K. C. Adams, "The Vampire's Revenge"

Kristina Adams is the author of 20 novels, 3 books for writers, 1 poetry collection, and too many blog posts to count. She publishes mother/daughter ghost stories as K. C. Adams. She also works part-time as a content marketer. When she’s not writing, she’s playing with her dog or inflicting cooking experiments on her boyfriend. 

About The Vampire's Revenge, by K. C. Adams
Is this family of ghost hunters about to become vampire prey?

Edie
Do I ever get a break? I’ve just been attacked by a knife-wielding weirdo and found out my new friend is a vampire. And now the bookshop has been vandalised.
But it turns out the vampire who trashed the bookshop murdered Maisie’s mum and turned her into a vampire. So now, she wants revenge.
And she wants my help to get it.
But how far will she go? And who’ll get caught in the crossfire?

Niamh
Fadil’s chronic pain is getting worse. He won’t let anyone help him, but it’s now so bad that some days he can’t even get out of bed.
Has being 4,000 years old finally caught up with him, or is something else going on? Do the answers lie in the normal or the paranormal? If we can’t convince him to get help, will he continue to get worse? And just how much worse could he get?

The Vampire’s Revenge is the eighth book in the Afterlife Calls series. It contains cave-dwelling vampires, a haunted bookshop, chronic pain representation, sassy pets, teenage angst and mid-life romance. Every book in the Afterlife Calls series contains a standalone mystery and threads that tie into a larger plot at the end of each part in the series.

You can read more about The Vampire's Revenge on the author's website here. Below, you can read an excerpt from the novel. 

From The Vampire's Revenge

From the Author's Note 

Whenever I tell someone I’m from Nottingham, they immediately think of Robin Hood. While Robin of Loxley may be the most well-known part of Nottingham history, there are far more interesting parts.

Underneath the city are (at the time of publication in 2025) over 900 documented caves. These are human made, carved out of the unique Sherwood Sandstone. What makes Sherwood Sandstone unique is its ability to hold its shape. Go a few miles to the west and the sand won’t hold its shape; go to the east and you won’t get through it without a drill.

Nottingham’s cave network was built by hand, which is another thing that makes it remarkable. While we don’t know the exact age of all the caves, some are thought to be around 3,000 years old – almost as old as Fadil! 

All the facts about the caves and the Goose Fair in this book are true. Except for the vampire part and the cave in which they live.

There are caves (and catacombs!) around the Church Rock Cemetery and Forest Recreation Ground which I’ve been fortunate enough to tour, but the one the vampires in Afterlife Calls inhabit is fictional. Most caves in Nottingham are quite small and unconnected. I needed something big and labyrinthine for them to live in, so I took some creative license with that part.

I grew up in a town similar to Hucknall, and my friends and I always complained that there was no interesting local history. But there probably was.

So much of our local history has already been lost. It’s really important to me that we preserve it, because we can learn so much from the lessons of the past. For example, the Luddites, something else Nottingham is famous for, didn’t rebel against the new technology in lacemaking their employers were bringing in. They rebelled against poor pay and working conditions. Sound familiar? Sound like it could be written now?

Everywhere has history. The problem is that local history just isn’t shared. If people don’t share it, it dies. Much like the origins of the catacombs in Nottingham, for example. We’ll never know if they really were carved out to house the dead and Notts folks got squeamish about it, or if it was just another excuse to mine sandstone. Personally I think the latter. The sand was an important part of local building and also exported for things like glassmaking. No one is giving up that lucrative business without a fight. They must’ve done eventually, though, as the city is no longer mined for sand.

If you want to find out more about the City of Caves, you can do a tour which will tell you about their history as homes, businesses, and even air raid shelters.

You can also walk down a cave called Mortimer’s Hole beside Nottingham Castle, which gave my legs a hell of a workout but was full of interesting stories of political intrigue.

Kristina Adams, "Revenge of the Redhead"

Kristina Adams is the author of 20 novels, 3 books for writers, 1 poetry collection, and too many blog posts to count. She publishes ghost stories as K.C.Adams. When she’s not writing, she’s playing with her dog or inflicting cooking experiments on her boyfriend. Her website is here. 

