Hmmmm! I thought. Little does he know—I have a manuscript! I sent him a very tentative and apologetic letter asking if he would look at my book. He was kind enough to agree. (Years later, much to my amusement, he told me my letter was the wimpiest letter he had ever read and he’d been certain he would hate the novel.) Not long after I sent him the manuscript, this editor called me up at work. Ahhhh! He’s such a nice guy, I thought. He’s called me in person to let me down gently.
I picked up the phone in the staff room at my library and he said, “Annette, we loved your book. We want to publish it!”
I’m sure they heard me scream in the library and beyond.
That was one of the most exciting moments of my life. It ranks up there with Christmases as a child and falling in love with my husband. I mean, how often do your dreams come true?
And secretly, inside, I nudged the phantom of the fourteen-year-old girl I had been and sent her a message back through time—Hey, we made it! We did it!
I have a confession to make here—yes, I admit it: the poem toward the end of The Silver Kiss is a slightly revised version of one of those original poems. I couldn’t resist.
I also included other things from my real life in the book.
There was an old abandoned car on the vacant lot behind my grandparents’ house—a bomb site left over from World War II. We local kids used to stop and climb over that car on our way to school. I don’t remember what year or make it was, but I remember it had running boards so it had to be old even then. That car surfaced eerily in The Silver Kiss as the abandoned car Simon inscribes with the blood of the young thug.
The leather jacket that Simon takes from one of the boys is based on a real jacket that I own. A biker gave it to my closest sister when she ran away to California as a teenager. I borrowed it from her when she returned, and never gave it back. I let Simon borrow it from me.
But the dying mother isn’t mine. My mother is still very much alive, thank goodness, and no one I know has gone through the experience of losing their mother to cancer while I’ve known them. I guess I made that experience very real to some people, however, because more than once I have been asked if my mother died of cancer, too.
Empathy is important in writing: being able to put yourself in someone else’s place. If you understand human emotions, you can imagine how your character would feel. But you also draw on what you know—yourself. This isn’t as limiting as it sounds, because you have many different sides, and people in your life see you in different ways. There are enough layers of you to be all sorts of people. Most of my main characters have me in there somewhere. The Silver Kiss was written for my lonely fourteen-year-old self, who fell in love with an imaginary vampire, and both Zoë and Simon have aspects of the quiet, shy, alienated girl I was back then.
I have received many letters over the years asking me why Simon had to die, and why Zoë and Simon couldn’t stay together. That’s what I had wanted for the characters in The Shiny Narrow Grin, so I understand. That’s why the vampire and the girl lived happily ever after at the end of The Saga of the Vampire. When I started writing The Silver Kiss, I still wanted an ending like that, but as the book became a reality, I realized that to be true to the emerging message that death is a natural part of the cycle of life, I had to let Simon go and let Zoë find the strength to go on.
That’s the funny thing about books: you can plan them all you want, but writing is still mysterious, and once the words start to flow and the characters breathe, the story can end up quite differently than you thought it would, and things surface that you don’t even realize you are writing about at the time. It was my husband who pointed out that the antagonistic relationship between Simon and his brother bore some resemblance to the relationship between me and that sister with the leather jacket—though I swear I never staked her—and it wasn’t until the third or fourth draft of the book that one of the most obvious things occurred to me. Zoë is the Greek word for “life.” How did I manage to give Zoë the perfect name without consciously thinking about it?
This first book of mine has been successful beyond my wildest dreams. The Silver Kiss earned wonderful reviews, won awards, has been taught in schools and colleges (sorry, kids), and has even been produced onstage in Japan with an allmale cast. (That one’s weird.) The book started my publishing career with a bang. I am constantly amazed and thankful that it is still in print after all these years.
I still receive letters and e-mails about my book, but I don’t think anything could top the excitement I felt at the very first fan letter I received, in which a girl declared, “I, too, would surrender my neck to Simon.”
Yessssss! That’s what I wanted people to feel. That’s what it was all about.
