Kathryn Meyer Griffith, Author of Human No Longer Chats About the Inspiration Behind the Story

Friday, January 11, 2013

By Emeraldfire at 6:00 AM
Meet Kathryn Meyer Griffith

Since childhood I’ve always been an artist and worked as a graphic designer in the corporate world and for newspapers for twenty-three years before I quit to write full time. I began writing novels at 21, over forty years ago now, and have had seventeen (ten romantic horror, two romantic SF horror, one romantic suspense, one romantic time travel, one historical romance and two murder mysteries) previous novels, two novellas and twelve short stories published from Zebra Books, Leisure Books, Avalon Books, The Wild Rose Press, Damnation Books/Eternal Press and Amazon Kindle Direct.

I’ve been married to Russell for almost thirty-five years; have a son, James, and two grandchildren, Joshua and Caitlyn, and I live in a small quaint town in Illinois called Columbia, which is right across the JB Bridge from St. Louis, Mo. We have three quirky cats, ghost cat Sasha, live cats Cleo and Sasha (Too), and the five of us live happily in an old house in the heart of town. Though I’ve been an artist, and a folk singer in my youth with my brother Jim, writing has always been my greatest passion, my butterfly stage, and I’ll probably write stories until the day I die…or until my memory goes.

Her published novels & short stories:

Evil Stalks the Night (Leisure, 1984; Damnation Books, 2012)
The Heart of the Rose (Leisure, 1985; Eternal Press Author’s Revised Edition 2010)
Blood Forge (Leisure, 1989; Damnation Books Author’s Revised Edition, 2012)
Vampire Blood (Zebra, 1991; Damnation Books Author’s Revised Edition, 2011)
The Last Vampire (Zebra, 1992; Damnation Books Author’s Revised Edition 2010)
Witches (Zebra, 1993; Damnation Books Author’s Revised Edition 2011)
The Nameless One (short story in 1993 Zebra Anthology Dark Seductions; Damnation Books Author’s Revised Edition, 2011)
The Calling (Zebra, 1994; Damnation Books Author’s Revised Edition, 2011)
All Things Slip Away (Avalon Books Murder Mystery, 2006…Amazon Kindle Direct ebook & paperback 2013)
Egyptian Heart (The Wild Rose Press, 2007; Author’s Revised Edition, Eternal Press 2011)
Winter’s Journey (The Wild Rose Press, 2008; Author’s Revised Edition, Eternal Press 2011)
The Ice Bridge (The Wild Rose Press, 2008; Author’s Revised Edition, Eternal Press 2011)
Don’t Look Back, Agnes novella & bonus short story: In This House (2008; ghostly romantic short story out; Eternal Press 2012)
BEFORE THE END: A Time of Demons (Damnation Books 2010)
The Woman in Crimson (Eternal Press 2010)
The Complete Guide to Writing Paranormal Fiction: Volume 1 (I did the Introduction)
4 Spooky Short Stories (Amazon Kindle 2012)
Telling Tales of Terror (I did the chapter on Putting the Occult into your Fiction)
Dinosaur Lake (from Amazon Kindle Direct 2012)
Human No Longer (Amazon Kindle 2013)
Scraps of Paper – Revised Author’s Edition (Avalon Books Murder Mystery, 2003; Amazon Kindle ebook 2013)

Synopsis from Shelfari: Jenny and Jeff Sanders become victims of a bizarre crime; leaving Jeff dead and Jenny in a temporary coma. She returns to her children. With Jeff’s death she must move back to her childhood home, a haunted farmhouse, in Summer Haven, Florida, where once they destroyed a family of vampires. 

Jenny has no appetite. She’s edgy. Her eyes hurt. She thinks it could be trauma or grief. Until one night she can’t resist the night woods or the overpowering urge to drink warm animals’ blood–and accepts the truth. Her attackers were vampires. 

Now she’s becoming what she once reviled. She can’t abandon her children but must find a way to live in the human world. At night she hunts, in the day hides what she’s becoming and attempts to fit in. 

Then townspeople begin dying. Like years before. With her blackouts, she fears she may be the killer, or is it her vampire attackers? For they've found her and demand she joins them–or her family will die. She resists until they kidnap her children. Then she has to find a way to outwit and ultimately destroy them.

