A Guest Post by Deborah Sheldon
Back in late 2019, reports of a new coronavirus in Wuhan, China, were just hitting the headlines. At the time, I was working on my latest novella, already titled Redhead Town, about a vampire infestation in Australia and around the world. I’d planned on blaming my pandemic on a SARS-type virus, and had researched the 2002–2003 SARS outbreak to lend my story a convincing scientific and medical background.
Then Covid punched us all in the face.
I remember cursing my rotten luck that I’d decided to write a pandemic story on the cusp of an actual pandemic. At the time, of course, I had no idea how devastating Covid and its ramifications would turn out to be. Following the eventual suffering of so many, I’m embarrassed of how shallow I was to worry about my novella. But hindsight is, as they say, 20/20.
My home is in Melbourne, Australia, and once the seemingly endless lockdowns began to feel like everyday life, I knew my novella in its current state was beyond saving. Firstly, who would want to read about a fictional pandemic while living through an actual one? And secondly, the market would soon be flooded with virus-run-amok stories, and I didn’t want my work to be lost in the deluge.
Redhead Town was effectively shelved.
But I really liked its concept. The initial idea came from my adult son, Harry, who has given me plenty of story sparks over the years. He had said to me one day, “Vampires – except they’re like meth-heads,” and I’d loved it. Hmm, not an aloof and deadly Count in a faraway castle, not inhuman monsters with superhuman speed, not sexy fiends that sparkle … but vampires that need blood like addicts need drugs. Wow.
The concept was a siren song. I had no choice but to return to Redhead Town.
My first action: to delete all chapters about the vampire pandemic, how it started, and how it spread. I whittled that information down to just a few paragraphs, knowing that readers would easily connect the dots since they had been through it all with Covid.
Did it hurt to wipe out all that work? I’d be lying if I said no. Sure, it hurt a bit. But I’ve been a professional writer since 1986, when I sold my first nonfiction article on steroid abuse to a bodybuilding magazine, so I’m pretty much inured to the pain of deletion.
With my novella gutted, I was left with an interesting dilemma. Of my original story kernel, what was left to explore? Character dynamics was the answer. Redhead Town focuses on the plight of the Murphy family – comprising parents Mark and Bernie, and their six-year-old son Nathan – and what it’s like to live in a town marked by politicians to be a ‘designated area’; a type of holding pen for vampires. I dug into the family relationships, and the push-pull of love, duty, and fear.
My main vampire character is Zachary, an eighteen-year-old ‘grey-eye’ in the earlier stages of transformation, who works nightshift alongside Mark at the town’s only supermarket. And Zachary is the happiest character in the whole novella!
Who knows what kind of story my original iteration of Redhead Town would have made? It’s a moot point. But, in comparison to the novella I ended up writing, I believe my first take would’ve been a weaker, paler, more anemic version. Because going through the Covid pandemic invited me to switch focus onto the most important element in fiction: character.
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DEBORAH SHELDON is an award-winning author and editor from Melbourne, Australia. She writes short stories, novellas, and novels across the darker spectrum of horror, crime, and noir. Her most recent works include the novel Cretaceous Canyon and the novella Redhead Town. As a senior editor at IFWG Publishing, Deb specializes in horror anthologies. Deb's other credits include TV scripts magazine feature articles; nonfiction books (Reed Books, Random House); stage plays; poetry; and award-winning medical writing. Visit Deb at http://deborahsheldon.wordpress.com.