So her
e, for all those girls who wanted to know more about Simon and Zoë, is a new edition of The Silver Kiss that includes two bonus stories about what happened to Simon before and what happens to Zoë after. I hope you enjoy them. And for those of you who are meeting Simon for the first time—surrender your neck.
Annette Curtis Klause
THE SUMMER OF LOVE
IT was the summer of 1967, the Summer of Love, the newspapers called it, and I wandered the streets of San Francisco with the most plentiful source of food around me since the day I’d died. Runaways from all over the country were lured here by the dream of freely offered sex, plentiful drugs, and rock ’n’ roll on every corner; and layered over the gray, workaday city was a multicolored party that seemed to exist in a parallel world. I walked that world.
I was almost a happy man, if a three-hundred-year-old vampire could ever be called happy. This is what I call fast food, I thought. These children knew no fear. Strangers were their friends. All they needed was love. They slept in doorways, in the parks, and in “liberated houses” that held dozens. How easy it was to slip in next to a girl drunk on cheap wine and take my own wine from her rich, young veins. It was fortunate that the drugs they imbibed had no effect on me, else I’d have been staggering around half-blind all the time. But my unnatural body screened all chemicals out that didn’t nurture it, and in these good times I pissed a red stream of waste maybe twice a week.
Love, love, love. How meaningless it was to me. My own loved ones were centuries dead, and I, forever trapped in-between, frozen in the form of a youth not yet twenty. What did I care of love? The ones I’d loved had always abandoned me or betrayed me. I wouldn’t be what I am except for one I loved. Yet, in this city of love, I could go anywhere—join in parties, hang out at those spontaneous park festivals called be-ins, wander nighttime concerts—and all welcomed me. If I didn’t tell my name, no one pressed me; if I lied, no one cared. I had friends everywhere, and still no one knew who I was. “Who’s that pale dude?” I’d hear a boy say as I watched my menu sway to the music, the colored lights dancing on their faces. “What’s the name of that cute blond?” a girl would whisper to her friend, winding her fingers in the layers of beads around her neck as if they were in my hair. But they never found out, not even when I sweet-talked one of those yearning girls out under the stars and lulled her into a sparkling silver trance of ecstasy, my fangs firmly planted in her neck. I was gentle with them, let there be no mistake in that, and I tried very hard to leave a drop of life in their veins so they would see the dawn, but I could not make friends with those I hunted—the thought repelled me. I didn’t take the pills they gave me, and I turned down the weed they offered in hand-rolled, smoldering cigarettes. “I prefer to drink,” I’d explain if I had to.
But I loved the music. Wild and free, tunes went on and on, meandering out to the moon and beyond. I danced to the throbbing music by myself, arms waving, eyes closed, and pretended to be moved by life. I floated through the laughter, music, and excitement of the night in a dark bubble of my own making, and it was cold inside, very cold, but the less that was known of me, the safer I was. In my stolen bell-bottom jeans and flowered shirts, I looked just like them but I never would be, and I doubted that their precious, shallow love would save me if they knew.
In the day, I had to have my sleep, and in an alley behind a row of shabby Victorian houses, I’d found my den—an abandoned garage with crumbled gingerbread trim. Perhaps it was a stable once. I covered the windows with old blankets I stole from revelers in the park, and stuffed the chinks in the wood with newspaper to keep out the damaging light. Under the floorboards beneath my bed I kept a suitcase with all that was valuable to me: a meager portion of my native soil, without which I could not sleep, and a painted portrait of those I once held dear. I curled above that suitcase every day, in a deep, sodden coma, too full of rich human blood to bother with the rats that shared my home.
It was there, one misty morning, groggy with the need to sleep off excess, that I found the cat.
It must have squeezed under the ill-fitting doors looking for shelter from the damp night air. Woken by my return, it crouched on my pile of blankets in a dusty corner behind a stack of old tires and stared warily at me.
“Lucky for you I’ve had my dinner, tabby,” I said. “Now off with you.”
It should have been scared, animals ran from me, but instead it hissed.
Somehow, the absurdity made me laugh.