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Follow Maxie Gwenoch as she takes the job of Managing Editor for SNAP Magazine, the world’s largest and most popular gossip media covering celebrities around the globe.

First, she finds the owners of SNAP are a family of Hungarian vampires, then she discovers she’s the reason for an escalating war between the Kandeskys and their archrivals, the Huszars.

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Book One, SNAP: The World Unfolds

SNAP, a multinational celeb TV show and magazine, is the holy grail for Maxie Gwenoch. When she snags the job as managing editor, she’s looking for fame, fortune and Jimmy Choos. What she finds is a media empire owned by Baron Kandesky and his family. A family of vampires. They’re European, urbane, wealthy and mesmerizing. And when she meets Jean-Louis, vampire and co-worker, she’s a goner.

The Kandesky vampire family rose in Hungary centuries ago. They gave up violence and killing to make a killing on the world’s commodities markets and with that beginning they built SNAP, an international celebrity multimedia empire. Now cultured…and having found food substitutes for killing…they’ve cornered the world market for celebrity and gossip journalism.

They haven’t fully left the past behind. Their Hungarian neighbors and rival vampire clan, the Huszars are starting to ramp up attacks, maybe looking to start a war to take over all the Kandeskys have built.

Maxie believes she’s found her ultimate career. She doesn’t realize that she’s found a family feud like none other, a centuries-old rivalry between vampire families, with her as the linchpin. Bells ring with Jean-Louis, but she doesn’t realize they’re alarm sirens until she learns that Jean-Louis is second in command of the Kandeskys…but by then it’s too late.

Book Two, SNAP: New Talent

In the second book of the SNAP Kandesky vampire series, Maxie Gwenoch, media-savvy editor of the multinational celeb gossip magazine SNAP, is pummeled in Paris and kidnapped in Kiev as the Huszars ramp up the race to oust their centuries-old rivals, the Kandeskys.

SNAP’s owners, the Kandesky family of vampires, built the world’s most popular celeb coverage empire but this isn’t just a business take-over. These powerful vampire families lived with an uneasy peace for four centuries until Maxie came in to boost SNAP’s coverage and started making inroads into the Huszar’s traditional hunting territories.

Although Jean-Louis, Maxie’s lover, vampire and second-in-command of the Kandeskys, tries to keep her safe, Maxie is determined to do things her way, a way that may lose her her job, her love and her life.

This is a new edition. It has been reformatted and contains additional bonus material.

Book Three, Plague: A Love Story

The third book of the Kandesky Vampire Chronicles begins the saga of the family’s start during the chaos of 14th century Hungary. When Stefan’s wife and infant son die in a minor plague outbreak, he has nothing to live for, so Theron’s turning him to a vampire is just a way out of his anguish.

Until he takes over the estate of a merchant, recruits Jean-Louis to teach him business and meets Lady Penelope Kandesky.
Plague returns to Budapest and this time paves the way for Stefan to become Baron Stefan Kandesky, a businessman who builds a trading empire with the help of Jean-Louis and Pen.

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Book Four, DANUBE: A Tale of Murder

The Kandesky management trio, Stefan, Jean-Louis and Pen, find themselves embroiled in a war with their rivals, the Huszars, which is bad for PR and bad for business, but after a judicious assassination they hammer out a pact.

This fourth book of the Kandesky Vampire Chronicles tells of peace agreements with their rivals and the growth of their now-international business ventures.

It also follows Jean-Louis as he meets and falls in love with a young artist, Magda, who desires travel and adventure but never imagined the world the Kandeskys inhabit

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Writing a series as a pantser

By the definition, a pantser is a writer who writes “by the seat of the pants”, someone who doesn’t outline and lightly plans a book.

I’m a panster, the one who in school wrote the paper first, THEN outlined what she’d written.

This allows me to create all kinds of scenarios, add characters along the way, set up action on the fly. And might become iffy as I find I’m writing series.

The one thing I’ve done with all of my series is to keep track of the characters! I list their names, occupations and which book they appeared, a must with the paranormal romance books which are littered with close to a hundred Central and Eastern European characters. Most of the time, I can’t even remember the spelling.

