On the Road Again - Behind the Wheel of Sacrifice

When I first sat down to write Sacrifice, I wanted to create a very different book than my first novel, Covenant. While the first book took young newspaper reporter Joe Kieran through a nightmare journey revolving tightly around the cliff outside of the small seaside town of Terrel, for the second book, I wanted to send Joe in a much different direction -- on a roadtrip. If the events of Covenant were claustrophobic, for the next book, I wanted him to  take a shotgun ride across the country. 

At the same time, I wanted Sacrifice to work as a novel that could be enjoyed without the reader needing to have seen the first book. When I first began the writing of Sacrifice (back at the end of 2002) I had not yet secured a publishing contract for the first novel and didn't know if I ever would. I had sent Covenant around to numerous publishers, but it would be another two years until it was released in a limited hardcover edition by Delirium Books, at the end of 2004 (and it would be four years after that before the Leisure Books edition appeared). 

But while I didn't know in 2002 if Covenant would ever be published, I wanted to use the backstory of that novel as the set-up for a new adventure. It was risky to write a sequel to a book that might never be printed, so I tried to make sure that the "backstory" provided by Covenant was included in Sacrifice seamlessly enough so that you would not need to have read the first book. The majority of Sacrifice only deals with a couple of the characters from the first book, and largely takes place outside of the location of the first novel. So what connects the two?

Demons.

In Covenant, the demon Malachai is introduced. In the past, Malachai provided protection to the town of Terrel from a group of murderous succubi spirits called the Curburide. Of course, that protection came at a price, and the "price" of protection is what Covenant is all about. The Curburide really don't figure into the first book's current events at all, except as backstory. For Sacrifice, I wanted to take a closer look at the Curburide. And so our "villainess" in this book, is a woman named Ariana - a fallen fledgling nun. She discovers a book about the Curburide as she studies for the sisterhood, and drops out of the convent to follow the dark path. She wants to bring the Curburide into our realm, and to do so, she needs to perform a series of ritual sexual sacrifices at different locations across the United States. 

Enter Joe and Malachai, whose mutual road trip is soon put on a detour as they are diverted to try to stop Ariana. Along the way they recruit the help of Alex, a teenage girl who can talk to the dead. 

Structurally, the book offered a way for me to take Joe and Ariana (and the reader) to some of my favorite spots, which made it great fun to write. The book's first chapter opens in my favorite goth club, Elysium, in Austin, TX. It also makes a stop in New Orleans. And Ariana's journey begins in San Francisco. Anyone who knows me well, knows that my favorite cities in the United States are Austin and San Francisco. So it was a natural for me to set at least a piece of one of my novels in those locales. 

When I first sat down to start work on Sacrifice, it had been a couple years since I'd finished Covenant, and I had started to wonder if I could write another novel. So to "jumpstart" the process, I used National Novel Writing Month as my prod (http://www.nanowrimo.org). NaNoWriMo is held every November, and it basically is a challenge for all novelists to dig in and write like a ____ (insert favorite colorful expletive here). The challenge is to create - start to finish - a brand new 50,000-word novel in a 30-day period. At the end of that time, you can upload your manuscript file and have a web system validate that it is, indeed, 50,000 words... and you can say you've won the NaNoWriMo challenge. I actually was out of town on a business meeting the first week of that November in 2002, so I started the challenge a week late... but I dove into Sacrifice and in three weeks of manic writing every day before and after work, I had knocked out 50,000 words. I finished on the night before deadline. That file still remains on my harddrive, timestamped at 2:09 a.m., November 30, 2002!

I think that my "breakneck" writing schedule contributed to the breakneck feel of the book. It also forced me to not allow any doubts to slow the writing.  There is no time to hand-wring, second-guess and question your muse when you have to turn out that many words in that short of time (which is the point of the NaNoWriMo challenge actually -- knock it out now, polish it later). 

In the end, I didn't complete the whole novel that month, but I did write the required 50,000 words - just over half of the book. Because of the insane burning-the-candle-at-both-ends schedule though, I ended up sick for the entire following month of December! And then in 2003, I signed the deal to release Covenant through Delirium Books,  and I put Sacrifice aside to give that first novel another edit, as well as to work on a young adult novel I'd been tinkering with. Then I was promoting Covenant, and writing some short stories, and then Covenant was nominated for a Bram Stoker Award, and... and somehow more than two years passed before I returned at the start of 2005 to finish the second half of Sacrifice, which I did in the first couple months of that year. At that point, without the NaNoWriMo impetus, I took a little more time and ran a lot of Google maps to make sure that the "time delay" between the concurrent roadtrips of Ariana and Joe made sense if you were behind the wheel. I had driven some of these roads myself, but certainly not all of them! I even used iCalendar to chart their mutual progress through the novel, since the whole thing works on a fairly tight schedule, while covering a lot of geographic (and body count) ground. It's kind of interesting for me to look back at the files of the "mapping" implements for the novel.

After a few days of final editing and polishing in the summer of 2005, during the week my son was born, I turned in Sacrifice to Delirium, and it was released in early 2007, two and a half years after the original edition of Covenant. It was shortly after the release of Delirium's edition of Sacrifice that I signed the mass market agreement to issue both novels  through Leisure Books.

It was a long, strange trip for both of these novels to arrive in paperback. For most readers, they appeared on the bookstore stands out of nowhere, and quickly - within nine months of each other. But the behind-the-scenes gestation, was much different!  In any event, I hope fans of horror and Leisure Books will enjoy the manic ride of Sacrifice. Writing this novel as both a lot of fun, and sometimes a nostalgic journey for me. Though I have to say, when I personally visited the places toured by this novel... my experiences of them were a lot less deadly!

Yours in Dark Arts,

John Everson
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SACRIFICE
Sometimes Death Is Not The End

NEEDLES & SINS
19 Tales of Twisted Redemption
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