Book Two, Blood Loss, is officially out as of today. The launch of this one has been a lot less clunky than how things were for Book One, but it hasn’t been without its problems. Much of last year was spent learning just what worked and what didn’t — and to be honest, I’m still figuring some of that out — so this time around, I was able to skip past some unnecessary things and be more focused. I eventually realized that that was what was making me feel somewhat overwhelmed last week as I was pulling everything together: I was condensing a bunch of disparate techniques that I’d worked out over the course of several months into just a couple of weeks. And because some of those things rely on outside companies to do stuff on their end, not everything can happen all at once, and some of it is out of my control. As of now, the Where to Buy page lists all the places where Blood Loss can be purchased (including this site if you want the Director’s Cut of the audiobook), and it will be updated as more retailers go live.
As I was thinking about the monumental task of pulling together all these various ways of doing things, I was reminded that writing Blood Loss felt kind of like that as well. It’s a very different book from the other two volumes in the trilogy, and intentionally so. Rather than being narrated by Ray, whom we already know isn’t the most reliable narrator in the world, instead what we have are lots of different narratives strung together, some of them journal entries, clippings, and all sorts of random elements that are part of the bigger story of the entire trilogy. (Two of the biggest inspirations for this book were Bram Stoker’s Dracula and Anne Rice’s The Queen of the Damned.) In fact, most of the stories made their way into this volume simply because they were the ones that Ray couldn’t tell. To him and the rest of the vampires, nearly all of their victims were these anonymous, unimportant nobodies, just casualties in their selfish, murderous game. Now we get to find out just who these people were, what mattered to them, and who their families were. Some of the tales are dark, some less so, and the points of view vary quite a bit, as do the lengths of the chapters. (Yes, there are chapters this time.)
Overall, this book is the shortest of the trilogy, a little over half the length of Young Blood. Quite a few people have commented on the massive length of that first book, something I’m well aware of. And yet, every single thing that’s in there is there for a reason, even if it’s not immediately apparent. My hope is that as a reader goes through Blood Loss, they’ll start to see some of those reasons, things revealed and questions answered, maybe even ones they didn’t think to ask. Some of the characters are ones to be identified with and to feel sorry for, others to fear or despise. And again, that applies to the bigger picture as well, as Blood Loss in a sense reframes the events of Young Blood, inviting the reader to re-examine the stories that were told. It also sets things up for the next volume, hinting at what’s to come. We’re only about halfway through the darkness at this point, and I hope you'll have the courage to continue the journey with me.