About Revenge of the Redhead
In her debut poetry collection, bestselling author Kristina Adams channels female rage. Anger, hatred, envy – all those things society tells women they shouldn’t feel, let alone express, are explored in this confessional collection. It takes you on a journey from heartbreak to friendship breakups to workplace bullying, ending on true love and hope for the future. Whether you’re in a good mood, a bad mood, or somewhere in between, Revenge of the Redhead has a poem for you. You can read more about Revenge of the Redhead here. Below, you can read two poems from the collection.

From Revenge of the Redhead, by Kristina Adams

Enough.

I split myself in two
in the hopes of pleasing you
But it doesn’t matter what I do
I’ll never be good enough
for you.


Rocking Chairs

You said we’d be old ladies in our rocking chairs
But how can we be when you were never there?
Friendship is more than just fair weather
I want a friend who’s here forever
not someone who’s in love with spring
but can’t handle the bad weather winter brings

You left the rocking chair beside me empty
When you decided you’d had enough of me
But you were ‘just’ a friend.
And no one talks about how when friendship ends
it hurts just as much, if not more
sitting beside that open door.

Kristina Adams, "The Ghost's Call"

 

Kristina Adams is the author of fifteen books and too many blog posts to count. She helps writers overcome their creative obstacles on her blog, podcast, and courses, over at The Writer’s Cookbook. When she’s not writing, she’s inflicting cooking experiments on her boyfriend or playing with her dog, Millie.

Website: www.kristinaadamsauthor.com

Blog/podcast: www.writerscookbook.com 

About The Ghost's Call, by K. C. Adams

One mother. One daughter. One haunted town.

Single parent Niamh desperately doesn’t want her daughter Edie to go into the ghost hunting business like she did. But when Edie receives an important message from a ghost, she may not have a choice.

Their hometown is haunted. With the town’s rich history, it could be anyone. And they could be anywhere.

When a ghost arrives on the doorstep of family friends, Niamh and Edie must race against time to protect the people they love.

Meet ghost hunter Niamh and her teenage daughter Edie in The Ghost’s Call, book one in Afterlife Calls, a new paranormal women's fiction series by Kristina Adams. It's perfect for fans of Charmed, Lost Girl, and Supernatural. If you’re looking for a story about family, romance, and ghosts, this is the series for you.

Below, you can read an extract from the novel. 

From The Ghost's Call

Prologue

The lightbulb flickered in my hand. I jerked my hand away. I wasn’t risking electrocution or burning for anyone. The last thing I needed was to be electrocuted while changing a lightbulb in a client’s house. Especially when they weren’t even there because the place wasn’t finished yet. That’d go down great. Not.

‘Edie, I thought I told you to turn the electrics off!’

‘I did!’ she called back from somewhere in the old house.

‘Are you sure?’

She didn’t reply immediately, but I heard footsteps running through the house to the fuse box in the hallway. A second pair of scurrying footsteps followed her.

‘It’s all off, Mum!’ she shouted from the other side of the house.

Fiddlesticks. That wasn’t good. There was only one thing that would cause a disconnected lightbulb to misbehave. And I didn’t like the direction that pointed in. Not one bit ...

The ladder wobbled underneath me.

‘Edie!’ I called. Without anything else to hold on to, I grabbed the stubborn lightbulb to steady me. Plummeting onto a wooden floor wouldn’t do my creaky joints any favours.

‘Mum!’ she called back, reaching the living room door. Thank god she had enough stamina for both of us. 

Our dog, Tilly, stood behind her, a startled look on her fluffy white face. 

The ladder steadied, so I tried again to unscrew the lightbulb in the living room. The previous owner must’ve been the World’s Strongest Man, because the way that thing was attached wasn’t normal. And I should know: odd jobs like that were my job.

The ladder juddered again.

No, not the ladder. 

The ground.

What the hell? An earthquake? We didn’t get earthquakes like that in England. It was bloody Hucknall, not San Francisco. We weren’t near a fault line. We were in the Midlands. We weren’t even near the sea!

