his wife, Carol, and his three sons. Romkey has written nine books, his most recent entitled, “The Vampire’s Violin.”

The author said that the reason he chose to write about vampires is because “there is a whole group of people who just love to read vampire fiction.”

Romkey says, “Given the belief that everyone has the capacity to learn and improve, it would follow that someone who lived forever would become wiser with time.”

All of his books but the first are about vampires.

“The Vampire’s Violin” tells the story of a vampire with passions for only blood and music. He longs for the music of an enchanted violin he lost years ago, and will do anything to find and play the instrument.”

* * *

To quote Jules quoting Ezekiel 25:17 (though it isn't really 25:17), which I have been wandering around muttering today, in a not especially sunny frame of mind:

"The path of the righteous man is beset on all sides with the iniquities of the selfish and the tyranny of evil men. Blessed is he who in the name of charity and good will shepherds the weak through the valley of darkness, for he is truly his brother's keeper and the finder of lost children. And I will strike down upon those with great vengeance and with furious anger those who attempt to poison and destroy my brothers. And you will know that my name is the Lord when I lay my vengeance upon thee."

* * *

"Pulp Fiction" trivia -- And now, trivia fans, the real Ezekial 25:17:

"And I will execute great vengeance upon them with furious rebukes; and they shall know that I am the Lord, when I shall lay my vengeance upon them."
Posted by Michael on 12.18.03 @ 02:42 PM CST [link]

New book cover is ready! (Well, almost)

Music: Pomp and Circumstance
Mood: Meditative



ABOVE: DRAFT COVER OF MY NEW BOOK, STOLEN FROM FROM AMAZON.COM...

* * *

My lovely bride, Carol, discovered a draft copy of my new book, AMERICAN GOTHIC, this morning at the Amazon website.

As an editor, she was quick to see that the title to my latest book, THE VAMPIRE’S VIOLIN, is slightly mangled. (Gasp!)

My editor assures me this is a draft version of the cover and will be duly corrected. Since I am a newspaper editor by day, I am more than a little familiar with how this sort of thing happens.

* * *

TODAY'S HORRORSCOPE

TAURUS (Apr 20–May 20) -- You are shifting gears as you move into a phase where your imagination will become more important. This can be quite creative, yet there are problems that can arise. Your beliefs can limit your success if you are holding onto unconscious patterns. Look deeply within and clear your subconscious mind of fears that are holding you back from accomplishing the great things you’ve set out to do.

* * *

Ah, yes, the subconscious fear that holds us back…

That is the issue, isn’t it with most of us? We walk through life as if in a waking dream, not noticing to how great a degree fear and anger control us, like puppets dangling from wires. It takes a tremendous effort to recognize these patterns and take away their power to enslave us. That is, come to think of it, the definition of enlightenment.

I am clearing myself subconscious mind of fears now.

I recommend you do the same.

Om...
Posted by Michael on 12.16.03 @ 02:06 PM CST [link]

Don’t bug me while I’m working

Music: Song of the Volga Boatmen
Mood: Bearing down

My editor called from New York. He said he likes the new manuscript, AMERICAN GOTHIC / A VAMPIRE STORY, a lot. However, there were just a couple of small changes he wanted to suggest…

I thought: “Uh oh.”

It turned out Chris was telling the truth. The revisions amount to three sentences.

Hence, the ol’ blog is getting a “lite” entry today. I’ve got to get busy on those three sentences. I am, after all, a professional writer, with revisions to make. Very serious business indeed.

The new book will be out in April, by the way. We’ll share the cover as soon as it’s ready.

Selah.
Posted by Michael on 12.15.03 @ 02:08 PM CST [link]

Whistling past the graveyard

Music: Greatful Dead
Mood: Gnarly


The author and his father visit a family crypt. Alas, there was no room at the inn.
Posted by Michael on 12.15.03 @ 01:54 PM CST [link]

David Parker's Journal: 1

Music: Mozart
Mood: Deep in thought

People pass away,
And the truth of the passing world
Impresses me now and then,
But otherwise my dull
Wits let this truth too pass.

– Saigyo

* * *

I wear black now.

Black is the perfect color for a vampire. Dark, somber, austere. A color that manages to convey a both sense of formality and Bohemianism.

Black is the color Quakers wore, a long time ago, in their attempt to turn their backs on everything frivolous and sensuous in the world.

It is the color priests wear beneath their stiff, starched white dog collars.