I have three series, the traditional mystery Amy Hobbes Newspaper Mysteries, the Stained Glass Mysteries and a paranormal romance one, The Kandesky Vampire Chronicles. There are three Amy Hobbes extant, Edited for Death, Labeled for Death and Delta for Death; two (so far) in the Stained Glass Mysteries and eleven in the Kandesky Vampire Chronicles. These are like Topsy, they just grewed

I planned ahead a bit in the mysteries and always intended  them to be a series. The main characters are the same, the actual plot changes with a different murder/mystery in each book. The planned-but-unwritten ones have a general mystery plot (who ends up dead and why) but nothing more.

The Kandeskys I initially saw as a trilology but as the characters developed, I had to keep establishing plots. Because the series are character-driven, a roadmap isn’t necessary. The characters can find themselves in the middle of a variety of situations which don’t have to be plotted out ahead of time. My only roadmap for this series is to continue the thread of the characters…they tell me what’s going to happen. My suspicion is that Lee Child didn’t sit down to write all the Jack Reacher books knowing he had a “roadmap” and Janet Evanovich keeps devising quirky situations for her characters. If you have a plot-driven book, although I’m hard pressed to come up with a series like that, some advance plotting might be necessary, but character-driven? No. Think Danial Silva, Robert Crais, Elizabeth George, Agatha Christie…etc. and ad infinitum.

The Amy Hobbes and Stained Glass Mysteries are complete in each book…well, I do have a couple of romances simmering. The Kandeskys on the other hand have loose ends and one GIANT cliff-hanger in book two, SNAP New Talent.

My initial publisher didn’t pick up the Amy Hobbes series so I don’t know if it would be different. I indie-publish for lots of reasons and this might be one of them. I like my characters (well, I love some of the guys) and would continue their story any way I can.

All of my books have some romantic tension. None of the female characters are particularly interested in getting married or even having a relationship, but as they meet a man in the course of their work, they become interested. The romantic tension in the Kandesky Chronicles kept the two main protags going for ten books. Now I need to figure out if Amy Hobbes (Amy Hobbes Mysteries) or Roz Duke (Stained Glass Mysteries) are  going to get totally wrapped up in their male characters.

All the characters grow and change, primarily in the way they understand themselves. In the mysteries, Amy is learning to cope with the hurt her ex-husband incurred when he left her for another woman. She’s rebuilding her life and her trust in men, but slowly. In the Stained Glass Mysteries, Roz’ husband has been murdered in a drive-by shooting. Although the gunman has been caught, Roz harbors a nagging question: Why was her husband at that mall where he was shot? In the Kandeskys, Maxie must make the decision of whether she’s willing to trade eternal life as a vampire for losing all she’s ever known. And the men, 500-year-old vampires all, must learn to love a 21st century career woman, a creature they’ve never met before.

During the writing of the series, the mysteries have shifted slightly. Amy Hobbes is the managing editor of a smaller daily newspaper in Northern California. The plots have changed as the focus of the economy has changed. Each of the books’ central plot centers around a real contemporary issue…but are they important enough to kill for? The Stained Glass Mysteries don’t rely on contemporary issues as much, although the first book, Stain on the Soul, hinges on pedophilia in the priesthood.

The Kandeskys have shifted quite a bit. Initially, the violence and tension was from a war with another vampire family. That family has died (or been killed) off and now the Kandeskys are up against international political issues. They’re living in Kyiv, Ukraine and are fighting off Eastern European thugs and gangs hired by the oligarchs. In SNAP: Pandemic Games, the danger is from Russia trying to break up the EU and NATO.

In a new book, I usually begin with the characters. What are they doing now? What challenges are they having? In the mysteries, this leads to a premise of “What if?” which leads to the plot, or mystery. In the Kandeskys, I usually begin with the events affecting global tensions because SNAP, the Kandesky family’s flagship company, is a multi-formatted international celebrity gossip television show and magazine. And they may be moving toward covering more news instead of gossip.

For me, one of the delights in pantsing, particularly a series, is the unknown. Although I almost always know the ending (not always the murderer), the plot can take interesting twists and the characters surprise me!

Coming in 2023, Resurrecting the Roses, Book Three in the Stained  Glass Mysteries.

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Michele Drier is a fifth-generation Californian and spent better than 20 years as a reporter and editor at California daily newspapers. She is the past president of Capitol Crimes, a Sisters in Crime chapter; the Guppies chapter of Sisters in Crime, current president of NorCal Sisters in Crime, and co-chaired Bouchercon 2020.

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