Report From The Writing Trenches

It’s been an insanely busy couple of months. Starting with the release of DEAD, WITHOUT A STONE TO TELL IT in June, I feel like I’ve been going non-stop, and there’s no end in sight. So I thought I’d take a brief break from the normal round of forensic posts to talk about what’s been going on with me lately.

1. Our novella, NO ONE SEES ME ‘TIL I FALL, has gone through our critique team and has been professionally edited. For now, it’s been temporarily put aside for one last pass before formatting to get it ready for a November release. Cover art is still to come. This novella is the second installment in the Abbott and Lowell Forensic Mysteries and occurs in series time two weeks after DEAD, WITHOUT A STONE TO TELL IT and about a week before A FLAME IN THE WIND OF DEATH.
2. Copy edits for A FLAME IN THE WIND OF DEATH are complete. This is the third installment in the Abbott and Lowell Forensic Mysteries and is scheduled for hardcover release in May 2014 with the eBook to follow. I’m expecting the cover art to arrive any time now since Advanced Reading Copies are due in only a few months. As soon as we’ve got the go ahead to release the new cover art, you’ll see it here first.
3. I’m getting ready to attend Bouchercon 2013 in Albany, NY in less than a month. I recently found out that I’ll be sitting on the forensics panel with five excellent authors. More to come on that in the next few weeks.
4. My biggest challenge lately has been our newest novel, the fourth installment in the Abbott and Lowell Forensic Mysteries. TWO PARTS BLOODY MURDER is definitely the most intense draft I’ve ever produced. DEAD was written over about five months, when I was in my former lab job (which was much less intense than my current position) and when I wasn’t into the social media aspects etc. of being a debut author. FLAME was written in about 8 or 10 weeks last year while I was between jobs and had the whole day get my words in. This novel is being written in about the same length of time as FLAME but with a very intense 40-hours-a-week in my new job. Don’t get me wrong, I love working with my current group, but it makes for an 18-hour work day nearly every day of the week.
5. I’ll be attending New England Crime Bake in early November, and have padded a day on each side of the trip to Boston to make sure all my locations for TWO PARTS BLOODY MURDER are perfect, as well as to start scouting locations for the next full length Abbott and Lowell novel. We’ve got great plans for that one, and the perfect location for a large part of the novel is going to be crucial. Even though we won’t be starting planning on that novel until January, I want to be boots-on-the-ground with my camera in November to get all the shots we need ahead of time.

So that’s my crazy life for the last half of 2013. Our WIP manuscript is currently almost 70% done, and the goal is to have the first draft complete in September, critiqued in October, re-edited and sent to our editor in November. Wish me luck getting the first draft in on time; I’m going to need it!

Photo credit: Shane Pope

Forensic Case Files: 16th Century Vampire Burials

Modern sensibilities and science tell us that there is no such thing as vampires (especially not sparkly ones!). But to people of the Middle and early Modern Ages, vampires were a real fear. The belief in vampires likely evolved because people of the time didn’t understand the natural process of decomposition, including corpse bloating and fluid purging. To protect themselves from the undead, communities adopted specific burial practices:

• Four skeletons were recovered this past July in Poland during a road construction project. Each set of remains was found with the head buried between the legs. Since the bodies were buried without personal effects, dating of the remains is proving difficult, but, with further testing, scientists hope to confirm their estimate of a fifteenth or sixteenth century burial. During that period, suspected vampires would be ritually executed by decapitation, or they would be hung until decomposition naturally rotted the neck tissues and the weight of the body pulled it from the head. The belief was that a vampire would not be able to rise if it couldn’t locate its own head.

• In Bulgaria, a number of skeletons have been discovered with an iron rod through the heart and their teeth removed. This ritual provided two-fold protection: The iron rod pinned the dead into the grave, preventing them from rising. But in case they did manage to escape, removal of the teeth ensured that the undead would not be able to feast on flesh of the living.

• The Black Plague killed over 50,000 residents of Venice in the year 1576, including the medieval artist Titian. Four hundred and thirty-three years later, Italian researcher Matteo Borrini and his team were excavating a mass grave from the epidemic when they discovered a peculiar victim—a dead woman with a brick wedged between her teeth. Dr. Borrini hypothesized that the practice of opening up mass graves to add more victims, thereby exposing the decomposing bodies, led people to believe that vampires were spreading the plague by chewing on their death shrouds. Bricks were placed in the mouths of these ‘Shroud Eaters’ to stop them from spreading disease.

What appears as odd customs to modern people were reinforced to those early believers as the ‘vampires’ never rose from the grave. And looking at it from a modern perspective, it’s clear where some of the customs around current vampire traditions arose. So the next time you see a vampire movie, remember that some of those mythical aspects date back centuries to a time when society was looking for simple answers to explain complex biology.

Photo credit: Andrzej Grygiel/EPA, Nikolay Doychinov/ AFP and Matteo Borrini