The Series That Will Never Die

Insider secrets of WINGS IN THE NIGHT

VIDEO VERSION OF THIS POST

TEXT VERSION BELOW

First the backstory

*When I was a little girl my parents would go to these auctions and come home with huge boxes of comic books. I always took out all the horror comics and let my little siblings have the rest. Okay, sometimes, I got into Archie and even Sabrina, but mostly, I was about the horror. This might've been a clue.

*For my entire childhood, as far as I recall, every Sunday afternoon at 2 pm, on WSYR, a local Syracuse NY channel––maybe an ABC affiliate, but I'm unsure––they ran "Monster Movie Matinee." What a work of art that was! They'd show a horror flick, yeah, but in between breaks, there were these skits by Dr. Witty, a vampire we think, and Epal, his Renfield. We never saw anything more than Dr. Witty's right hand. The opening was an extreme close-up of a miniature hillside with a cemetary, up a twisting path to an old, scary house. They built it right in the studio. This is local legend.

The clip below has a version of the opening but you can find better ones, with the mist rising from the tombstones. This one, however, has a bit of the hosts' ongoing storyline.

I loved Monster Movie Matinee. This was my childhood.

*I used to watch Dark Shadows with my mom. I could not wait for Dark Shadows every weekday, and I was mesmerized by Barnabas Collins. It ran from 1966 when I was only two years old, to 1971 when I was 9.

I have no comment on the remake.

Onward.

*In second or third grade, when I was 8 or 9 years old, the teacher would read to us every day after lunch––or maybe before lunch, I don't know, it's been REDACTED years.

I just know we students got to pick the stories. My turn came, and I chose The Tell Tale Heart by Edgar Allan Poe. I don't know how I got turned onto Poe at age eight, but I suspect it was from watching Vincent Price films on Monster Movie Matinee.

As my teacher began to read the opening lines, I recited them from memory, as I think I still can. Not looking here:

Nervous, true, dreadfully nervous, I was and still am. But why will you say that I am mad? The disease had heightened my senses, not dulled, not destroyed them. I heard all things in heaven. I heard many things in hell.

Is that close? I think that's pretty damn close.

Mom got a note home.

ANYway....

It was clear that I was into the macabre from the very very start. So when I started writing fiction, my attention was drawn in that direction. Of course it was.

Everyone I knew (none of whom had the first clue about writing for a living) told me I should start with short stories because it would be easier than a novel.

And so I wrote this vampire short story. I was also writing other stories and submitting to places like Women's World Magazine. I got a lot of encouraging notes back from editors saying, "This was was close, just not quite right. You're a good writer. Please try us again."

In case some aspiring authors out there don't know, that's a very good sign. Usually you get a form letter with a hastily scrawled signature.

I had written a couple of novels by then. They were sitting under the desk, stacks of printed pages, with rough edges from where I ripped off the tractor feed holes, and performated tops where I'd separated one long sheet into 400 or so individual ones.

They'd been rejected by every publisher in the universe, of which there were a a handful. One was A Heart for Any Fate in which a virginal fresh-off-the-farm but now in the big city secretary is framed for embezzling by her boss. She's sent on a business trip, and arrested by a handsome cop who has to escort her back to stand trial.

So that's the setup.

And then their plane crashes in the Rockies, and the entire body of the book is a survival story, in which the hero is too injured to do much good, and the heroine has to keep them alive, fight off a mountain lion, and save the hero's ass. This was the eighties, folks, I was writing very progressive shit.

They're rescured near the end, and they go back, and we return full-on into the resolution of the suspense part of the plot.

It's like if you took the beginning and end of one book, and fit them around the middle of an entirely different book. So that was the first one. A practice book.

The second effort was Saba Spice, set almost entirely on a cruise ship, despite that I've never been on a cruiseship in my life unless you count a three-hour-cruise around Boston Harbor on a double decker tourboat. It was raining, so we all crowded into the lower level where the Sterno burner fumes were suffocating, and they kept going the whole three hours

So yeah, very little cruise experience.

Anyway, in this book a numismatist in a fedora (and that was his entire personality. He was the guy in the hat.) Anyway, he teams up with my heroine to solve the crime of some stolen ancient coins. I mean, it probably had some moments.

The third was called Moonfire, in which a crazy person was hiding in my heroine's shed, but wasn't really the bad guy, and the legendary "Beast of the Labrador" is involved. I think they might've been trying to put a nuclear waste site in a small town, and the bigwigs were playing dirty.

That's is the one I've gone back and rewritten the most times. And I'm still not convinced I can't save it one day. (I can't.)

But I switched to short stories, because they were easier, you'll recall, and wrote a little story called Twilight Phantasies, which I sent to the handful of magazines that still published fiction.

By the way, title came from the poem Adonais by Percy Bysshe Shelly about the death of John Keats. Part of the 13th stansa reads:

Desires and Adorations,

       Winged Persuasions and veil'd Destinies,

       Splendours, and Glooms, and glimmering Incarnations

       Of hopes and fears, and twilight Phantasies;

       And Sorrow, with her family of Sighs,

       And Pleasure, blind with tears, led by the gleam

       Of her own dying smile instead of eyes

Anyway, one of the fiction magazines offered to publish the story.

