Blog text version also being posted on GoodReads –

I just finished the first draft of a new book, “Amy”, and am sitting back, taking a breather. In my new novel, there is a scene where a minor character, Peggy Howitzer, waxes kindly to a more central one, Mina, about a former Oakland neighbor, Amy, the novel’s protagonist. So warm and such a nice presence. They were all surprised when she and Steve had decided to split, they had been a couple that just seemed so happy together and were so sociable on that scenic block.

So, the character Amy Ritter is refracted in the perceptions of those around her. She is an adept people person, and a tenured practitioner in the “people business”, as Amy herself describes it. She’s an accomplished HR professional and trouble-shooter, for many years with the substantial Bay Area employer Kaiser Permanente, but currently in billet at the fictional protean, vaguely mysterious and growing Clarix Corporation, located in Oakland.

Peggy adds that the athletic, capable Amy would have been “a natural” at tennis, such a shame that she never took it up. Kinda sad too that she and Steve did not have any kids; they would have been great parents, Peggy reflects.

Of course, being vampires, Amy and Steve were on a kind of parallel track relative to their unsuspecting human neighbors, so their lifestyle would manifest as such. There were no kids – being dead, they couldn’t have any.

But they love the Bay Area, even though Steve, an accomplished pediatrician, has a figurative mid-life crisis and decamps to the affluent Del Mar area in metro San Diego. In their centuries together, Steve would periodically do this, executing a strange form of serial monogamy, only eventually, after say years or decades, to come back and rekindle things with the indulgent Amy. She would be left to her own devices, he to his.

Steve, though, encourages her “to get out there” for the time being. Meet someone, have fun – but be careful, Steve intones. He encourages her to think about the dating apps, which she then pursues…

Amy also begins a new chapter, as she and Steve sell their opulent home on Skyline Boulevard with its panoramic view of SF and the Bay, and split the proceeds. She moves then to the North Berkeley hills and buys a smaller but still charming home, one even with Bay views.

The vampires in “Amy” are a bit different from standard Hollywood fare. They can function pretty seamlessly in human society, and in many ways, they want to. They are rare birds for sure, but they can function more or less normally to the casual or unwitting observer. They can function in the daylight, they have nine-to-five jobs. They do like people, and have friends, even though, ultimately, their needs may be monstrous.

Because they “live” over so many lifetimes, they foster naturally an easier enjoyment of what they have in the present moment. They savor things. Being around for a long time, they are certainly from somewhere, but their wealth of experience means they can be from anywhere. They’ve been there, they’ve done that.

So, the “athletic” Amy was once the daughter of a weathered knight, one who is kind of retired and “of counsel” at the time of her birth in the thirteenth century. Her mother dies in her childbirth, and the distraught knight keeps his girl-child to raise with his sons. She is a token and keep-sake of his beloved dead wife. Amy is raised then with her brothers as a warrior.

The old knight is part of the Teutonic order, an actual religious order that exists to this day. It is a Roman Catholic order dedicated to charity and good works, and had been outlawed by the Nazis in 1938, only to then emerge again after the Second World War. At its conception during the Middle Ages, the Teutonic Knights had been a martial religious order and supported by German merchants to protect travelers from the German speaking regions to the Holy Land. The popes later directed the knights to aid in the conversion and settlement of the Baltic region, the last enclave of paganism in Europe. They participate in the protracted Northern Crusade, which is a brutal one. Amy and her family are swept up into that fight. Just as in anyone’s life, events overtake her. She sees the quick death of her father and brother, who actually saves her life. She’s rendered delirious from a battlefield wound she suffers. She listens and believes in the entreaties from someone she believes is a priest. And so, she meets her fate, which takes her to Northern California some 750 years later.