Monday, September 15, 2014

Blood Diva by VM Gautier Giveaway & Interview


Blood Diva
VM Gautier

Genre: Urban Fantasy

ISBN: 9781620154663

Number of pages: approx 450.
Word Count: 120,000

Book Description:

The 19th century's most infamous party-girl is undead and on the loose in the Big Apple.

When 23 year-old Parisian courtesan, Marie Duplessis succumbed to consumption in 1847, Charles Dickens showed up for the funeral and reported the city mourned as though Joan of Arc had fallen. Marie was not only a celebrity in in her own right, but her list of lovers included Franz Liszt – the first international music superstar, and Alexandre Dumas fils, son of the creator of The Three Musketeers. Dumas fils wrote the novel The Lady of the Camellias based on their time together. The book became a play, and the play became the opera La Traviata. Later came the film versions, and the legend never died.

But what if when offered the chance for eternal life and youth, Marie grabbed it, even when the price was the regular death of mortals at her lovely hand?

In 2014, Marie wonders if perhaps nearly two centuries of murder, mayhem, and debauchery is enough, especially when she falls hard for a rising star she believes may be the reincarnation of the only man she ever truly loved. But is it too late for her to change? Can a soul be redeemed like a diamond necklace in hock? And even if it can, have men evolved since the 1800′s? Or does a girl’s past still mark her?

Blood Diva is a sometimes humorous, often dark and erotic look at sex, celebrity, love, death, destiny, and the arts of both self-invention and seduction. It’s a story that asks a simple question – Can a one hundred ninety year-old demimondaine find happiness in 21st century Brooklyn without regular infusions of fresh blood?

Excerpt:

Her bathroom was en-suite, but could be accessed through a second door from the living room. Rosa, who came in the mornings to clean, routinely filled the bath. There was a timed heater that kept the water warm. Alphonsine slipped into the oversized tub.
She dove under the bubbles. While her kind needed to breathe, they could control respiration and stay under for hours. She enjoyed soaking this way in very hot water, allowing herself to think and dream. Her morning kill had been so unusual, so exciting, she wanted to relive every detail.
She hadn’t been planning to feed that night, though it had been almost four weeks. She could go five, even six in a pinch, but after that long she felt so fatigued it was hard to distinguish day from night. Pierre and she were planning to get out of town to feast together. He often chided her for her recklessness, pointing out it was not like the old days. Trains, planes, and automobiles made it easy to place distance between oneself and one’s prey. No reason to kill where one lived, but sometimes, one couldn’t help oneself.
She had left the party feeling a particular restlessness. At first believing sex alone might be enough to stave off the hunger, her plan had been to head downtown or back to Brooklyn to find some pretty thing to hook up with. Then she caught a scent, felt something unique was waiting. Violent images flooded her mind as she entered the bar. It was coming into focus – a mortal who killed, not in war, but for fun. While her telepathic powers were weak – she was after all still quite young, she could sense emotions, especially strong ones, and he had been a seething caldron of barely suppressed rage.
Under the warm water, she could still taste it on her tongue, his blood, his essence – all of that delicious hate, and yet in the intimacy of the death-grip, she felt more, his humanity, as though they both were spiraling backwards in time to a moment when even he was innocent.
She’d given him peace. It had been a good death for him. True, she had frightened him when she jumped out. They said in the best hunts the prey never suspected, never felt a moment of unease, but allowances had to be made. After all, he believed he had killed her. She couldn’t let him go to his grave thinking that.
Blood was more than nourishment. It was a sacrament. Some said the blood itself contained the very soul. She doubted such a thing existed. She only knew it had something – a power, a magic like nothing else. Strange how easily satisfied beings like her were, hardly the monsters depicted in myth. As pleasurable as it might be to hunt and feast every night, like the noble lion, they only did so when hungry.
No two people tasted the same – not father and son, nor brother and sister, not even twins. This she knew from her own experience. Children’s blood had a sweetness like the candied grapes young men once brought her as tokens between acts at the opera. There was a freshness to young blood, like apples picked in the summer at a perfect moment of ripeness. Teenaged girls tasted of secrets, and boys of lust. Women, pretty ones, whose hearts had been broken had a certain tenderness and resignation, especially if you came to them when their looks were fading, and there wasn’t much hope. There were men who had an edge like a wine with a bitter after taste, while others were warm and smooth. The old, whom she wasn’t fond of, tasted of sadness, disappointment, and defeat, though they would certainly do when convenient. Human blood, like the human voice, had different timbres. Some had the richness and depth of a bass-baritone while others were light but agile like a coloratura soprano.
A killer, however, especially one who dispatched his own so remorselessly, this was a rare treat indeed. The essence would hold within it all whom he had taken. For her to act so boldly, to take so many chances to have him, was a risk, but what would be the point of immortality without gambles? And she had always loved games of chance.
When she walked in and saw him, saw those thick arms, the sandy hair, could already feel what it would be like to fuck him, to take him perhaps when he was inside her, she knew she had to go through with it. The combination of lust and hunger made her almost giddy, barely able to contain herself.
Still immersed, Alphonsine began to touch her thighs, working up to her pussy, replaying the night.
As soon as she sat down at the bar it became clear he had picked her, imagined her as his next victim. It was too delicious! A chance for play-acting. Something different and rough.
Alphonsine lifted her head above the water, feeling the urge to breathe. Her breaths became quick as she felt her release, the first taste of his blood a vivid memory. Her kind not only felt everything more strongly than mortals, but could recall in full sensory detail.
It had been everything she hoped. Feeling him draining, feeling his life force leaving his body, merging into hers. That final beat of his cruel heart. A rush of something – all his anger, perhaps? It overwhelmed her for a second and then was gone. And he had looked so tranquil – transformed by death – beyond the desire to hurt and kill, beyond it all, finally at rest – a gift she had bestowed on him.
She had closed his eyes, and kissed him once softly on the lips before beginning the task of clean up.
The act of remembering left her not hungry for more blood, but still unsatisfied.

