question corner Vol.1
Welcome to the first of our monthly Question Corner features! I appreciate everyone who asked a question and hope more people have burning questions about anything. Ask away on my IG or Twitter, both of which are linked in the drop down menu on the top left. You can ask via comment, dm, email, whatever is easiest for you. I’m going to put a song to listen to at the end of each article too, because why not? Now let’s get into it.
Q1. - Why you hate T-Pain so much? From AG (NJ)
A.1 - Thanks for the question! It’s a funny story. I’m pretty sure it was 2018 but it might’ve been 2019. My girlfriend was staying at a Sheraton (which is annoying because why is there a Sheraton hotel and a Sheridan hotel?) in Brooklyn, the one around Jay Street. I was picking her up and for whatever reason the elevator had this really stylized lighting where the car is dark and there’s just purple lighting in strips at the top and bottom, so it looks really cool. The only reason I mention this is because T-Pain and two big, baldheaded, Johnny Bravo-built bodyguards get on too. It’s a big elevator but you can’t help but notice them, and T-Pain has on these huge, twinkling chains with charms, diamonds dancing in the purple light and everything. Some of the brightest chains I’ve ever seen. He also has aviator sunglasses that take up 70% of his face, so between those and the dark I’m not 100% sure it’s T-Pain. I like features like Good Life and Maybach Music III and a handful of his solo music but I was never a big fan of the music so I’m not just recognizing T-Pain off rip. It’s also a random Sheraton, not the Ritz; part of me didn’t believe he was staying at the same hotel my girlfriend and her family was staying at. So I’m just kinda like “Yo T-Pain?” just to confirm that it was him. What you have to understand is I’m from New York where you see celebrities fairly often. I try to be respectful, so I don’t speak to celebrities that look busy, I don’t ask for pictures or anything unless they offer for the most part, usually I just kinda tell ‘em I like whatever they do and keep it pushing. I don’t make scenes either. I thought my question was fairly innocuous seeing as we were stuck on a long elevator ride down. He goes, “WE’RE JUST TWO PEOPLE IN AN ELEVATOR MAN, TWO PEOPLE IN AN ELEVATOR.” I was too confused to even get mad at that very moment. I thought to myself, I know he wasn’t talking to me. I know he wasn’t being rude to me. What made the situation worse is these two old white ladies got on maybe a floor later and he’s making small talk with them! I was mad as hell I should’ve caved his chest in.
Q.2 - Who are the main characters? 😃 From Nayika (UK/FL)
A.2 - Excellent question. Actually this is the most important question I’ve gotten regarding the book, right after the backstory of my feud with T-Pain. Without spoiling anything, I’ll say there are two characters who are the most central to the events in this book and going forward, and will probably make the most appearances in any related works. We have Jahari Jones, a Haitian American psychic who works for a shadowy organization dedicated to protecting the public from the forces of the paranormal and occult. He’s looking for the truth behind a series of child sacrifices that were perpetrated by a cult decades ago, a cult that’s recently resurfaced. We also have Moriko Miyazaki who’s Japanese American. She’s trying to shed some light on the circumstances involving her father’s suicide in a famously haunted Japanese forest. How they meet or even if they meet will be answered in the pages of Hecatomb of The Vampire! This series is going to put them through Hell, so you’ll have to read it all to see if they survive! Will they uncover the truth? Read and find out for yourself soon.
Also there’s a TON of additional information on the characters appearing in HOTV (this acronym looks crazy) in the Secret File. If you sign up for our mailing list you get the link and password emailed to you, so please consider doing that! There’s lots of cool stuff in there, including music, character art, behind the scenes info, and an interview with the artist for the book.
