While UNIQUE marinates... (Some notes:)
My plan for the series AFTER MAN was to conclude the story way far in the future, thousands of years. That's one of the reasons I wanted to write vampire stories - they can live quite a long life if they're careful enough. So, what kind of world would these creatures inhabit 10,000 years after mankind relinquished power? Turns out, that's a work in progress.
But this is how I wanted to introduce the second novel. I wanted it to begin in the far future, because personally I don't want to wait 20 years for the opportunity to write what I want to write today. So, the limited pages of notes I have for the finale will be Incorporated to Book 2. I'm okay with this, I guess. Book 2's plot is only a few decades after the first story, but I wanted a way to time travel these characters without a time machine.
Now, Book 2's plot deals mostly with Evander's search for Tammie - directly where we leave off in UNIQUE, and his revenge for the two that took her away from him in the final pages. But I wanted to develop more of a mind trip for this second story, so the relationship between Evander and Gideon (who is now more or less Dracula; it's out of the box at this point) is seen at its height and near-climax. Dracula's inventions over the past twenty thousand years (he was around, it was estimated, for ten thousand years before the events of UNIQUE) have led him all over the universe. He is no longer confined to Earth or our reality. He has opened a domain where the other side (death) is a complete reality parrelled to our own; the spiral arms of our Milky Way are his borders now, and he is constantly using his EGG to get back and forth from all of these unimaginable places and times.
Evander has become enthralled with Dracula's powers, so much so that he looks at him like a god with the power to get Evander back to a different place. The years have begun to warp his mind, and he wants something simple again. Like mortality. So Book 2 (WITNESS) begins with Evander reminiscing about a dream he once had where he was watching a snowfall. These countless white flakes were everywhere, but then they began to form into vampires. It was an analogy for the reality-warp he had found in immortality. But now, these snowflakes were stars, and he is once again taken back by the powers that Dracula wields. And he confronts him that it was never meant to be for human-like beings to have this type of power. And it is insinuated that he and Dracula are somewhere near the center of the Milky Way as Dracula asks Evander a simple question. This question leads directly into the plot of Book 2. Which will lead directly into Book 3. Which will, I hope, lead into Book 4. But now I'm getting way too far ahead of myself.
Oh, and did I forget to mention that I received Tor's rejection letter the other day? Huh...