Coming to Amazon on 27 December 2012!

I would like to welcome Kathryn Meyer Griffith, author of Human No Longer to Emeraldfire's Bookmark. Ms. Griffith was kind enough to write a guest post for me and here it is below in her own words:

'Human No Longer Backstory'
by Kathryn Meyer Griffith

Human No Longer. It’s my 17th published book – yeah! – and my fourth vampire novel. First, let me tell you where I got the idea for it. About five years ago, I was still trying to please the agent (who I no longer have) who’d sold four of my earlier paperback novels to Zebra in the 1990’s and, because she didn’t seem to like any of my new potential concepts, I asked her what she would like to see. Out of nowhere, she said, “You know your 1991 Zebra vampire novel, Vampire Blood? I liked that one a lot. The characters. Well, how about writing me a sort of sequel with basically the same cast, but with this premise: A woman, a mother, after being turned into a bloodthirsty vampire, must learn to adapt to the human world and still be a good mother. You know, how would she deal with everything when she had children she loved; didn’t want to hurt or leave them…but still had the need to feed on blood? Still had all the urges and desires of a vampire?"

Yikes. I hated the idea but, to please her, I went ahead and begrudgingly wrote the book. I tentatively called it The Vampire’s Children or The Vampire Mother or something like that. I finished it. Not too happy with it. I had never liked writing what other people wanted me to write. Stubborn, I guess.

My agent, in the meantime, had begun her own online erotic (which I don’t much care to write) publishing company and when I’d gotten done with the novel she was too busy to even read the finished book. She handed it off to an apprentice intern. An intern? What? Who didn’t like it at all. Duh. So, disgusted, I tucked the file away on my computer and, fed up with the whole agent thing, returned to writing what I wanted to write. An end of days novel called A Time of Demons and a new vampire novel where the evil vampire wasn’t a mother. In 2010 I went with a new publisher, Kim Richards at Damnation Books/Eternal Press, and she contracted not only those two books but asked me if I’d like to rewrite, update and rerelease all 7 of my older out-of-print Leisure and Zebra paperbacks going back to 1984. Heck yes, I said! So for the next 2 years I was busy doing that. Some of those books were over twenty-five years old and very outdated. Their rewriting, editing and rereleasing took a lot of work and time.

Then, in late 2012, I decided to take a very old book of mine (Predator) which was contracted to Zebra Paperbacks in 1993 but, in the end, never actually released, and just for the heck of it, as my 16th novel, self-publish it to Amazon Kindle Direct. Just in ebook form. A kind of grand experiment. The first time I’ve ever tried self-publishing. See how it’d sell. Dinosaur Lake. A story about a hungry mutant dinosaur loose in the waters of Crater Lake that goes on a rampage. Hey, I wrote Dinosaur Lake before Jurassic Park, the book, ever came out! Really. I had my cover artist, Dawne Dominique make a cover for it…and it was stunning with a dinosaur roaring on the front. And I did everything else myself. Editing. Proofing. Formatting. With forty years and endless publishers behind me I felt I was capable. 

And it’d been selling so well I decided to self-publish another one…and I remembered the mother/vampire book. Hmmm. So I revamped (ha, ha, inside joke), polished, and self-published it, as well. I retitled it Human No Longer. Got my fabulous cover artist, Dawne Dominique, to make me a lovely haunting cover with a troubled-looking woman standing outside a spooky house, with two children behind her in its shadows, on the front and voila! All in all, I don’t think the book turned out half bad. In fact, with the changes I made I think it’s not bad at all. Now I just hope my readers will like it.

So that’s the story of Human No Longer. My 17th published novel.***

Also, I have four audio books available now at Audible.com and Amazon.com…Dinosaur Lake, Witches-Revised, The Last Vampire-Revised, Egyptian Heart and Four Spooky Short Stories. Human No Longer will be an audible book, as well, by the end of 2013.

****

All of Kathryn Meyer Griffith’s Books are also available at Amazon here: http://www.amazon.com/s/ref=nb_sb_noss_1?url=search-alias%3Dstripbooks&field-keywords=Kathryn+Meyer+Griffith


May you read well and often
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