the phone junction boxes, and eventually also the electricity in the hopsital.
This is a newer hospital, so it is set up with cell phone jammers, like modern airplanes. No one will be able to use their cell phone.
Paul’s cop will be able to use his radio in his car (which is loaded with weapons) but he’ll have to get outside in order to do it, and I predict the hospital will fill up with draculas pretty quickly, and these things are HARD to kill.
The hospital is isolated. Ten miles from anything. Once the epidemic starts, it hits fast and hard—no one has time to get away. The only remaining survivors after the initial onslaught are the ones hiding in their rooms. Moorecook also directs some of the other draculas to cruise the hospital parking lot and pop tires on all the vehicles.
A note on how this will work: we all need to turn in pages as we write them. That was, we can cross into each other’s stories. One thing we envisioned was the cop had arrested the lumberjack in the past, and when they meet up, they are hostile to one another. They would even begin to fight. This would freak out the cop’s girlfriend (the historian) because if either of them spill even a tiny drop of blood—a cut lip, a busted knuckle—the draculas will be able to smell it from another floor and they’ll swarm on them.
I’ve got two books to write by July 6. But I will have time in June to start cranking on this. Worst case scenario, I’ll bat clean-up, and weave my story into the three that you guys do.
Blake is taking the lead on this one. When we’ve got a rough draft, we’ll all have a chance to streamline and edit and expand.
Joe
• • •
(Virtual rubbing of hands) This is going to be FUUUUUUUUN!
Paul
• • •
Paul - what’s your gun toter’s name?
Blake
• • •
Joe - give a call when you gave a moment. I have a question about our mythology (and also an idea).
Blake
• • •
I didn’t have the historian/forensic anthropologist get into the mythology of dracula in the opening chapter because I think it slow things down too much…there will time for her to wax eloquent about the myth and what exactly she’s doing for Mortimer in a breather between terrifying scenes in the hospital.
Blake
• • •
Nicely done! Great start. I’m going to make it a tad bit more serious (An edge of black humor is good, but I don’t want anyone to think this is parody or comedy), then do Shanna’s section.
Can you sign in to Dropbox.com, make a DRACULAS folder, then send invites to me, Paul, and Jeff and explain to them how it works? Then I’ll drop the file in.
Make four Word Doc templates titled BLAKE, JOE, JEFF, PAUL and put those in the folder. That way we can all work on our sections at the same time.
Joe
• • •
LOL, I just created a Draculas folder. Did you create one as well?
Did the second chapter. Third chapter is mine, in the hospice nurse’s POV. She’ll be the ex wife of the lumberjack.
This is gonna rock.
Joe
• • •
Great edits to my opening, btw.
Blake
• • •
Thanks. Jenny is going to go into the ER, and call Randall, her lumberjack ex-husband who is recovering from a chainsaw injury. During the call, Moorecook will escape the gurney and bite several people to death before being restrained.
Then everyone will do their character intro chapters. Then we do the morgue scene where the draculas come to life. Then we’re off…
Joe
May 9, 2010
How does Clayton Theel sound?
Paul
• • •
So you’ll write the Moorecook losing his shit scene from Jenny’s POV in the ER? Cool. I’ll write the morgue scene.
Blake
• • •
All - so Paul’s cop character is Clayton Theel (great name)…I think we called the lumberjack Randall for now, unless Jeff wants to change him to something else. Clayton’s girlfriend is Shanna, the historian/anthropologist. Jenny, hospice nurse, is the lumberjack’s ex.
Jeff and Paul, all we need to complete the setup is a brief description of your character who comes into the ER and gets themselves bitten by Mortimer Moorecook. Maybe mention what ailment brought them to the ER. This will be your Dracula you get to reek havoc with, so go nuts.
Blake
• • •
Howzabout I use the ER doc Kurt Lanz, MD (“No, not ‘Kurt’ — Doctor Lanz.”) on duty who thinks he’s hot shit and too good for this lame community hospital and all these hicks he’s got to deal with? When he first changes he’s sure he can control the blood thirst because he’s a superior being, but he’s so wrong. And then he gets into it.
I’d also like to add to Shanna’s POV in 2 that she’s going to break it off with Clay before the gun show - she can’t take another gun show.
Paul
• • •
I love it, Paul. I don’t know if I can do this in my Moorecook dracula POV (because he’s higher-functioning than the people he infects) but I dig the idea of showing, through a dracula POV, the mental crumbling as these intelligent adults begin to lose their high cognitive functioning abilities.
Blake
• • •
That works for me, Paul.
We need to figure out if draculas die like zombies, then mutate into monsters, or if they only mutate when they get bitten and survive.
Joe
• • •
I have an answer to my own question.
If someone is bitten and lives, they become a dracula. Not as drastically as Moorecook did (he was bitten by the source, which is more virulent), but they mutate over the course of half an hour, losing their mental facilities as they change.
Those who are killed by draculas also come back to life if there is enough of them still intact and they still have enough blood left. Maybe an hour time frame to reanimate the dead tissue.
This way, we can follow certain characters becoming draculas, and also have a surprise morgue scene where
