Jeri Smith-Ready

Bring on the Night

Yesterday I turned in the rewrite for Bring on the Night (WVMP Book #3 and sequel to Bad to the Bone). I spent the last seventeen days working 10-12-hours a day on it,* so I've been living (and unliving) with these vampires almost every waking moment since Thanksgiving.

To ease myself out of Sherwood and back into the bright, shiny, scary palce called "reality," my first post-Bring on the Night blog entry will be about...Bring on the Night.

Official release date: August 1, 2010. You can already pre-order it at Amazon. And check out the spiffy fake cover--much better than the old "No Image Available" option. (I haven't seen the cover art at all yet, but I'm sure it's cool.)

Bring on the Night will be released in recession-friendly mass market paperback. Speaking of which, Bad to the Bone will be reissued in mass market on February 22, with a Bring on the Night "teaser" first chapter that is no longer the first chapter (rewrites, you know).

What it's about: The usual WVMP gang of vampire DJs, picking up two-and-a-half years after the end of Bad to the Bone.

We've got a near-final version of the back cover copy. I'm particularly psyched about this one, because my editor and I wrote it ourselves.

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Recovering con artist Ciara Griffin seems to finally have it all: A steady job at WVMP, the Lifeblood of Rock ‘n’ Roll. A loving relationship with the idiosyncratic yet eternally hot DJ Shane McAllister. A vampire dog who never needs shots or a pooper-scooper. And after nine years, it looks like she might actually finish her bachelor’s degree!

But fate has other plans for Ciara. First she must fulfill her Faustian bargain with the Control, the paranormal paramilitary agency that does its best to keep vampires in line. Turns out the Control wants her for something other than her (nonexistent) ability to kick undead ass. Her anti-holy blood, perhaps? Ciara’s suspicions are confirmed when she’s assigned to a special ops division known as the Immanence Corps, run by the Control’s oldest vampire and filled with humans who claim to have special powers.

To a confirmed skeptic like Ciara, it sounds like a freak fest. But when a mysterious, fatal virus spreads through Sherwood—and corpses begin to rise from their graves—Ciara will not only get a crash-course in zombie-killing, but will be forced to put her faith—and even her life itself—in the hands of magic.

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As part of my culture shock therapy, I spent last night putting together the Bring on the Night chapter title songs playlist. It's not final--I will definitely be changing a few in the copyedit stage.

Some notes:

1) Most of the songs fit the chapters better than in the two previous books. B y that I mean the lyrics and mood, as well as the title, should resonate with the story. This makes it more of a soundtrack than previous chapter title collections. They don't tell the story, but there's a bit of extra truth in each one.

2) No Nirvana. Shocker! Everything about this book is a little different from Wicked Game and Bad to the Bone, right down to the music. Instead of ending with a Nirvana song as usual, I chose to frame the book with Neil Young & Crazy Horse's two versions of "Hey Hey My My," Out of the Blue and Into the Black. Kurt Cobain quoted the line, "It's better to burn out than fade away" in his suicide note, so his spirit still haunts the soundtrack. (The song also includes the phrase "Rock 'n' roll can never die," one of the WVMP series taglines. Bonus! And there's also a line about Johnny Rotten, who sings the song "Rise" (with Public Image Ltd.), which comes a few chapters earlier. Self-referential bonus!)

3) More songs from this decade. By the time the book takes place (and comes out), the 00's will be over. And they'll have their very own DJ to represent them on WVMP.

So here it is! Enjoy trying to figure out the plot from the chapter titles. Or just enjoy the music.





Missing tunes (unavailable from Playlist.com):
"How Many More Years," Howlin' Wolf
"Help Me," Sonny Boy Williamson
"Sugar and Spice," The Searchers
Also, "Home of the Blues" should be Johnny Cash, and "All That Heaven Will Allow" should be Bruce Springsteen.

I hope to fix these holes by replacing the playlist with an iTunes iMix, as soon as I figure out how to do that. Definitely on my 2010 to-do list.


*Lest you scoff, thinking, "Pah, I stay at my desk until 7pm all the time," I don't mean I sit down to work and then get up ten hours later to spend a few hours leisure before I go to bed. I mean 10-12 hours as measured by a timer, which gets paused when I check e-mail, walk the dog, get food, take a bathroom break (or, more rarely, a shower). So a 12-hour day for me runs from 8am to midnight.

Labels: music, vampire series

• posted by Jeri @ 9:12 AM
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