Author Notes: The Vampire and the Lost Locket
As I write these lines, my books — books 2, 4, 6, and 8 of The Secret Society of Monster Hunters, which I was privileged to write in partnership with Book Buddy Media in 2019 — are now available to purchase on multiple platforms. Working with my counterparts at Book Buddy was a lesson in writing partnership with an editor.
Over the next couple of weeks I’m going to do a quick dive into my four books of the series. My assumption in writing this is that you, the reader, are either a parent who has chosen to google the author of one of these four books, or a school librarian or media specialist who is doing the same thing.
In the very earliest draft of this script, it was set in New York City; my editor let me know that we wanted to avoid setting multiple books in the same place and so it moved to Chicago. Finding a suitable substitute for Fiorello La Guardia proved a challenge; Chicago’s municipal leadership was infamously corrupt during the 1930s and well in the pocket of the mob; compared to the upstanding La Guardia, this would have created significant problems for the story I wanted to write. This, however, led me to Central YMCA College and its president, Edward J. Sparling, who I quickly found to be a fascinating character and without the myriad troubles of writing anything even vaguely positive about the Daley family. Writing about Central YMCA College was a fascinating subject that I wished I could have spent more page count on; the college itself (and its successor institution, Roosevelt University) deserves its own set of books.
Roller derby and vampires are subjects that I know well. My creative thesis, Irkalla Derby Demons, mixed roller derby, vampires, and Sumerian mythology. So to get the privilege of writing two of these three subjects was a real treat. For the image of Laurel, our vampire, looming out of the darkness to menace our heroes to be the image chosen by the publisher to represent the entire series — the very, very first image I wrote — well, that’s a rarity.
When you’re writing vampires for kids there’s always a real dance involved. You have to make the vampires real enough to be threatening (kids are pretty savvy to artifice) while keeping them benign enough for parents. The first draft version of Laurel was a lot more aggressive and active in the plot than the final character ended up being, but I think I managed to capture just a little bit of that essence in the final.
Roller derby is a sport that’s consumed large chunks of the last six years of my life. I think it’s fair to say that I have spent more time from 2014-2020 on roller derby than on any other activity. It is a very difficult, intensely physical, highly rewarding sport. 1938, the year in which I chose to set this adventure, was the first full year that roller derby became a full-contact sport rather than being an intense long-lasting skating race; for the specifics of the history of the sport, I recommend Margot “Em Dash” Atwell’s excellent book Derby Life. In those days, it was commonplace for barnstorming sports attractions such as the early roller derby to travel with two entire teams and play in a new city every few days.
Finally: While researching The Vampire and the Lost Locket, I found this short from 1949. Featuring early stars Jean Porter and Midge “Toughie” Brasuhn, it shows the early game in all its glory. Enjoy, and I’ll be back soon with some author’s notes from The Stolen Kraken!
