Dracula's Ghost - Afterimage - Acknowledgements

Memento Mori

At a funeral, we mourn the dead and celebrate the living, for when a loved one passes, family and friends gather from the far corners of the earth, and we see faces and share both tears and laughter. This year has seen a fair amount of both, and it seems fitting to look back and consider what the past year has wrought.

Photo by Dieter K on Unsplash

First of all, one does not write two works of Dracula fan fiction without acknowledging Bram Stoker, for though Dracula was not the first work of vampire fiction, it is the greatest, and the rest of us are standing in his shadow. I am also indebted to Leslie S. Klinger, who produced The New Annotated Dracula in 2008, for his wealth of background information – if you want to take a deeper dive into Stoker’s work, I strongly urge you to check out Klinger. Once again, I used Project Gutenberg (www.gutenberg.org) as the source of the public domain works quoted in this work, including Dracula, Plato’s Republic, and Heart of Darkness.

For our celebration of the living, I would like to thank all of the wonderful folks of the Substack community. In particular, S. E. Reid has been a tireless promoter of Substack’s fiction writers, Wolf boosted my profile with a great interview, and The Chronicler got us all working together with a delightfully disturbing series of collaborative ideas. I am also grateful to Josh Tatter, Daniel W. Davison, and The Brothers Krynn for their feedback and encouragement.

Finally, and most importantly, thanks to my wife and daughters for their unending love and support. We have leaned on each other through laughter and tears in the past months, and I am so thankful that I have you.

Now then… let us mourn the dead. 2023 will go down as a tough year in our family, for there were three deaths in less than a month. Karen Marie Hudson (1947-2023) was my mother-in-law, outspoken, funny, never subtle, and fiercely devoted to her children and grandchildren. Marlin Jay Blake (1929-2023), my father, devoted a lifetime of work to providing for his family and was a model of decency and kindness. Betty Jane Blake (1938-2023) was my mother, a remarkable woman of extraordinary intelligence and wit. My mother and father were devoted to each other for more than a half-century, and though I am saddened to lose them, it is fitting in a way that they would leave this world so closely together. I am convinced that neither of them would have wanted it any other way.

Thank you again for reading – I had fun writing both novels, and I hope that you enjoyed them. I am busy working on the final installment of the Dracula’s Ghost trilogy, and I hope to begin publication on the last book by mid-2024. Meanwhile, I will be dropping in with short stories and previews to keep the site active. Take care, and I hope to see you soon.