Black is the junkie color. It hides telltale pinprick signs of blood leached from a vein when the needle is removed. So it is for the vampire: It is the blood; always the blood.

Ten years of walking with the blood have worked a thousand changes in me, some large, others so small and subtle that I am barely aware of them.

The most recent of these changes is this: The blood had begun to speak to me.

In a sense there is nothing new about this. The blood has called to me ever since Tatiana gave me the Change in Chicago. (That time seems like a century ago…) But those conversations are different from the new one that has started inside my head. When the blood spoke to me in the past, it was always the Hunger talking. The Hunger is about me. My need. My desire. My anger. The Hunger calls me to satisfaction, to erotic pleasure, to power.

This is entirely different – at least I think it is.

The new way the blood speaks to me is like Hunger held up to a mirror. It is as if the object is not me, but others. It is difficult to convey exactly what I mean by this. There are no words for some things – although maybe it is not words that are lacking but understanding.

It is as if the blood is calling me to other people to do something for them.

This both intrigues and frightens me. When vampire and mortal come together and blood is shared, the reward is all on the one side, the risk on the other.

How can drinking the blood of a mortal help them, or hazard them anything but the risk of death? So many have died, may by my hand, victims of the Hunger, of madness.

Maybe this is a new trick of the Hunger, working on me to turn away from all the Illuminati have taught, trying to seduce me into giving myself over to the vampire’s powerful instinct to be a hunter, a predator.

My ultimate fear is that I will be reduced again to the Hunger, to being the beast that is the Hunger’s slave.

Or maybe it is the madness returning…

The blood is speaking to me now. I close my eyes and try to listen, but I can’t quite make out the words. It seems to be different than the Hunger. Indeed, it is nothing like the Hunger, but it is impossible to be certain.

It is four in the morning. Yesterday it rained, the rain turning to sleet and snow as the temperature fell and it became night. It is twenty degrees outside, an overcast sky hiding the stars and moon.

I do not understand what the blood is saying to me now, whispering in its own secret language, but I am compelled to listen. The time has come to turn away from my computer for tonight, put on a coat, and go outside to see where the blood leads me.

Posted by Michael on 12.12.03 @ 07:46 AM CST [link]

Black Thursday

Music: Paint it Black
Mood: Black

I have a poem from a fan I've been saving for a day like this. "Peel the skin/ Burn the bone/ Taint a soul" -- if this doesn't paint a perfect picture of a day at the office, what does?

This is from my friend, Adrienne.

Enjoy.

-- Michael

UN HUMAN

Peel the skin
Burn the bone
Taint a soul
Cry a sympathetic tear for the real
Make sure everyone believes
But in the dark, privacy of your own
Weep for the real you lack
And hate the ones who are
Just want a taste for what a real life tastes like
Just want to know what’s missing
Is it worth missing?
Is it worth the souls we sell to win?
Or is it worth the tears we cry to feel?

Peel the skin
Make sure I feel
Burn the bone
Don’t want to remember
Taint a soul
Don’t want to go down alone
Hope someone understands
So sure of life and laugh at the real
So sad of life, cry for the real
Am I headed to the right direction?
Am I facing the right way?
Want to sacrifice my soul for redemption
Peel back and see if this future’s for me
Then find out I’m not human after all
I feel like a traitor
Promised things that turn to shit
I don’t know if I can keep this up any longer
But if I do, will it be worth it?
Will it work out in the end anyway?

Peel the skin
Burn the bone
Pluck the seed
That lies at my core
Analyze
Then dispose of my remains
That’ll prove I’m not human
Leave me as a pile on the floor
Paralyzed by the void.

Posted by Michael on 12.11.03 @ 06:01 PM CST [link]

Script now downloads

Music: Teeth grinding
Mood: Not insane yet

OK, the script PDF will now download from the SCREENPLAYS section of this site. Those of you who are dying to read the Michael Romkey vampire movie that almost got made are free to have at it. A word of warning: The PDF is 100 pages long. Me, I'm going home and pouring myself a large vodka.
Posted by Michael on 12.10.03 @ 06:13 PM CST [link]

Hi, Jennifer Byrd

Music: The police scanner
Mood: Determined

Hi, Jennifer. I tried to respond to your kind posting in my guest book, but your email bounced back. If you entered it incorrectly (see below) and want get in touch, and I'll forward you the message. Now I ask you people: How many writers who spend their professional lives dreaming up ways to kill people horribly (in books) would go to this amount of trouble? Am I fan-friendly or what? Best, MR

Email: i_vampyre@ hotmail.com
Posted by Michael on 12.10.03 @ 05:27 PM CST [link]

Reading List

Music: Karan Casey
Mood: Experimental

Sitting here on the table from my trip yesterday to Borders are the following:

* “Rosslyn, Guarding of the Secrets of the Holy Grail,” by Tim Wallace-Murphy and Marilyn Hopkins.