Just as soon as I sent them $35 for a subscription, since they only published works by subscribers. Which is the definition of "Pay to play."

Babe in the woods and virgin writer that I was, I was still too savvy for that.

A Line is Born

Then, something amazing happened. Silhouette Books, who'd rejected Saba Spice and Moonfire and A Heart for Any Fate, announced that they were starting a paranormal line. And I knew it was just for me.

I dove back into my short story and built it into a novel. And then I sent it off to Silhouette.

My process back then, was to start a new story as soon as I returned from the post office after mailing one out. This is because if you're working on a new one, there's still hope when you start gathering rejection letters from the last one you sent out.

Melissa Senate, my first editor, told me the following tale later on. The company had freelance editors who read through the "slush pile" of submissions, and then passed them on to the acquiring editors with a note or summary attached and a recommendation to buy or pass.

Melissa received Twilight Phantasies with just such a note, and it read, "Pass! Am I the only woman in American who doesn't want to have sex with a vampire?"

To which Melissa replied, "Yes. Yes, I think you are." And then she read it anyway.

She wanted to buy it. She went to her boss, Executive Editor Leslie Wainger, and told her she wanted to buy it, even though it needed a few revisions.

Leslie said no. You can't buy from a new author until AFTER they've done revisions. I guess some people can revise and some can't. So I had to prove myself.

Melissa wrote me a long, thoughtful letter, telling me all this, and what I needed to do. You see, I had a whole subplot going with the hero's best friend, Roland. And I needed to cut most of it and keep the focus on the Eric and Tamara, the hero and heroine.

I loved Roland, and grieved his loss, but I cut him mercilessly all the same. While I was doing this, I sent Melissa my just finished romantic suspense, Reckless Angel, which as you know, she bought for the Intimate Moments line. Then I did the revisions on Twilight Phantasies, and sent it in, and she bought that too, for Silhouette Shadows.

The way it went down, Reckless Angel was my first published novel, beating Twilight Phantasies by a month or two. But to me, Twilight Phantasies was first. She'd seen it and she wanted it, we just hadn't signed on the dotted line yet.

At one point in the process, I worked up the nerve to complain about having to cut so much of Roland from TP. You know what she said?

"What are you worried about? Just save it for the sequel."

Sequel? Sequel. SEQUEL!

That's how innocent I was. I hadn't even thought of writing a sequel! She was planning to buy the sequel from me!

And when I received the cover, there was what they called a "series flash" on it––a little logo representing your book series. It was a little black bat with a red circle and the words "Wings in the Night" inside. Sorry the quality is so bad. It was thirty years ago. The gold parts along the top were raised foil!

I was stunned. I had a series! I had a series with a name and a flash! What? And look at that cover, and notice how there's no reflection of Eric in the mirror. See? See? His head should be right between her neck and the lamp. But it's not! Ha! Brilliant!

From there, I took off and I was on fire. I started the sequel, just the first couple of chapters and a synopsis, in which a young woman pretends to be stranded or something and winds up at Roland de Courtemanche's vampire castle or something. There's a thunderstorm so she can't leave, and he's painting something that might resemble her or something. And then along comes this female vampire who is bad and dangerous and mean and scary AF. She is clearly the villain of the piece.

I was still a baby writer. What did I know?

Melissa and Leslie put their heads together over this synopsis, looked at each other, and wondered how I was missing the obvious. When Mel called to give me the verdict, it was stunningly simple.

"You're got the wrong heroine," she said. "It's obivious to both Leslie and me that your villain, Rhiannon, is the main character of this story. She jumps of the page.

And Rhiannon said, "You bet you pathetic mortal asses I do."

As soon as the words were spoken, the lights went on in my clueless baby writer mind, and I knew they were right. The notion of taking that powerful, intimidating bad ass vampire and making her the heroine set me on fire.

And really, the series has been all about Rhiannon ever since. She's the greatest character I've ever created.

So the series was off and running. I wrote the third book, Twilight Illusions, where I began uncovering the Sumerian origins of my vampires, and that just built through the entire series.

Then I was invited to write a Wings novella to be included in an anthology with Anne Stuart and Chelsea Quinn Yarbro. Are you even kidding me right now?

These were QUEENS to me. Personal heroes. I could barely believe it.

The anthology was called Strangers in the Night

I was on a roll!

And then I wasn't.

Shadows' End

Melissa called one say, and she sounded sad. She had to tell me that Silhouette Shadows was folding. The line just hadn't taken off. It was just a handful of years ahead of its time. The vampire romance craze took off a few years later, with Meyer and Feehan and Kenyon and Harris. But Shadows and I were done.

I was told to stop writing vampires and shift my focus to other areas, the suspense, the westerns. There was nobody publishing category-length paranormal romance anymore.

There was a brief pause, while I pissed and moaned and whined to all my friends and anyone who would listen. But then I did what I always do when told I can't do something. I did it anyway.

