I’ve been promising this post forevah!!
Okay, so a while back, I made a little survey asking people if they wanted to read a spin-off about the next generation in the Jason and Azazel saga—basically books about Chance and Kenya and Azazel’s new baby, etc.
While more people wanted the spin-off than didn’t, only a total of forty people were on board with the sequels, and twenty-some people wanted it to end with the ninth book.
So I decided that I would do my best to please everybody (except the people who haven’t looked at the series since they got burned with That Last Onset, but more on that later) and sort of combine both of the ideas into one book.
The way it’s planned out, it’s now one long story that starts in the beginning of the book, but can only be resolved with the kids.
So… for a long time, I just had fits with this book, and then two amazing stories inspired me. One was Richard Linklater’s Before Midnight—which is inspiring the Jason-Azazel love arc for the last book—and the other was Terminator: The Sarah Connor Chronicles.
Wait, some of you are saying, Breathless was inspired by The Sarah Connor Chronicles. What?
Therein, ladies and gents, lies the genius.
So, here’s the basic premise: Okay, Azazel is pregnant with a baby. And it turns out this baby is super powerful (duh!). As a matter of fact, the kid has the power to suppress all the immortal-vampire blood power that I introduced in Shudder. Imri doesn’t want this kid to survive, so he decides he’s going to try to kill it, and basically, we get this beautiful dovetailing of the original story, in which Jason and Azazel were on the run from the Sons and the Satanists, who were trying to kill them.
(As George Lucas would say, “It’s like poetry. They rhyme.”)
Anywhoo, here are the reasons why this book will be really great reading and you will all LOVE it, and it will be a really great way to end the series.
1-This book is back to basics. It’s Jason and Azazel up against a big bad, which was always what was compelling about the series in the first place. The fact that there were these two plucky kids who wouldn’t believe what anyone said about them, no matter how bad it was. They were going to fight the good fight and SURVIVE, dammit. So, this is nice stripped-down plot. Through various machinations, I am excising half the crap that I built up in writing this nine-book monstrosity. (This does mean that some people are going to die. People you might like. Not Jason and Azazel, don’t worry. They don’t die. They are bullet proof. Consider anyone and everyone else possibly expendable. This actually puts us right back where we were in the first books, anyway, because people kept dropping like flies in those books. It’s also going to streamline things and it’s going to build tension and put some actual immediacy back into the book, because Jason and Azazel have been too safe for too long, and it’s really mushed up some stuff.) Anyway, the point is, this is a simpler, more exciting, more desperate, more primal story.
2-This story returns to the theme of “fighting the future,” which I originally stole from Terminator. What was compelling in Breathless was that there were all these prophecies about how bad Jason was going to be and how bad Azazel was going to be, and the two of them were in this constant struggle to stop that from happening.
When I started writing the apocalypse books, I completely lost that, because it was no longer “the future,” but now. I thought I needed to pay up for all my ominous prophecies and that they needed to come true or whatever. But in doing so, I completely lost the theme, and everything got weird.
Anyway, in this book, the kid’s now inherited the powers that J&A gave up in Onset, and so now the kid is this ominous future powerful threat thing or whatever, and so that theme comes back, and it’s awesome.
3-Jason and Azazel fight to stay in love after everything they’ve been through, which is a compelling story that I think anyone who’s been in a long-term relationship will be able to identify with. There’s something very different about the way you love a person you’ve been in love with for years and years than the way you love someone right when you first meet.
4-There will be new love in the next generation story (which Jason and Azazel will not be entirely absent from, so fear not. I’m not abandoning those characters halfway through the book. They thread through the entire way.)
5-There’s going to be lots of swearing, lots of violence, lots of angst, lots of kissing, some gunfights, and everything you’ve ever loved about Jason and Azazel.
Are you excited yet????
I am. I’m 11K into this book. My deadline is the end of November, but if I keep up the pace I started today, I’m going to beat that by a good bit.
In preparation for the release, I’m going to be posting scenes from the previous books on Tuesdays and Thursdays, to give fans a chance to reread some of those pivotal moments in the lives of these two craaaazy characters and to help jog your memory of what has gone before.
Now, a word on That Last Onset, and an attempt to get fans who abandoned the series to give the final Ambrosia trilogy a shot.
Okay, so I really like That Last Onset, at least most of it. I like it when Jason and Azazel are stuck in the weird Little Red Riding Hood parallel world and they fuck in the woods and it’s all disturbing and weird and awesome. I think that may be some of my best writing. I love it when they’re in the Tarantino homage portion and they crash a wedding and kill the bride and the groom and force the pastor to marry them at gunpoint. I even love the going back to Bramford fake-out.
There’s a part of the book I hate, though, and that’s the big long portion where I attempt to explain why the hell everything in all the books ever happened by going on this big long thing about these forces of Chaos and forces of Order and… Hell, I confused myself, and I made up the mythology.
BUT… I think I know why most readers did not like that book. It was because it was radically different from all of the other Jason and Azazel books. That Last Onset is this long, drawn-out dream sequence, and it’s structured differently than all the other books, and it plays fast and loose with time, and it changes the rules constantly, and it’s… well, it’s weird.
NONE of the other books in the series are that weird. Shudder and Falter are much more in line with the rest of the series. There’s no dream world. There’s no Tarantino homages. It’s basically Jason and Azazel with guns up against other people with guns. Also Jude’s alive again. They are fun and violent and sexy and disturbing.
I’ll admit that the entire series of books has internal logic about on par with the television series Angel (yeah, the show that a-got a vampire pregnant b-sent the baby, Connor, to another world to grow up 16 years while only four or five episodes passed in our time c-had this big prophesy about Connor, but then basically only had him exist to father Jasmine d-made this big long arc about Cordelia becoming a higher being just so she could give birth to Jasmine—character assassination, really—and then die e-then erased Connor out of everyone’s minds except Angel using the evil power of Wolfram and Hart.) Look, don’t get me wrong. I love Angel. But, um, yeah, Jason and Azazel, at times, makes about that much sense.
However, the characters are cool, and the emotions are raw, and that’s what important to me anyway.
Okey-dokey. Love to hear from you about what you think. (Comments, facebook, goodreads, twitter, etc.) Soooo excited, y’all. Aaaah!!!!