‘Mum!’ cried Edie, her voice vibrating with worry as she ran over to me. Had she ever experienced an earthquake before? When was the last proper one in England? The nineties?

She grabbed the ladder to steady it as the earthquake slowed. I clung to the light fitting for dear life, suddenly glad it was fastened on so well.

Tilly ignored us both, running over to the window and barking. It didn’t take much to make her bark – she was a typical westie in that regard – so that wasn’t unusual. But what she could see – what all three of us could see – wasn’t just unusual. It was unnerving.

My eyes were glued to one of the most haunting sights I’d ever seen. I squeezed my eyes shut, hoping I was hallucinating, but I definitely wasn’t.

‘Mum, is that—?’ Edie began, but she couldn’t finish her sentence. She knew what it was. We all did. But she was in shock. She’d never seen anything like it. Heck, neither had I, and I’d been around for more than twenty years longer.

I descended the ladder and followed Tilly to the window.

There was an eerie fogginess about the drizzly day, but that wasn’t what had our attention. We were used to the soggy, grey, autumnal weather. There was no other kind unless it decided to lie to us and pretend it was still summer for a couple of days.

What we weren’t used to was seeing dozens of ghosts floating above the houses. If we hadn’t been in a house at the top of a hill, we may never have noticed them. But oh, we had.

We craned our necks to get a better view. There were so many ghosts they almost covered the clouds. Where could that many have come from? Was it related to the earthquake? Had the souls been trapped and been freed by … something?

While there were a lot of them, I couldn’t make out what they looked like or what they were wearing. They were a sea of blurry white figures, made worse by the crappy weather.

Nearby, dogs howled and cats meowed, trying to alert their owners to threats they couldn’t see and would never understand. Poor things. They thought they were helping. Their owners thought they were barking at thin air. Echoes of their owners shouting at them in unison travelled through the air.

‘That’s not normal, is it?’ said Edie, looking at me. She bent down to pick up Tilly, who was still barking like she was trying to warn us. She was our little Westie Warning System, but in this case, we couldn’t do anything to change what she was warning us about. It wasn’t like there was a ghost floating towards us, or someone at the front door with a parcel. This was a sea of ghosts as far as we could see.

I suppressed a shudder and put my arm around my daughter. ‘No, it definitely isn’t.’

Writing Character Goals, Objectives, Flaws and Fears

By Kristina Adams

If someone were to write about my goals, ambitions, and motivations, they’d probably put something like this: ‘She’s obsessed with writing. The first story she wrote outside of school was about a stolen china teacup. She was seven. Since then, she’s experimented with many different genres and mediums. No matter what gets in her way, she’ll always find a way to write. Her chronic pain sometimes makes it difficult to write, but when this happens, she finds ways around it. The thing that motivates her the most to write is her strong desire to help people.’

That paragraph tells you a lot about me, doesn’t it? It’s fair to say that I have a pretty one-track mind – most of my life revolves around writing. I really can be quite boring in that regard.

When that comes to goals and ambitions for characters, that’s not necessarily a bad thing. Your character needs to have one main goal they’re working towards. Any more and it makes it confusing for you to write and confusing for the reader to follow.

The only exception to the one-goal rule is in a series, where you could have a goal per book and also one per series. For example, a detective in a crime novel could be motivated to find the murderer. But her goal in the series could be to find the person that murdered her mother ten years ago. The early seasons of Castle slowly explore this backstory for Beckett, teasing out bits of information about it from her as she learns to trust the titular character. Some of the show’s most powerful episodes are tied to Beckett’s search for answers about what happened to her mum because the victim of the crime is someone the viewer knows so well.

Think about TV shows from fifteen or twenty years ago. Often, episodes would have two layers: the demon / murderer / conundrum of the week, then on top of that a serial arc. The episodic theme could lead them to figure out elements of the serial arc, too. At the end of the series, either that arc is wrapped up, or a new layer / question is added to it to lead into the next series.