* Issue No. 34 of “Renaissance Magazine.”

* “The Da Vinci Code,” by Dan Brown.

* “Preludes and Nocturnes,” Neil Gaiman’s grapic novel.

The first two items are research for the trilogy of vampire books I’m thinking of writing set in the Dark Ages.

My friend Connie Richardson put me onto Rosslyn – unless I had too many glasses of wine the other night at dinner and completely misremembered the chapel she told me about visiting in Scotland, where many secrets are hidden in the architecture, crypts and statues. Connie has a thing for Masons and Templars, and Rosslyn is chok-full-o Templar and Masonic symbols. If there’s an Illuminati conspiracy trying to take over the world with its shadow government, she had it figured out long before any of it occurred to Dan Brown.

I knew I had to have Renaissance Magazine when I flipped it open and read the headline, “Rare Codex Resurfaces.” More research for the new vampire series, and, as such, tax deductible.

I don’t know what to say about Dan Brown’s mega best-seller. Last week I read “Angels & Demons.” It was a real page-turner, as hack book reviewers are wont to say, but the characterization was shallow and the twists of plot utterly improbable. Everybody’s a critic, I guess, maybe even a hack critic, including yours truly. We’ll see how “Code” measures up.

“Preludes” has to go back to Borders because, as it turns out, my wife has already gotten for me as a Christmas present. I’m interested in Gaiman in part because I’ve been thinking about turning my first vampire tale, “I, Vampire,” into a graphic novel. Gaiman started writing comic books and has ended up as a novelist. I started writing novels and may end up writing comic books. Life is filled with crazy symmetry. His website is worth a visit. Here’s the URL: http://www.neilgaiman.com/ .

Selah.



Posted by Michael on 12.10.03 @ 12:45 PM CST [link]

Pacific Ghost Highway

Music: Warren Zevon
Mood: One pot of coffee over the line

Looking for a Christmas present for that hard-to-shop-for person? May I suggest a visit to the Los Angeles County Coroner’s gift shop?

The shop, located in a corner room on the second floor of the LA County/USC Medical Center, rakes in $300,000 a year selling a selection of macabre souvenirs.

You can get a red corpse-toe ID tag with your name on it – or better yet, your boss’ name – for $5. Or maybe a garment bag that looks like a body bag, or one of the shop’s “cutting edge” office products, like an L.A. County Coroner mouse pads that declares, “We’re dying for your business.”

The shop also sells coroner windbreakers, coffee mugs, doormats and beach towels decorated with the outlined bodies. And, my favorite, plastic skulls that dispense business cards via a spring-loaded jaw.

Tasteful.

The shop is a natural final destination for people taking the L.A. death tour, visiting the places where folks like John Belushi, Marilyn Monroe and Robert F. Kennedy expired.

Not planning at trip to LA in the near future? There’s always the shop’s website, http://lacstores.co.la.ca.us/coroner/.

Be sure to tell them I sent you.

* * *

Xmas autography: If you would like a book autographed as a Christmas present, send it, along with a stamped, self-addressed envelope, to: Michael Romkey, c/o The Dispatch, 1720 5th Ave., Moline, Ill. 61265. Be sure to include the name of the person for whom it's being signed.

* * *

Selah.
Posted by Michael on 12.09.03 @ 10:58 AM CST [link]

How I Spent My Weekend

Music: The Wedding March
Mood: Relief

“Bad food is probably the best you can hope for at a wedding.”

I wish I’d said that. The friend I was corresponding with about this past weekend hit the nail exactly on the head. Weddings can be horrific experiences, so who is going to complain much about a substandard pork chop?

We are beginning to decompress at our household after a family wedding. Only one houseguest remains from the festivities. After a trip to the airport tomorrow afternoon, life will return to its familiar old pattern. Why, I might even have time to upload a new photo of my father and I visiting a family crypt last week.

Cultural propaganda would have us believe that all women adore weddings. The opening quote, supplied by an astute female, proves this is not universally true.

