The Elders is a sub-series of Coffee and Blood.
The series will take part in the same modern time as Coffee and Blood. Whereas Coffee and Blood is mortals and vampires working together to solve some problem caused by vampires coming out to humans, the Elders will be about the past.
These books will be paired with the narration and questions of one Joshua Martin, a human journalist who is pulled into everything by an unnamed force. He takes a recording device and his paper pads along with him and sits with the vampires as they tell a selection of time from their past.
After the first book, Joshua will be given a token that keeps him safe from vampires and allows him to ask any vampire for their story. He becomes a bit of a historian for the race.
The original plan for this series was to just use those vampires who count as Elder among the race. Except the title appears to be arbitrary.
Each book will be titled by the vampire involved in the story. They will be solo-stories but some will have a thread of connection between them besides the vampire family ties between them.
Besides the first book, this will take a great deal of research on my part. All historical facts will be double checked but mistakes are bound to happen as I am not a historian and new facts come to light every day.
The first book is titled Hera, and as of June 2018 the first draft is written. Editing will likely begin shortly as I’m still obsessing over this story, but it will be on the side and I need to do some setup first.
Like taping a long piece of paper to the wall and sketching out the basic timeline of humanity and then overlaying the timeline of vampires over that and make preparation to do the same for the witches and werewolves. I just need to figure out how to do the layers to not accidentally rub them off but still let me rub them off to fix things.
Hera covers some twenty-five, ish, thousand years of vampire history and involves the second turned child of Mut. Given Hera’s power to transmute all organic matter, some of the wording, and the reaction of an old friend at the end of the book, I suspect Hera is my first trans-gender character. I only say that for questions that come out later. I suspect this partly because of the ability to change anything, including humans into other humans, paired with the fact that the older vampires developed power based on what they wanted to do in mortality.
Hera goes over some of the events that led to the Great Race War of about twenty-thousand years ago, and then the War itself. It’s been described by a reader as a prequel that explains the vampires. I don’t necessarily think it’s a prequel, since those are nice and tidy and wrap everything from before up in a nice little bow in one book.
This does not do that. It could be used as a prequel to Wraith’s Rebellion, I suppose.
Other vampires who have spoken up and might be participating in the elders are:
Gaia – A period of time approximately four thousand years before modern day. Her tale would cover about six or seven hundred years and would look at a small area in the Mediterranean. If you’ve done research on this area and time (Minoan Culture) I’d be interested in talking to you.
Balor – A bit of a debate between when he was turned or his ruling Ireland for a thousand years or so.
Hathor or Ares – This will cover the Ba Re Family, though I’m uncertain of when or what it would cover.
Lucrecia – The second Great War, so Bau before she went mad and what Lucrecia has managed to piece together since then.
There is no plan at this point to ever write Sasha/Niri/Mu/The Great Maker. The only story from her will remain in Wraith’s Rebellion.
Aya DeAniege 