What would you do if the man of your dreams
turned into your worst nightmare?
When I came up with the idea for Kiss Me, Kill Me in 1989 (near right), I had no idea it would take me 14 years to publish it. I knew it would be hard to write; I'd only written short stories and magazine articles to that point, and this was a novel. But it came out of such frustration from the gay dating scene in New York at the time — and a specific, scary incident that happened to me — that the need to write it was strong. Still, except for one scene, nothing else had even been thought about, much less written. I had no plot. No characters. I just knew I wanted to write a novel about the gay life (my gay life) in Manhattan, and make it a revenge/horror story with lots of graphic sex and violence — a literal horror story, drawing from one of my favorite movie genres: vampirism.
The 1990s passed; work, traveling, and life in general got in the way. Every once in a while I'd come back to Kiss Me, Kill Me, but I wasn't inspired. I couldn't write unless I was passionate about the subject. The passion had yet to hit me. In 2000, my dearest friend, the late Craig Hamrick, urged me to start writing a book about Lucille Ball (one of my major obsessions, in case you hadn't noticed!) while we were both working at a dot-com that had yet to take off. Sitting there in a cubicle doing nothing all day was soul-crushing — but the pay was excellent! — and Craig suggested I write the book in an encyclopedic format. It might be easier to organize that way.
In 2001, I published the first edition of Lucy A to Z: The Lucille Ball Encyclopedia, and that seemed to open up the creative floodgates in me. I went back to Kiss Me, Kill Me and finished it within six months. Craig contributed his own atmospheric, gothic photos (see one example, right)to the novella. He had taken many, because his obsession was the classic, campy soap opera horror kitsch-fest, Dark Shadows). My novel turned out shorter than I expected (it was a novella, but at least I'd finished it, and created fictional characters that lived and breathed on the written page) and I published it in 2003. It sold around 500 copies, but it was such a thrill to finally have it done and in print. (And it was nominated for a Queer Horror Award.)
I published several more books, all non-fiction, either about Lucy or classic TV, or both. But I felt the story of my Kiss Me, Kill Me hero, Ray, wasn't finished, and when I showed Craig, one of the best editors I've ever known, another manuscript called Sleeps Well With Others (top, far right), about my sexual awakening and escapades over eight seasons at summer camp, he pointed out that it was good as far as it went, but that it was basically a series of sexual experiences with no overall theme tying them together. Craig suggested that adding a vampire element would make it spicier and more interesting. I immediately hit on the idea of rewriting Sleeps Well With Others as a prequel to Kiss Me, Kill Me; thus, it would be Ray's experiences at camp, not mine — and in addition, one of the characters from Kiss Me, Kill Me (one of the, er, not living characters) — would be present, watching Ray as he grew up, protecting him when necessary, and having a major ulterior motive for doing so...that would become evident in Kiss Me, Kill Me.
I published Sleeps Well With Others several years later, and though it didn't sell even as well as Kiss Me, Kill Me, there was a sense of completion, which was a positive thing. Until...I noticed within the past two years that vampires were everywhere in the media, and thought it might be fun to combine the two novellas into one longer novel, and — okay, most importantly — hitch my star to the current undead craze. Hence, KISS KILL: A Vampire's Tale (top left), published in late 2009. The books' text remained basically the same, but I had to re-edit for continuity, and reshape both tales so that one followed logically from the other.
I think I did it well...but, dear reader, you should be the judge of that. You can check it out here.
— Michael Karol
December 2010© 2011 by Michael Karol All rights reserved; pictures for entertainment
purposes only and are copyright © their individual owners.