I approach weddings with a healthy measure of dread. Anytime you bring far-flung family members back together from around the globe, you’re engaging in a dangerous chemistry experiment. Even in the most civilized families, a wedding – or a funeral – represents the potential for disastrous combinations of air, fire, water and earth. It’s like going into your grandmother’s tool shed, opening all the cans and jars you can find there on the cobweb-covered shelves (many decorated with the popular skull-and-crossbones motif), and empting the contents into a bucket because you’re curious to learn what will happen when you mix it all together – and then maybe throw in a lighted match.

A wedding is an excellent opportunity for bitter accusations, angry tears, tearing open scabbed-over resentments, public humiliations, and the ever-popular temper-induced stroke. Waiting in the wings at every wedding is the potential for volcanic eruptions of long-buried psychological angst of the sort that sends people diving for the nearest meat cleaver. It can all lead to arrest, a jury trial, and the ultimate horror, a featured appearance on a sleazy Court TV crime drama. Imagine having yourself portrayed in tonight’s episode of “I Slaughtered The Bride.”

I'm happy to say our family wedding went off without a hitch. Indeed, it was pleasant, even joyful. My family made the decision, on some collective subconscious level, to relax and go with the flow. To my knowledge there was nary a harsh word spoken, not even to the smiling waitresses who served us sub-par food at the wedding supper.

Sometimes the angels of our better nature win one.
Posted by Michael on 12.08.03 @ 06:07 PM CST [link]

Necro tour II

Music: A crackling fire
Mood: Ready for my run

It did snow yesterday, but not until late, so we easily survived the necro tour of family grave plots without cracking up on the highway.

If you take a walk through any cemetery that has been around for a couple of hundred years, you can see the evolution in the way society thinks about death.

The newest graves, occupied by some of my distant relatives, are marked by nothing more than flat bronze markers that sit flush with the ground. Instead of looking out from your car and seeing hulking granite markers with family names carved in them, it’s more like you’re looking across a golf course. You get out and wander around, scanning names until you find the one you want.

If this trend in burying the dead is to be more harmonious with nature, to blend the life and death of the individual into the greater whole, then good enough. I suspect the flat-marker fields have more to do with saving money and our general inability to deal with death. A monument to a dead person is, in a way, a monument to Death, a heavy, expensive, three-dimensional reminder that mom and dad were mortal, and so are you, so just wait. To quote one of my favorite epitaphs: “As you are, I was; as I am, you will be.”

My grandparents’ graves, which are from the early 1960s, are marked with a nice big granite marker that says “Romkey.” The individual graves have the metal plaques. My father’s is already waiting for him; all the grave needs the is for the dates to filled in and a casket dropped into a hole. I thought about asking him to lie down on the grass for a picture, but it was sleeting and we were going to lunch afterward our visit to those Romkeys now taking the Big Sleep.

The original Romkey plot is farther back in Aspen Grove Cemetery, overlooking Peaceful Valley Drive.

The farther back you go in time, the fancier the graves become, and our family's graves are no exception. My relatives in this spot all died between the early 1900s and the 1930s. There’s a big granite marker with our family name, then individual granite markers for each person, including my aunt, who died the day she was born. No cheap metal signs for the graves of these stalwart prairie individualists! The outline for the plot is marked by four granite cubes, each engraved with the initial “R.”

My favorite family grave is a little further on, an enormous limestone mausoleum where my great-great aunt Anna is buried. She married into the Andre family, so that’s the name on the mortuary temple. The Andres were in the shoe business. Apparently, there was a lot of money in shoes back in the 1880s.

My first reaction to Aunt Anna’s mausoleum was to wonder why anybody in their right mind would spend so much money on a place to park their casket. But the more I thought about it, the more sense in made. You’re only alive a short time, but you’re dead forever.

My father said you used to be able to go into the mausoleum and look at the crypts, but these days the doors are lag-bolted shut. I thought about asking the cemetery to send someone over to open it up so we could pay our proper respects, but it was sleeting. I’ll save that for another day.

The windows that probably were once stained glass have been filled in with cement, to keep out vandals, or maybe after they were broken out. The limestone is beginning to flake. Even stone wears down with time. And so it seems, nothing lasts. Any Buddhist would tell you the same: Nothing lasts, everything is ultimately unsatisfactory, and ultimately all are one. Standing in a graveyard on a December day with the sleet falling down and the foggy sky coming lower by the minute, it seemed to make perfect sense.
Posted by Michael on 12.05.03 @ 03:30 PM CST [link]