Goals and motivations
Motivations are tied to goals. If someone’s goal is to publish a book, their motivation could come from other people suggesting they do it, or from their deep desire to share a particular story. The thing that holds them back will always be their fear or their flaw.

Quite often, their flaw will come in the form of a fear, but not always. But let’s run with fears for a moment. In the case of a writer, it’s often the fear of being judged or rejected by agents, publishers, critics, and/or readers.

Fear is what holds people back in their goals more than anything else. For someone to achieve their goal, their motivation to do it must be stronger than their fear.

Fear tends to run deeper than claustrophobia or arachnophobia, although they can be useful if you want to torture your characters in a particular scene. It would be hard to carry a whole story – or series of stories – on something like that. A scene that focuses on it – or someone avoiding particular situations because of it – could work.

Everyday fears are the ones that hold people back more without them even realising it. Often because they don’t know they even have those fears. These include the fears of judgment, embarrassment, rejection, loneliness, or physical or mental health problems. These fears are tied to other people and our needs as a social species. We’ll do anything to not feel ostracised from those around us, both the people we love, people we don’t know, and sometimes even the people we hate. We want to feel like a part of something. Your characters are no different.

Many people fear public speaking because they fear standing up in front of so many people. Why? Because those people can judge them. Nobody likes to be judged, so many people avoid public speaking so they can’t be.

But you could flip that on its head. What if your main character needs to speak at a charity event to raise money for a friend to get a new cancer drug that their healthcare won’t cover? Their goal, then, is to help their friend. It motivates them to overcome their fear because they’re more afraid of losing their friend than of getting up on stage.

As I’ve said, fears are one of the bigger flaws, but there are plenty of others you can play with. There are the seven deadly sins: anger, greed, gluttony, lust, pride, sloth, and envy. Depending on what you’re writing about, these could give you considerable ways to put your character’s primary goal at odds with how they’re used to behaving. Someone who’s surrounded by material wealth having to give it all up and discover they don’t need it after all is a common one. Or someone very slothful discovering their motivation because they’ve finally found a real cause to get behind. Or maybe someone whose default reaction to not getting what they want being anger finally having to confront how unhealthy their angry behaviour is.

To come up with your character’s flaw or fear, think of something that’s directly at odds with what they want to achieve. That could be a musician with stage fright, a would-be politician who’s afraid of judgment, or a lust-filled nun.

About Kristina's book and course
How to Write Believable Characters: Character Development Tips for Novelists, Poets, and Scriptwriters, by Kristina Adams, is available now in ebook and print here and here. 

Discover how to create realistic, believable, and three-dimensional characters that readers remember long after they've turned the final page. Preorder Kristina’s Character Creation Crash Course today here. 

About the author
Kristina Adams is an author, blogger, and reformed caffeine addict. She’s written nine novels about our fascination with celebrity culture, three nonfiction books for writers, and too many blog posts to count. She shares advice for writers over on her blog, The Writer’s Cookbook.

Author website: www.kristinaadamsauthor.com

Blog: www.writerscookbook.com 

You can read another article by Kristina Adams, "How Creative Writing Skills Can Make You A Better Copywriter," on Creative Writing at Leicester here. 

How Creative Writing Skills Can Make You a Better Copywriter

By Kristina Adams

What do Allen Ginsberg, F. Scott Fitzgerald, and Dorothy L. Sayers have in common? They all worked as copywriters. Many published creative writers have worked in copywriting at some point. Why? Because copywriting and creative writing aren’t all that different.

People often put poetry on a pedestal, assume nonfiction is boring, and believe the only thing worthwhile is novel writing. And oh, how wrong those people are. (And how much fun they’re missing out on!)

I write this as an MA Creative Writing graduate, a content marketer, a novelist, a poet, and of course, a copywriter. If you remember this one thing, you’ll be able to write anything and everything: the execution may change, but the basics never do. Creative Writing is a versatile degree. I like to think of it as a degree in communication, because that’s what it is: it teaches you how to better communicate with those around you, both in written and spoken forms. How can that not help with copywriting?

Let’s take a look at the skills you learn as a creative writer, and how they translate to copywriting.

