Dark Genesis is a new YA paranormal fantasy from the creator of the Hunters of the Dark series, Dave Ferraro.
"Alyssa opened her eyes to darkness. And in the first flash of light provided by a gathering storm, she could make out a ring of bodies surrounding her.
With no memory of who she is, Alyssa stumbles into a dark world populated by witches. The witches are powerful, and demonstrate frightening powers, but even more terrifying are the monsters who rule over the land. Vampires, werewolves and other awful creatures of the night have taken over, forcing the witches behind stone walls, afraid to venture outdoors. But Alyssa finds that as she kills certain monsters, memories return to her, memories of a life on Earth, and the boy she left behind.
The quest to collect her memories and piece together the puzzle of what has happened to her is a daunting one, with betrayals and sacrifices every step of the way. But Alyssa is determined to fight for a world that is not her own, destroying powerful monsters along the way, so that she can return home to the boy she is coming to love through the memories she recollects."
The author has an exclusive guest post for us, all about his
WRITING EXPERIENCES!
When I first put pen to paper, I was still in junior high
school. I read hundreds of young adult
books growing up, obsessively reading everything I could get my hands on from
the “teen thriller” section, which made up almost the entire teen section of B.
Daltons and Waldenbooks, small mall store chains that I had access to before
the mega bookstore chains of Barnes & Nobles and Borders began to open
around me. These books were mostly
slasher books, mysteries featuring serial killers that picked off teenagers one
at a time, from the likes of Nicole Davidson and Kate Daniels. There were some supernatural books in there,
but they were few and far between.
Those, however, became my favorites.
They were really exotic compared to the others, and so Christopher Pike
and L.J. Smith soon rose to become my favorite writers, and would be highly
influential to my writing in the coming years.
While I was immersed in reading these teen thrillers, I
often found myself imagining what the book would be like when I first picked
them up in the store and on the car ride home.
I would read the synopsis on the back, and take into account the cover
image, and sort of think up what the pages would hold, forming some idea of
what I had to look forward to.
Oftentimes, the book ended up being drastically different than what I’d
imagined, and sometimes, what I had thought up had been better. That’s when I decided to begin writing books
myself. The first books that I wrote
were “The Nightmare” and “Trapped.” I
wrote them in pen in spiral-bound notebooks, scribbling out mistakes and
sentences often, words arching over blacked-out errors. I would even scribble out entire paragraphs
at times after reading through the story, and rewrite them in the margins. Both of these initial books were slasher
stories. “The Nightmare” took place in a
rainforest, probably inspired by my science class at the time, since I remember
a big rainforest segment in junior high.
It was basically about a group of teenagers on some sort of educational
trip, and one of them begins to kill off the others in ridiculous ways, like by
luring them into quicksand, or confronting them with boa constrictors. It was definitely the stuff of a kid’s
imagination. “Trapped” was a story about
a girl whose boyfriend was trying to kill her after she broke up with him, and
took place entirely in her house as she tried to hide from him and get
away. After these two books, I ventured
into stories with supernatural elements.
I remember being influenced heavily by L.J. Smith’s “The Forbidden Game”
trilogy for one of them, but I probably wrote a good half dozen before I got
really serious about writing.
“Hunters of the Dark” was born from reading several
different books about teenagers fighting off various monsters. There were either werewolf hunters or vampire
hunters, like in L.J. Smith’s “Night World,” or a council of witches trying to
track down bad witches, like in Cate Tiernan’s “Sweep.” So I thought that all of these various
monster hunters should unite and take on monsters together, which is the basic
idea behind “Hunter of the Dark.” A team
of monster hunters. My very first draft
of book one is drastically different than how the final product turned out over
a dozen years later. It went through
many drafts. The very first draft pretty
much consisted of the first three books crammed together, before I was able to
really pace myself and establish characters clearly. Some characters, like Krystal, didn’t appear
right away in the final version, and became someone completely different than
originally intended. I flushed out who I
was writing about, and lived with these characters for a very long time so I
got to know them and what exactly it was that they were fighting for. And through that first “Hunters of the Dark”
book, I think that the writer that I am today emerged. It was a long, tedious process of editing and
revising, smoothing things out and constructing new scenes and characters. It was a journey, and by the time I was
through with my final rewrite, I had gone through a journey, and I understood
better what exactly I was doing, and how to write well. It took over a
decade, and that’s perhaps why “Hunters of the Dark” is still my baby. These characters still live in my head, and I
know things that are going to happen to them, things that I want written down,
so I’m sure I’m going to be writing “Hunters of the Dark” books for a long,
long time to come. I just have so many
ideas stored up for the characters.
Throughout junior high and high school, I was recognized
often for my writing abilities. My
stories were often chosen as the examples my ninth grade teacher would read
aloud to the class, for various writing exercises. I remember in high school we had one
particular exercise where the teacher showed us an image on an overhead
projector of a little rowboat pulled up on a short, where a fire was
raging. We had to come up with a story
to write around the image. She read mine
aloud to the class and people were really surprised. One girl asked how I was able to come up with
it, and I couldn’t come up with an adequate answer. I just could.
I had a vivid imagination.
I got discouraged in college, honestly. Young adult books weren’t exactly seen as
high literature, and as I grew up reading teen books, my writing voice
naturally fell that way. I eventually
graduated with a B.A. in English and creative writing, and while I did have
moments where I shone, I got the sense from the director of the creative
writing department that he was not impressed, and I later got confirmation of
this. As he taught most of the creative writing classes, I didn’t have much in
terms of variety of people I could look to for guidance, but I did get one
teacher, a published author, who didn’t really see my potential through the short
stories I wrote, but was “dancing around with happiness” after I turned in a
longer work, the first ninety pages of a novel.
She saw what I was capable of and encouraged me, which is all I really
needed in the end, to continue to write.
While I have mixed feelings about my college experience, I am overall
thankful for the English program, as it taught me to appreciate the
classics. I still try to keep up on
reading classics because I think you do sort of learn good writing from them,
through osmosis.
I can’t imagine doing anything but writing. I probably started out reading as a way to
escape a troubled childhood, but I feel like I was directed toward my true
passion in life through those “teen thrillers.”
I’ve written various fantasies and high school dramas since that first
“Hunters of the Dark” book, as well as revisiting my “Hunter” friends. I want to write an autobiography and a
children’s book. And I have ideas for
dozens of worlds to visit. But wherever
my muse takes me next, I know I will continue to write with passion, and I will
have fun every step of the way.
******
