DRACULAS (A Novel of Terror)

I have it going out at the end of my Shanna/Chapel scene but I can move it later.

Lanz realizes there’s a heavily armed Rambo type coming through the hospital and needs to turn things to his advantage. Ah-ha! Power failure.

I can have Lanz disable the On/Off switch of the backup generator, then destroy the main power breakers. This will leave only battery-powered emergency hall lights until Randall hotwires the backup generator to start up.

Should we do this before Lanz finds Jenny?

Paul

• • •

Lanz already confronted Jenny in the last scene I wrote, and Jenny set him on fire, which he extinguished before he ran off.

Paul, you can then have him run downstairs, past gun-toting Clay, and figure out the best way to get both Clay and Jenny is in darkness, because draculas have a tapetum lucidum and can see well in low light.

Joe

• • •

I read that scene.

Okay. I’ll tackle that next.

Paul

September 4, 2010

I was just finally catching up with everyone’s sections, and it looks great. I think we’re at about 38,000 words right now. Jeff and Paul, I noticed that some of the files in your folders were already in the Draculas 1.6 manuscript, so Paul I moved “Paul 1.3” them into your “Old” folder, and Jeff, I moved “Benny 1.0, Jeff 1.0, and Jeff 1.1” into your old folder. It’ll make it easier to add things to the manuscript if only new sections are there.

Have a great weekend, all!

Blake

September 5, 2010

Paul and I got a lot of work done in New Orleans.

Just kidding. All we did was drink.

Joe

• • •

Shocker

Blake

September 6, 2010

Anyone adverse to me putting together what we’ve got so far and doing a light edit (fixing errors, seeding consistencies, etc.)?

Joe

• • •

Okay, I put together just about everything we’ve done so far. I also added a scene with Lanz turning off the circuit breaker, and changed Shanna’s cell phone message to Clay into a payphone message, and kept Randall with Jenny in pediatrics instead of running after Mortimer.

It’s in DRACULAS_2.0. It reads really well. Feel free to check it out. But let’s avoid going back and editing this for the moment—if we all go in and start changing things we might begin to overlap each other. There will be time to tweak our sections, and the overall manuscript, when we’re finished. We’ll all have a shot at fixing stuff.

Also, don’t tweak your old scenes, as those have already been incorporated in the manuscript and you’d have to make the same changes twice.

What’s happening next:

Jenny’s stuck in pediatrics. Lanz is coming for her.

Blake and I want Benny to take Randall’s chainsaw, but we’ll leave that up to Jeff.

Randall needs to keep the girl safe, and get down to the basement and flip on the circuit breaker so he can use the intercom like Clay did, to get a message to Jenny.

Stacie and Adam have to deal with birth, and Oasis. Blake, I dunno where your Grammie Ann scene fits in (nice scene!) Stick it into 2.0 where it goes.

Clay and Shanna are heading to the parking lot, but they’ll find Mortimer there, tearing cars and tires and radios to shreds. Should have a Mort POV scene here, doing it. He’s also stronger than the other draculas, so Clay may take it as a personal challenge to try to bring him down.

Also, Shanna is going to either tell Clay, or use internal monologue, to recap how this outbreak might have happened, going back in history to recall Baron Von Wolkenstein. This will give the reader a bit more of where the vampires came from, how they spread and helped to form the vampire legend that we all know. Blake and I have a lot of this figured out, so if you can set it up, Paul, we can just plug it in.

The police will be coming soon. We all have our villains to deal with (Clay and Shanna vs. Mort and a lot of draculas, Randall vs. Benny, Jenny vs. Lanz, Stacie and Adam vs. Oasis.)

I think we can take this up to the army surrounding the hospital. Then we can begin the final act.

Joe

September 8, 2010

I put up some new Clay and cut off at a spot where Joe and Blake can put in the myth/lore they’ve worked up. After that, I’ll have Clay give Shanna the ring (he thinks it’s possible he won’t see her again). They’ll make it to the parking lot to find the dead staties and the slashed tires.

Paul

• • •

I added Draculas 2.2, which includes a very short moment on page 113 where Randall loses his chainsaw.

Also Benny 2.0, in which the clown picks up the aforementioned chainsaw.

Jeff

September 9, 2010

BLOOD BLOODBLOODBLOODBLOODBLOOD…STOP! He released the girl he’d been slurping, even though she still had some blood left. Moorecook wanted them to turn. He wanted as many of his kind as possible.

This implies if victims die they don’t turn. But what about the morgue scene?

Paul

• • •

If they die, they come back, but they can die through exsanguination. A dracula needs a certain amount of blood left to transform. Which is why draining their blood kills draculas.

I’ll try to make that clearer in the text.

Joe

• • •

Okay, I’m going to have Clay and Shanna in the parking lot with the ruined tires and the dead state cops. They can’t escape but they’d be crazy to go back in…

…unless they see Jenny waving from an upper floor window. Clay will go back in to get her, Shanna will come along (because what if these dead staties turn into monsters?) and that’s when Clay and Randall meet.

As I said before, Clay will be wounded and will find a dramatic way to take himself out of the picture and take a whole buncha draculas with him.

Think it would be possible to have a conference call and do a little spitballing? I’m not comfortable with the complete isolation of the hospital. Every patient room has a land-line phone. Calls would be going out left and right. When the sheriff calls in the staties, the police beat reporters hear about it. Local TV stations would be sending