Author and blogger Thomas Galvin visits the Dollhouse…and there’s a giveaway!
Today the dolls are thrilled to welcome Thomas Galvin – Thomas has been blogging and recapping for years and has recently released his debut novel Sire – the first installment in the Vampires of St. Troy series.
This Doll (Noa) waits with baited breath for his weekly recaps of TV’s most popular shows…in fact, I quite often find myself skipping the shows and sticking to the recaps! So I am especially pleased to welcome Thomas to our humble abode.
You can read more of Thomas’ thoughts on all things supernatural on his blog and . His debut novel, Sire, is now available.
PBD: How did you get started on the series recaps?
TG: Well, to start with, I’m kind of an attention whore. I have opinions about a lot of things, and I consider it a public service to inform others about what my opinions are.
I think the first recap I ever did was for Rambo, and it was literally two lines long. The idea was to distill the movie to its bare essence. I did Then I did Iron Man and The Incredible Hulk next, but the recaps just kept getting longer and longer. Eventually, it turned into the scene-by-scene recaps I do today.
I decided to recap Vampire Diaries for two reasons. First, I wanted to start writing more regularly, and having a weekly TV series to talk about gave me a schedule. Second, I’m a big old vampire slut, and since the CW was kind enough to come out with a new teenage vampire drama…
PBD: Why do you think your recaps have such a large following? (just so you know I’ve started watching The secret Circle because of your recaps)
TG: I think people get invested in these shows and these characters, and aren’t ready to let them go at the end of an episode. These stories stick in their minds, and they spend the rest of the week thinking about what they just experienced. And the great thing about the internet is that it’s full of porn. I mean, it allows you to connect with other people who are just as invested.
As to what I specifically bring to the table, well, I genuinely love The Vampire Diaries, and I think that shows through in my writing … but I don’t treat it with religious awe or anything. I let people laugh at it, and maybe enjoy it from a different perspective.
And when I write about something I don’t love, like Teen Wolf or the latest season of True Blood? Well, it can be fun to watch a good slaughter, too.
And, you know, I’m awesome. That helps.
PBD: Why did you choose to write a YA genre book?
TG: I actually kind of go back and forth as to whether Sire is YA or not. The characters, at least the ones that aren’t ancient, immortal murder machines, are all in college, not high school, and I think most of my readers are women age 18 to 45.
But I very consciously set it in college, and not in the “adult” world, for a couple of reasons.
First, going off to college is all about discovering yourself and the world around you, and that’s what Caitlin’s story is about, too. It’s just that for Caitlin, what she discovers about world involves blood, fangs, and kidnapping. So much kidnapping.
Second, the “adult” world kind of sucks. As an adult, you have to go to work and pay your rent and remember to pick up milk on the way home, and it’s just so boring. I don’t want to read about someone whose life is boring, and I sure don’t want to write about them. College is kind of a magic time when you have a lot of the the freedoms of an adult, but none of those responsibilities. Like, you have the freedom to go to the hot club in town and get picked up by a two hundred year old serial killer, and you don’t have to worry about making an eight AM meeting the next morning.
PBD: Ok, so, Twilight? It seems you have quite the love-hate relationship with this series – is this why you have so many Twilight references in Sire?
TG: Like it or not, Twilight is why we’re all here right now. If Stephenie Meyer hadn’t written that book, vampires wouldn’t have taken off again, and we wouldn’t have gotten The Vampire Diaries or True Blood, and I wouldn’t have had an audience for Sire. So I think we have to give credit where credit is due.
And even though there are a ton of problems in Twilight – from purple prose to an almost unrelenting misogyny, sprinkled with a pinch of bestiality and pedophilia for flavor – Meyer accomplished what she set out to do: write a story that you can’t put down because it speaks directly to your warm squishy bits. I’ve talked to so many people, intelligent, well-read people, that say the same thing: “I know this is terrible, but I just can’t stop please help me I think I’m in trouble.”
In Sire, I think it was important to spell out why Caitlin didn’t just run screaming from Michael the moment she learned what he is. Twilight really changed the way people view vampires, and now it’s actually kind of plausible that someone would fall for one. Michael, of course, thinks that’s immensely stupid, and calls her on it.
Also, I wanted to show Caitlin’s journey, from a sweet but kind of air headed girl who reads Twilight to the smart, though girl who’s ready to face the reality of her situation.
PBD: Do you still think it is the ultimate reading guilty-pleasure?