About the Author:

VM Gautier is a pseudonym. This is not the author's first book, but it is his or her first book in this genre. You haven't heard of him or her.

Interview:
Where are you from?

I've written books under my real name, but VM Gautier is a pen name. I'll probably merge the identities some time soon, and explain the reasons why I decided to try this. It's actually been a lot of fun. There are tons of books, plays, and movies where characters are never freer or more themselves as when they put on a mask. I'm nobody you've heard of, but I don't want to give too many details or to make stuff up. Readers could probably make an educated guess about where I'm from by reading Blood Diva.

Tell us your latest news?

Blood Diva has been released. It's a vampire novel with emphasis on the “vamp.” The premise is simple: What if 19th century Paris' favorite party-girl was undead and on the loose in the Big Apple? The main character is a vampire-version of Marie Duplessis. She was a real person – a courtesan who died in 1847 a few weeks after her 23rd birthday. Alexandre Dumas fils, whose famous father wrote The Three Musketeers, had been in love with her. He wrote The Lady of the Camellias about her. It was a bestseller and became a play, then an opera – La Traviata – which is still performed today. (It was the opera that Richard Gere takes Julia Roberts to in Pretty Woman.)

The story in Dumas' novel and the opera is basically “bad girl” falls in love, reforms, sacrifices everything for her lover and dies. In Blood Diva, the main character falls in love with a mortal, who reminds her a lot of an old love. She is willing to sacrifice everything to be with him – even her immortality.

When did you first consider yourself a writer?

I think fiction writers – like musicians – are born. I've been telling stories in my head since before I can remember. If you write, you are writer. You might not be a writer who makes money at it, or a writer who makes enough money to quit your day job. You might not even show your work to other people, let alone publish it, but you are still a writer. Whether or not you are any good at it is another matter. That takes work as well as talent.

What inspired you to write Blood Diva?

Marie Duplessis inspired me. She lived for such a short time. She didn't rule a country. She didn't invent anything. She wasn't a singer, or an actress or a painter. Yet, she became a muse who inspired writers, musicians, and artists, and continues to do so long after her death.

I wanted to tell her story in a different way. I also wanted to write something that would appeal to a wide audience including people who maybe don't read a lot of history. I was thinking about experimenting with genres I hadn't written in before – historical romance, erotica, horror. I was thinking about how a lot of the current popular novels borrow from old stories. Fifty Shades may have started as Twilight fan fiction, but the idea of the virtuous woman reforming and taming the damaged man, sounds like Jane Eyre. (Both Jane and Ana have to deal with the crazy exes of their lovers.) What I attempted to do was tell a modern version of The Lady of the Camellias, but one that has some different twists. For one, the impediment to true love in Dumas' novel was social class and the fact that the main character had a scandalous past. In Blood Diva, it's that she's an immortal who preys on humans.

Do you have a specific writing style?

I try to get into the head of my characters and see the world from their point of view, so sometimes the style seems different depending on the character. The prologue of Blood Diva is from the viewpoint of a very dark character and is more noirish than the rest of the book. Most of the book is through the main character's eyes. She's not exactly unreliable as a narrator, but being a cold-blooded, immortal bloodsucker, her viewpoint can be a bit disturbing at times. Readers who enjoy seeing the world through very different eyes will enjoy that.

How did you come up with the title?

The title came to me pretty early “Diva” is another word for goddess. Before we started calling all women with difficult temperaments divas, it was used to describe opera stars. Marie Duplessis was associated with the opera, so I thought the word “diva” could describe her. Also in a sense, she is always performing. She's been used since her death as kind of a honeypot – a trap to bring wealth into the vampire community. In Blood Diva, the vampires think of themselves as “gods,” divine beings above humanity. But they don't create. They only destroy, and they are sustained by human blood, hence “blood diva.”
Is there a message in your novel that you want readers to grasp?

