Guest Post + Giveaway: Blood and Whiskey

Asphalt ballerina and the birth of The Meta 

By Kathleen McFall (with a little help from Clark) 

What happens to a Vampire’s mind at dawn? Where does it go?

Imagine having a Near Death Experience (NDE) every day — floating out of your body and seeing yourself from above, then rushing off through a tunnel of light, filled with an ecstatic sense of connectedness to everyone and everything, all fear of death gone.

In Blood and Whiskey, that’s exactly what happens every day for vampires as they face the dawn.

Inside The Meta.

We started thinking about what it might mean for vampires who have serial NDEs every day of their long, long undead lives. We created the concept of The Meta where vampire consciousness waits out the day, connected to each other, inside a long tunnel of light, but then emerges at night, individually resurrected.

NDEs happen to humans too, but very few make it back alive to tell the story from The Meta. But some do. Like me.

Asphalt ballerina: the car crash 

When I was 15 years old, I was riding in the front seat of an orange Chevy van that was hit by a white Dodge clunker sedan head on. The impact sent me crashing through the windshield and onto the rural highway where I landed in a splits like a ballerina, only with shattered bones and sitting in a pool of my own blood, shards of glass and exhaust fumes.

People screamed. I cursed. When an elderly man picked me up to move me to a safer spot, my left leg dangled beneath me like a marionette. Sirens wailed. Technicians pulled me from the ambulance into a hospital. A nurse sobbed at the sight of me. I vomited French fries into my terrified mother’s purse. Shadowy voices whispered about the tragedy of the young girl whose leg would be amputated.

And yet I was calm. Weirdly so. I knew, just knew, it was all going to be okay. I felt something unearthly as I flew through the windshield. I quietly asked the physician if I would be able to go home later that night. He looked at me, bemused, and shook his head no. I remember every moment, but like a waking dream, not reality.

My leg was saved, but something changed in my brain that day. Ever since, I’ve pondered religion, done as many forms of mind-altering drugs as one can do, sought out mystics and embraced science and neurology. I keep coming back to Near Death Experiences as the only tangible manifestation of the disembodied consciousness I felt. From this obsession, and that horrible accident, The Meta was born.

As Kirkus Reviews noted, The Meta is, “where consciousnesses wait out the daylight hours and immortality, [and it] has all sorts of ramifications for human spirituality.”

We agree!

However, none of this personal backstory explains how Clark and I developed our fondness for the macabre, for bloodthirsty vampires and for a chronic attachment to sexually deviant behavior (mostly for our characters). Blood and Whiskey has all the love, romance, sex, horror, action and comedy readers have come to expect from The Cowboy and Vampire Thriller Series. To visit The Meta yourself, check out Blood and Whiskey. For more fun, check out one of our favorite reviews below from AJBpdx, a top 10 list.









Blood and Whiskey 
A Cowboy and Vampire Thriller
by Clark Hays and Kathleen McFall
Publication date: May 1, 2012 Fiction
Trade Paperback (362 pages) $14.95
e-book $4.99
Buy it on Amazon

Wanted: Lizzie Vaughan, Dead or Alive 

Relationships are always hard, but for a broke cowboy and a newly turned Vampire, true love may be lethal.

 After barely surviving an undead apocalypse in The Cowboy and the Vampire, Tucker and Lizzie hightail it back to quirky LonePine, Wyoming (population 438), to start a family. But she’s got a growing thirst for blood and he’s realizing that mortality ain’t all it’s cracked up to be when your girlfriend may live forever. With a scheming Vampire nation hot on their boot heels and a price on her head, how far will Lizzie and Tucker go to protect their unlikely love?

Blending evolution, religion and an overly sensitive cow dog named Rex, Blood and Whiskey drags the Vampire myth into the modern west, delivering double-barreled action, heart-pounding passion and wicked humor.

“Girl-on-girl vampire naughtiness” 

Here’s one of our favorite reviews from Amazon. 

AJBpdx shares the top 10 things she likes about Blood and Whiskey:

10. Vampires

9. Cowboys

8. Awesome love story

7. Hot vampires

6. A consciousness realm called The Meta where Vampires hang

5. Nice nod to Oregon

4. There's a blood farm in it!

3. MacGyver-style weapons

2. Kick-ass female lead with an even more bad-ass side-kick

1. Girl on Vampire-Girl naughtiness

About the authors 

Stuff Clark likes: sagebrush, the American West, clouds, whiskey and graphic novels. Stuff he hates: running quarterbacks, drivers who don’t use turn signals and the sound of flip-flops.

Stuff Kathleen likes: Russian literature, anarchy, martinis, lava and the ocean. Stuff she hates: intermissions, Halloween corn mazes and high-speed vehicular

Learn more and stay in touch:

Website
Facebook
Twitter: @cowboyvamp 
Find us on Goodreads

Look for my reviews for both The Cowboy and The Vampire 

and Blood and Whiskey later this month.




   

a Rafflecopter giveaway