How to create an emotional connection with your reader

This is the most important part of any writing. You need to be able to create an emotional connection with your reader or they just won’t listen to (or read) what you have to say. When it comes to copywriting, that emotional connection can be the difference between someone buying your product or going to your competitor. 

We make decisions based on our emotions. Your product may technically be the best, but if your reader doesn’t care about you, they’re not going to want to buy from you. It’s the same reason certain politicians get more press coverage than others – it has nothing to do with their policies and everything to do with how much of an emotional reaction they trigger in people. The stronger the emotional reaction, the more attention the news outlet covering them gets, and the more money they’ll make.

Style vs substance

Style is just as important as substance in writing. If people don’t like your writing style, the substance won’t mean anything to them. You want to get the message across, of course. If your copy doesn’t say anything, what’s the point in it existing? Your copy should be clear and concise. There’s no room for purple prose here. If you don’t get to the point and stat, you’ll lose readers.

I like to compare copywriting to writing for children or teenagers. Children’s and YA fiction doesn’t have the space to spend two pages describing the history of a sword (I’m looking at you, George R. R. Martin). It needs to keep moving. If it stops or slows down too much or for too long, readers may well put it down, never to return.

If that happens in the world of business, you can say goodbye to those sales you wanted. If people don’t read what you have to say, they won’t know enough about your product to spend money on it.

How to use literary techniques

People assume that copywriting is bland and boring. But the best copywriting isn’t. It’s shiny and sparkly and it’s memorable. You already know how to make your writing sparkle thanks to your amazing creative writing skills. Now you just need to translate that into copywriting.

You can use techniques like rhyme, iambic pentameter, alliteration and more to make your copy more interesting. Most copywriters don’t use these – or don’t use them effectively – which automatically gives you an advantage. Don’t be afraid to use techniques you’ve been taught for poetry, fiction, or even script writing when crafting copy. These all help to make your writing memorable, meaning that even if someone doesn’t buy today, when they are ready to buy, they’ll remember you.

People’s eyes gloss over when they read lazy copy. It’s no different than when they read anything else. Cliches, overused words or phrases, and bland language all turn your reader off. Colourful language that experiments with punctuation and brings scenarios to life draws readers in and holds their attention. Changing one word can change your conversion rate. Creative copy is that powerful.

The importance of audience

Don’t worry about people not liking your writing style – you want to isolate people. That’s right. I said it.

You shouldn’t write for everyone. You should write for one person. That allows you to get super specific with your writing style, right down to the one shot decaf soya vanilla latte they drink every morning. (Yes, that is my obnoxious coffee order.)

If you try to cater to everyone, you end up being vague. Vagueness is boring. It doesn’t sell, either.

Audience is everything. Your audience dictates what you write about and how you write about it. When your audience changes so, too, should your writing style.

You can tell a story

The most effective copy tells a story. No exceptions.

You know what the most boring copy does? That’s right. Nothing. No story. No colour. No personality.

So, instead of writing something super boring, use those storytelling techniques you’ve been honing. Tell the story of what your reader’s life is like now, then fast forward to what their life could look like if they use your product or service. Describe – in graphic detail – the life they’re missing out on by not using your product. The more specific you get, the better they’ll be able to see themselves living in that scenario, and the more likely they’ll be to give you their money.

The one thing you need to learn

How to sell.

Most writers feel uncomfortable selling. I get it. It’s like wearing a pair of jeans that don’t quite sit right or flatter your figure but you can’t work out why. Turning your creative writing skills into a selling tool is possible, though. All you need is a pair of scissors, a sewing machine, and a little initiative. Those jeans that once felt too tight will sit just right in no time.

Ready to get started?

Then join me on 11 May 2019 at Nottingham Writers’ Studio, where we’ll explore how you can write kickass copy! For further details about this course, see here. 

About the author

Kristina Adams is an author, blogger, and reformed caffeine addict. She’s written five novels poking fun at celebrity culture, one nonfiction book on productivity for writers, and too many blog posts to count. She shares advice for writers over on her blog, The Writer’s Cookbook.