TG: Nah. I read things that make me feel way guiltier than Twilight.
And I kind of think Twilight is anexperience you can only have once. The first time through you just get caught up in the life of this girl who is so overwhelmingly in love, but the next time you pick it up you start to realize how much of the story is just Bella sitting in Math class, or Bella cooking dinner for her father, or Bella writing “Edward + Bella” on her trapper keeper. Or Bella attempting suicide because her boyfriend broke up with her. Or Bella leaving her baby with a werewolf pedophile. You know, filler material that distracts from the real meat of the story.
PBD: What gave you the idea for a town/university created by a vampire and dedicated to the arts and beauty?
TG: In the original draft, Angelica was a very different character, and she kind of sucked. Not in the “I want to drink your blood” kind of way, but in a “all of my early readers wrote me angry emails saying they wanted Angelica to die and no not because she’s such a wicked villain it’s because she sucks dear God did you actually think this character was a good idea?” way.
She was a very generic, cookie-cutter psycho that really only exited to harass Michael and Caitlin. Villains like that are boring, so I spent a lot of time putting myself in Angelica’s place. What would it be like to live forever, and watch the world around you constantly change? What would it be like to see the people you love grow old and die, the things you love tarnish and fade?
I decided that Angelica was really very sad. She’s learned to hide it well, but there’s an emptiness in her because everything is so temporary. And everything she does, from creating St. Troy to founding the University to Siring Michael, is all about making things permanent, about holding on to them.
Also, I needed a plausible excuse to have a bunch of vampires interested in a bunch of teenagers. A convenient supply of attractive Happy Meals seemed to work.
PBD: Were the Twilight vampires the basis for having Michael drink animal blood?
TG: No, that’s a fairly common trope. Angel did it in Buffy the Vampire Slayer, Stefan did it in the Vampire Diaries novels in the 80s, and I’m sure it’s been done before that, too. When you have a vampire hero, you basically have two choices: he eats animals, or he eats murderers and rapists. And while murderers and rapists are nutritionally complete, that would have pushed the story to a darker place that I wanted to go.
Twilight is the reason Michael doesn’t hunt in the forest, though. In an earlier draft he did, and I circled that spot, wrote “Hi, Edward,” and crossed out the whole chapter.
PBD: Where did you come up with the idea of having the characters able to see what someone is doing/feeling after drinking their blood?
TG: The idea is: the blood is the life. When a vampire feeds, they aren’t just drinking your blood, they’re drinking your life, the essence of what you are. And since they already have mental powers, compulsion and the like, it made sense to me that they’d be able to use that essence to see and feel their prey.
Also, even in the early drafts Liam liked to play with his food. He said they tasted better if they ran or put up a fight. At first I said that it was just because of the adrenalin pumping through their veins, but then I started thinking, what if it’s something deeper? What if he’s actually tasting their fear?
To me, that made Liam a much scarier bad guy, and it made that one scene between Michael and Angelica much more emotional for Caitlin.
PBD: How many books do you have planned for the series?
TG: I have plans for six more stories, so seven books in total. But I’m not building toward an end-game, at least not yet, so I’ll keep writing these as long as I have stuff to talk about.
PBD: Any tidbits you can share?
TG: Well, the second book picks up right where the first one leaves off, and I don’t want to spoil that for anyone.
By the time book three comes around St. Troy will be kind of falling apart, with vampires feeding and killing openly, and people are going to start noticing the pile of pretty young corpses.
And then you have the fact that Michael has murdered — I actually went through and counted once, and I think I came up with like twenty-eight werewolves in this first story. You can’t make a mess like that without someone demanding furry vengeance.
And I’d like to get into the origin of these vampires, too. I love The Vampire Diaries, I honestly do, but my vampires were not created by a bunch of Vikings with Hebrew names that lived in Virginia in 1,000 CE.
PBD: There has been quite the ongoing debate among the Dolls over books with cliffhangers… Do you feel cliffhangers add something to a series? Are they necessary?
TG: To me, the ending of Sire is important not because it’s a cliffhanger, but because it tells the reader that there’s actually a plan for this story.
Some stories are tragedies by design. You get to the end and everything explodes and everyone dies, and then you fade to black. But a year later someone realizes that they can still make money off this thing, and it kind of sucks that all of the characters people know and love are dead, so they import a wizard to bring them all back to life. It trivializes the original story.
