Blood Price reprinted as Trade Paperback
Recently, DAW Books reprinted the first of the Vicki Nelson novels in trade paperback. Trade paper? Trade? Y'all know what I mean when I say trade, right?
Anyway, I wrote an introduction for this new edition and my editor has very kindly agreed to allow me to reprint it here. While there's a number of things I could say about having a new trade edition of Blood Price out, I like how I've already said them so...
Plus, if you've never read the Vicki Nelson novels, there's a couple of points in here, toward the end, that you should be aware of.
And, because I know someone is going to ask, that isn't Christina and/or Kyle on the cover.
Also, the John the book is dedicated to is John Rose, my boss (and, at the time, the owner) at Bakka Books in Toronto (now Bakka-Phoenix).
Twenty-two Years Later
I pitched the first of the Vicki Nelson books in 1989, back when contemporary fantasy barely existed as a marketing concept. At that time, most fantasy that happened in the modern world, a world that was recognizably ours, was horror -- or at least more horror than fantasy. Oh, it was years after Interview With A Vampire had become a cult classic, reinventing the vampire as the romantic, albeit violent, hero but it was still years before the vampire became the go to bad boy of genre fiction.
But I'd been reading a Tudor history and in it was a description of the last days of Henry Fitzroy, bastard son of Henry VIII who went from being a healthy, athletic young man to being increasing pale and wan, to stone cold dead in about three months. There's a theory among forensic anthropologists that it was tuberculosis, but it certainly read like he'd been targeted by a vampire to me. Once I had a vampiric Henry Fitzory, I needed a story to put him and I needed a human he could connect to, someone whose weaknesses mirrored his - he was helpless in the day, Vicki's RP denied her the night -- and whose strengths demanded the truth. Mike Celluci came on board as the voice of reason, both Vicki and the reader's anchor to reality. I had story, I had characters...
...did I have a publisher? DAW had already published Gate of Darkness, Circle of Light so I knew they were open to contemporary fantasy, but this new book was a demonic police procedural with a vampire as one of the heroes. Hedging my bets, I submitted the proposal for Blood Price (then called Ninety-eight Point Six) (I know. Titles remain a constant struggle.) at the same time as the proposal for The Fire's Stone figuring that the traditional fantasy would be accepted but I might have to shop Vicki, Henry and Mike further a field.
But Sheila Gilbert, my amazing editor at DAW -- and who has been my editor at DAW for twenty-eight books now and I could not have done it, for any number of values of it, without her -- wanted them both. As I had ideas for additional Vicki Nelson books, I was to write The Fire's Stone first and then we'd dive into the series.
Blood Price came out in 1991, Blood Trail in 1992, Blood Lines in 1993, Blood Pact in 1994, and Blood Debt after a short break and three other books, in 1997. They have never, as a series or individually been out of print, they're available in a number of foreign editions, and in 2007 were adapted for the 22 episode television series, Blood Ties -- which is discussed in the short story collection Blood Bank. (NB: as well as here in lj land if you use the Blood Ties tag)
This new edition of Blood Price you're holding is twenty-two years old and, as such, new readers need to be aware of two things. The first, this is not a paranormal romance. It was not written as a romance but as a fantasy. The relationship between the characters, while important, remains secondary to the plot. If you go in expecting romance, you're going to be disappointed and, as we don't want that, best you're aware of the difference up front. The second, is that there are no cell phones. Because in 1990, for all intents and purposes, there were no cell phones. Other than that, I think we're good to go.
And twenty-two years later, I'd like to thank Sheila and DAW for taking a chance on Henry and Vicki and Mike and me, riding the wave way, way in advance of the curve