Dark Genesis Blog Tour - Guest Post

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."

Buy your own copy of Dark Genesis today! 
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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.

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