But Sire isn’t a tragedy. It ends on a dark note, but I want the readers to know that there’s already a plan in place. The second book is a continuation of the first, not a retcon.
Also, I write these books like some people write television series; even my draft notes sometimes take the form of a script. To me, the end of Sire is the end of Season One, and the cliffhanger is what whets your appetite for Season Two.
And if you don’t like that? Pretend you never read the last line, and you still have a complete story. Caitlin’s arc is complete. It’s just really, really depressing. It’s kind of like Buffy; if you want to pretend Season Seven never happened, you’re free to leave Buffy in the grave. But then you don’t get Once More With Feeling or invisible blow jobs. And everyone loves invisible blow jobs.
PBD: Now that you have become an author “officially” will we be seeing less of the Thomas Galvin blog?
TG: God no. I’m way too much of an attention whore to give up blogging.
And honestly? I kind of love the little community we’ve developed on my blog. I’ve made actual friends there, people I talk to on Twitter and Facebook. We even talk about things other than teenage vampires. Crazy, right?
Also, of it wasn’t for my blog readers, Sire would be just another novel up on Amazon, selling like fifteen copies and then disappearing. And that’s almost worse than never getting a book out there at all.
Thank you so much to Thomas Galvin – I for one am very glad you’re an attention whore. :D
And now…
Thomas has very kindly agreed to share a copy of Sire with one lucky follower!
Woaaah, this book look amazing! I laughed with this interview, mostly when he said: “I’m a big old vampire slut” OH GOSH! I feel like I’ll be like Thomas in the future HAHAHA
[...] Paperback Dolls have graced me with a double feature on their web site: a very kind review and an interview … with an attached giveaway. So head on over and check them (me) out and enter to win a [...]
SIRE looks brilliant. I love to read this.
marypres(AT)gmail(DOT)com
LOL! Loved the interview! I haven’t even had my coffee yet, and I’m wide awake now, hahaha!
Thanks so much for the giveaway – I definitely want this book ;-)
I hadn’t heard of Thomas Galvin or Sire before. I’ll be looking up his recaps (thanks for the link to his site) and Sire (if I don’t win it). I’d like to see if his writing is as amusing as it was on this post.
The book sounds amazing. Would love to read it.:)
Great interview. The book sounds awesome!! Thank you
I am a follower and email subscriber. Please enter me in contest. I would love to read this book. It sounds very good.
I’d really love to red this! I love vampire novels!
The interview was great thanks. And for those who hadn’t read it yet: go read it, the book is awesome!
Looks cool.
This sounds like a nice good read. I am a GFC follower and email subscriber. Thank you.
vsloboda(at)gmail(dot)com
Thank you for the giveaway :)
woah, sounds so much fun!and the interview was really nice!
wow the lady on the cover is gorgeous and the one word name for the cover is very grabbing!I l also like how it’s explained why he drinks animal blood than muderers and rapists =) Thank you for hosting this giveaway!
Sounds like a promising read. Thanks!
This sounds like a fantastic story and I love the cover, it’s very striking.
thanks for a great interview and giveaway! This book sounds awesome!
happy Holidays!
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Read it, loved it
… and would love to get a paper copy of it! ;-)
Sire sounds like a book I’d greatly enjoy! Caitlin is a pretty name for the heroine.
Sire sounds awesome! Thank you for the interview & giveaway! :)
Sounds amazing can’t wait to read!
Now this is a book I’d love to get my hands on! I’ve been following his blog ever since he began recapping Vampire diaries, and I love it!
This is the first I’m hearing about this book but I love it! The cover is beautiful, and the description is intriguing! I’m also a lot like Thomas in that I, too, consider it a public service to inform others about what my opinions are!! Thanks for the fun interview and the awesome giveaway:)
So first off, this way be the bet author interview I’ve EVER read. Thomas is hilarious and if he’s even half as witty in his book as he is here and in his recaps, then he’s got a fan in me!
Smiles!
Lori
I’m Team Vampire. Amazing giveaway! Thanks.
Very interesting interview. Thanks.
[...] Paperback Dolls have graced me with a double feature on their web site: a very kind review and an interview … with an attached giveaway. So head on over and check them (me) out and enter to win a [...]
great recap, thanks for the information
Sound interesting, I would like to read this book :)
What a great giveaway :) Would be a class book to read :D
[...] and I’ve had a couple of very nice reviews, which didn’t hurt, either. I also did a giveaway. I think stuff like this is great for getting your name out there, but I haven’t done a whole [...]