I wrote Twilight Hunger in eight weeks flat. It was a much longer big, a bigger, fatter, sexier book. I also think it might be the best book in the series. I sent it in for Silhouette's big single-title book program, MIRA.

They bought it, and I kept the series going. That was the fifth Wings title, and now there are twenty-four. And it's STILL going.

The Movie

Embrace the Twilight was next, and that's the only book of the series that ever made it onto film. You can find the movie on Amazon and elsewhere.

Dear independent filmmaker, Carlos Dunn purchased the rights to Embrace the Twilight for a $1000. He was so kind, he consulted me on everything, he put my name in the credits, and he invited me to the set. I so regret that I didn't go. But my granddaughter and her friend did, and they had a blast, met the actors, and got to watch scenes being shot.

Many of the actors read the book, and one, Aja Nicole, who played Rhiannon, wrote to me about her character. I was so thrilled to tell her who Rhiannon is, and what she's like, and man, did she ever take my notes! She channeled Rhiannon. She really did.

And then there was the WWE wrestler Chris Hahn, who played the villain, Frank Stiles. I just split a gut every time he's on the screen. In the books, of course, Stiles was a DPI scientist. But I don't think Chris Hahn was one of the actors who read the book. He just went his own way with it, and I loved it. He was Frank Stiles if Stiles had a side-gig in the WWE. And I loved it.

There is onescenes that seems to have been left out - the scenes where Esmeralda is transformed and goes off with Bartrone, her first love. But I know why.

I love the Bartrone actor, (the guy who walks into the sun,) by the way. And the girls, Amber Lily and Alicia! Willem and Jameson were so good together!

Carlos had nearly finished filming and was in post production when he left us. I suspect the missing scene got lost in all that or maybe he never had time to film it. This happened fast. Pancreatic cancer, the same stupid disease that got my mom and her sister and one set of my grandkids' other grandmas. I hate that disease.

So another company, dear friends of Carlos, Ghost Walk Films lovingly took over, finished post-production at their own expense and got the film released in hopes it could earn back some of its cost for Carlos' grieving widow.

Carlos was an awesome storyteller. He LOVED story, especially vampire stories, and he genuinely loved my vampires. The story of Esmeralda and Willem Stone hit him where he lived. The film he made is the manifestation of his love for it, and for the genre.

This was an indie project on a shoestring budget. I think it has brilliant moments, and most of the young actors are surely going places. Embrace the Twilight was Carlos' final film. It was the passion of his life, making vampire movies. I'm so glad we crossed paths before he had to move on.

I appreciate the film more and more as time passes. I think I'll watch it again today and raise a glass to Carlos.

Love it or otherwise, this film is forever a part of the Wings in the Night canon.

One more Embrace the Twilight tale, to bring this back to a lighter (but not daylight!) place.

I was doing a booksigning in the Ballston Bookhouse in Ballston Spa New York, when two avid Wings readers came in and got into a lively discussion as to who would win a fight between Rhiannon and Sarafina.

I decided on the spot that my two alpha females were going to have a big physical knockdown drag-out at some point in the book. And they did.

Onward

As the series got longer and longer, Melissa Senate left, and Leslie Wainger became my new editor.

I can't express how much I learned about the craft of storytelling for those two women, and a handful of others. Lucia Macro, Cindy Hwang, Tara Gavin. These are smart, savvy literary pros, and I got to play in the same sandbox with them.

A few more tidbits before I close.

Prince of Twilight was written entirely during my mother's final battle and eventual death, and then it had to be entirely rewritten, as there was no emotion in it. I had corked it up for the situation and couldn't uncork it for the book. I don't even remember the initial plot, but I chucked the whole thing and started over. Only time I ever had to do that.

Blue Twilight was the only Wings in the Night book about a pair of ordinary mortals. I always wanted to spin off a Kolchak-like paranormal detective series with Mad Maxie and Lou Malone. But there are only so many hours in the week and so many years in a lifetime.

There's no way I'll live long enough to write all the books I have floating around in here. But I'm trying my best, I'll tell you that much.

If I have to choose between running out of stories, or dying with some still untold, I'll take the latter every time. I always say I'll become a muse and whisper stories into young writers' minds when I cross over.

The Current State of Wings

Eventually, I moved all my backlist (old) and frontlist (new) titles to Oliver Heber Books, the best publisher I've ever worked with. They have just re-packaged the entire series with new covers, and we bundled the five novellas into their corresponding novels (in chronological order) so you get them for free.

Here are the new covers.

What's Next?

The most recent title in the series was Young Rhiannon in the Temple of Isis, Rhiannon's childhood and teenage origin story.

Next I have in mind, Young Roland in the something something. I think. I want to cover Roland and Rhiannon's first meeting and falling for each other. When they first come onto the scene in the current series, they already have a history, and that history is knocking on my brain trying to get out, and won't wait much longer.

So that's all about Wings in the Night. Swoop in and enjoy!

---

Take a bite!

---

PS: There will be a second Wings in the Night themed post. I thought of more as soon as I finished.