Q3. - What are your favorite short stories or books that have inspired you? From Zay (AL)
Amazing question, a question that could be many separate articles honestly. The two most important books that inspired HOTV are probably Salem’s Lot by Stephen King and Queen of The Damned by Anne Rice, for very specific reasons. I forget the exact circumstances that lead me to read Salem’s Lot, my mother must’ve recommended it to me. It was probably of my first non-R.L. Stine horror book (shout out R.L. he’s a hero), and it was genuinely scary. There’s a few scenes involving the Marsten House that come to mind that have stuck with me to this day. I’ve read that book a billion times, but there are two elements that really stuck with me and translated to my writing and this book especially. The first was how strong King’s character writing is. There’s probably a dozen, if not more, unique and distinct character perspectives in the book, and that really inspired me. I’ve always thought that having strong characters that people can connect with is even more important than a good narrative. Obviously you wouldn’t want to chose one over the other but I’ve seen series with really strong characters that elevated a simple story to grand heights. So in reading Salem’s Lot I got a good idea of how to make each character’s voice distinct and easily identifiable, and I hope that I was able to internalize that skill.
In writing this article I realized how crappy the cover of my copy was compared to others, I’m just going to show the cool ones.
Queen of The Damned is so genius in its structure. Now I have to put an asterisk because I don’t think I ever actually read Interview With A Vampire, the first book in the trilogy. There’s a slim chance that I did, or maybe I used Wikipedia or something. Sacrilegious, I know. Blame my mother. These books were another recommendation of hers and she said Interview was a bore, plus I didn’t actually have that book; I only had The Vampire Lestat and QOTD. But what those two, probably all three, books achieved is a masterful execution of long form storytelling. There’s something about how Anne Rice weaves all the plotlines and characters together that is really awe inspiring. QOTD is special because it’s the main point of interaction and interest between all these elements and it really climaxes in a satisfying way (no freaky.) I think I wanted to recreate the feeling I had when everything came together in QOTD when I decided that my short stories would no longer be standalone stories but rather one cohesive story in 5 parts.
I think books influenced me more in the structure of my writing. If you want to be a writer you have to read actual books, it’s non-negotiable. Books taught me how to go about writing, whereas movies, comics, etc. influenced me more in what kind of stories I wanted to tell. My influences from other forms of media will definitely be an article soon.
My copy had the movie cover with Aaliyah on it. Still not the best cover but at least I really like Aaliyah.
Q4. - How do you feel about your fight choreography? Do you have a particular character you like to write fights for? From Aaron (GA)
A4. - Great question! Thanks for asking! I think my fight choreography is pretty decent but has more room to be showcased in some of my later works. As of this moment I’m pretty far into the sequel to Hecatomb of the Vampire and there’s more and more fighting as the series goes on. In this first book there’s a lot more cat and mouse going on, so what I try to establish is how certain characters use their heads in a combat situation, especially when one character is clearly outmatched by another physically. Of course, there are fight scenes in the book, and I think they’re good at illustrating what I want the audience to know about the characters through the fight. I like watching boxing and other combat sport breakdowns for this, and sometimes I’ll look at war tactics. My favorite character to write a fight for is probably the vampire. There’s a sort of brutality that comes with the way it fights that is fun to write, it’s a predatory style of fighting. A vampire is sophisticated in its savagery and used to fighting beings weaker than itself, so I tried to reflect that in those scenes. Jahari is fun to write fights for, because of the nature of his powers. Psychokinesis is the same as telekinesis, meaning he can manipulate matter with his mind. The idea is that he was trained to use his powers in combat as an extension of his body, so he has a background in martial arts principles that involve the use a lot of follow through, a lot of extension of the limbs, and using force and the redirection of force. This is something I tried to show in the way he fights rather than to specifically detail it in the book. At the same time if I was directing a show or something visual based on the character, there would be a lot of moves that were based on those principles. When I write Jahari’s fights they’re all very momentum heavy, stuff that involves heavy, deliberate strikes, boxing, throws, even some wrestling. Whatever you would call his style would be “hard style.” The Raid films come to mind when I think of something that exemplifies that.
And just like that we’ve completed our first Question Corner! Thank you everyone for submitting questions and for reading. Keep the questions coming everyone. And like a wolf’s howl during a full moon, Hecatomb of The Vampire is coming soon…