Any good novel will have some kind of message, perhaps several. If the writer needs to explain what it is, he or she probably hasn't done a great job. I'll leave it to readers to find and interpret the message or messages for themselves.
How much of the book is based on reality or real events?

Regarding the historical Marie Duplessis, I tried to stick to some of what we actually know about her. She was born Alphonsin e Plessis. In Blood Diva, she still thinks of herself as Alphonsine. She had an awful childhood. Her mother abandoned the family and died when she was still very young. Her father probably abused her sexually, and almost certainly sold her to men who did. She arrived in Paris when she was fourteen and worked for a short time as a laundress until she realized that pretty girls had other options. There's a lot we don't know because she lied a lot. She didn't keep a journal and we don't have many of her letters. In creating a fictionalized version of her, I speculated on what we don't know and can't know – her true feelings. In the historical scenes, I tried to mix the real and the fictitious in a way where a reader who hadn't just read a biography wouldn't be able to tell which was which. None of the contemporary characters are based on real people. However, I hope that they behave like real people – that readers find them realistic.

What books have most influenced you?

I read a lot and I read in different genres. For Blood Diva, I'd have to credit Anne Rice as a big influence. I think anyone writing vampire fiction after Interview With a Vampire owes her a great deal – even if they've never read a word she wrote. Interview changed everything we thought we knew about vampires. It also allowed authors to explore the genre and create their own versions of the vampire myth. Mostly, it allowed vampires to become protagonists, full-bodied characters, and not just personifications of evil that must be destroyed. It challenged us as readers, to think about vampirism seriously. Who wouldn't want to be young and beautiful for eternity? But would we still want that if the price was .taking human life to survive?
What writer has taught you the most about writing? Who are your literary mentors?

There are lots of writers who offer useful information and guidelines. Elmore Leonard's much-quoted Ten Rules for Good Writing is a great common-sense starting out point. You can also learn a lot from readers and other writers – even if they aren't the best or most famous writers in the world. If you work with a group of people, and they ALL think there's something off about your beginning, then there is something off about your beginning. It's great if you get to meet one of your idols or take a workshop or a class, but most of us will never have those opportunities. Besides, I'm not convinced that the best writers necessarily make the best teachers.

If you are working on developing yourself as a writer, you can learn from the books you love most. Let them be your teachers. The trick is to begin to read them with a writer's eye, to think about what the writer is doing and try to figure out how he or she is doing it. You can read advice like: “Start where the story is,” but I guarantee this will make much more sense if you open five of your favorite books and study how each one starts.

Once you figure out what good writing looks like (to you), it's easier to begin to recognize when it's working in your own writing, to the point where you may have some “Eureka” moments and know when something is right. You may also learn to recognize when it isn't working, and the only thing to do is try again and again till it is.

Some writers have written great books about developing yourself as a writer. Stephen King's On Writing, is a wonderful investment, and many are now offering so much on websites absolutely free.

So the answer to the first question is, I have learned from every writer I've ever read, and to the second – I have a lot of mentors.

What book are you reading now?

I'm reading The Good Lord Bird by James McBride. It's historical fiction – no vampires or supernatural beings. Like Blood Diva, it uses real historical characters fictitiously. It takes place prior to the civil war, and involves a completely fictional character – Henry who orphaned at age ten, winds up under the care of abolitionist John Brown. It's dark and funny, with a body count that would make my vampires blush. If you like The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn and/or Little Big Man, you will like this.
Are there any new authors that have grasped your interest? The Guardian recently started a “Self-Published Book of the Month” feature, running on their blog. Unfortunately, it's only open to residents of the UK, but I think it's an enormous step for self-publishing. I have all of the winners so far on my to-be-read list (and their works loaded onto my kindle.) They are Dinosaurs and Prime Numbers by Tom Moran, The Right of the Subjects by Jude Starling, The Gift of Looking Closely by Al Brookes, and Shoot the Savage by LM Latham.
What are your current projects?

I have a blog – www.blooddiva.com that I post on frequently. I'm also interacting a lot with readers on facebook and twitter. I'm not working on anything new right now, but people have started asking about a sequel. Blood Diva was written as a stand alone, but you never know.

What would you like my readers to know?


I'd like all readers to know how much they are appreciated by writers. Writers don't write for money. They write to be read. I'd love to hear from you on facebook or twitter or to read your comments on my blog. If you've got questions about the book, I'd love to answer them.





Tour Giveaway 
 5 signed paperbacks (to US ONLY)
 2 Gorgeous Blood Diva mugs (US only)
 3 Amazon Gift Certificates for $3.99

  a Rafflecopter giveaway

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