During the end of May, we’ll be celebrating Emerian Rich’s birthday, coming June 1st!
Now, some of you may not know that Emz did not start out as a podcaster. She actually ran a little San Francisco Bay Area ‘zine called DarkLives in the 90s. All the while she was also writing a vampire novel that would lead her to become a podcaster and start the snowball that would become HorrorAddicts.net.
Her dreams to be a vampire novelist started about 1991 when she started writing Jespa’s story in her college apartment overlooking the fog-covered streets of Daly City. At that time, Julien, Severina, and Markham were in a different story and only sparks of ideas at that. Soon, she’d move closer to her college and reside in downtown San Francisco, where her love of the city would blossom into an all-consuming passion. And with her love of the city grew the vampires that she would create there. As you may know, if you’ve read Night’s Knights, the city is almost its own character in this book and it would be a late night roaming the deserted alleyways of the financial district that she would decide to combine the Jespa story and the story of the vampires.
About ten years later, as she was shopping her book around, frustrated at the publishing business and hoping for a deal, she would get a real bite from a publisher. It was so exciting! Someone actually wanted to publish her book! She spent months cutting, fine-tuning, and getting the book ready for a publisher that would ultimately close before the deal was done. Depressed, pregnant, and ill, she gave up. Night’s Knights went into the closet. Her pregnancy brain wasn’t working anyway, so she stopped writing for a time.
After the birth of her son, she suffered post-partum cardiomyopathy, which caused her to die and be brought back to life on the ER table. Waking up a week later, unsure if she lived or died, she realized something.
“Life isn’t easy and it’s short. If I sat around waiting for someone to give me the okay to be a writer, I was going to die without any of my stories out there.”
So, she left Night’s Knights in the closet and wrote other things, constantly working on her craft. During this time, Artistic License came to be. Meanwhile, she would record her books on short little audio snippets and put them together on CDs for her and he husband to listen to.
One day, her husband came home from his commute and said, “Hey, there’s this thing some authors are doing and it’s just like you recording your books for us. Only… they are putting it out on the internet and iTunes for people to listen to. I think they call it podcasting.”
Emerian jumped in head first, but still hoping for a book deal and also leery about people maybe stealing her book ideas from the cast, she didn’t want to use her fresh new book, so she pulled out the closet book, Night’s Knights. Still her baby, the book market at the time was NOT looking for vampire tales. She started podcasting her vampire novel, which gave her an audience who wanted it in book form. She self-published her book when that was not a very cool thing to do and got a lot of flack about it. But her listeners (or Biters as she called them) didn’t mind.
After the publication of Night’s Knights, offers from anthologies started pouring in and she took every single opportunity she could to write for other publishers and get the word out.
If you’d like to check out her first book, you can get it on Amazon in Print and eBook, and the podcast from 2009 is still out on her website at: https://nightsknights.wordpress.com/1-nights-knights/
Night’s Knights (#1)
by Emerian Rich
Buy Night’s Knights in PRINT and Kindle.
Listen to Night’s Knights on iTunes.
Severina is an exotic beauty from the jungles of Brazil whose family is brutally murdered by the same man she later calls lover.
Markham is a simple Irish immigrant striving for the American dream in 1860 when coach robbers cause his untimely death.
Julien is a knight who serves as guardian angel to his family but has no clue about his predestined fate.
Vampires on a quest for knowledge attempt to create the perfect offspring, but from the shadows an even more demonic evil threatens their immortality.
Will a powerful mortal named Jespa be the one to save them all?
“Emerian Rich is the unrivaled queen of podcast horror fiction.” -Mike Bennett, author of One Among The Sleepless
“Night’s Knights gives new meaning to the preconceived notion of vampires. These vamps left me with the taste of blood in my mouth and an unquenchable thirst for more.” -Rhonda R Carpenter, author of The Mark of a Druid
“Never before have I felt so much compassion for a bunch of murderous vampires. Fresh, original, and thoroughly entertaining.” -Mark Eller, author of Traitor
“Emerian brought the Vampire Novel back from the dead! Jespa will captivate you and leave you wanting more.” -C. E. Dorsett, author of Shine Like Thunder
HorrorAddicts.net 