Cool guys. I appreciate the words of encouragment and the constructive criticism.
A few things, in this one thread I've got posters telling me that it needed to be longer, and needed more backstory on the badguys, and a couple posts later I've got people telling me it should have been shorter and not had the backstory on the badguys.
Which tells me that it must be pretty good if I'm getting totally opposite reactions in different directions.
There won't be any deleted scenes posted anywhere, just because small things change, and it screws stuff up.
And everything has a purpose in MHI, even little tiny things. Keep that in mind when some little thing is referenced, but nothing seems to come of it. This is the first of a series.
Trebor, like I said, first in a series. Don't worry, not everybody lives.
Believe it or not, I'm actually pretty bloodthirsty as a writer, and have no problem making my characters suffer. Just ask Nightcrawler, he's had to talk me down from killing like everybody in the Mr. Nightcrawler III.
Moondancer, I had to make the vamps strong. If you're going to have a book where the characters actually do something useful and fight back, instead of being your typical B-movie pansies that scream, run, and get eaten, then you either need to have more monsters, or tougher monsters. So I did both. Plus I wanted to be able to up the ante over your traditional TV monster hunter that has like a crossbow or some crap, and I skipped right to 81mm mortars.
And Earl is a major character throughout the rest of the series, and Monster Hunter Alpha is written from his perspective and is the story of his life.
The little village in the swamp? WTH?
Come on? Doesn't your local swamp have a legend about cannabalistic mutants?
Plus honestly, that part gave me the shivers writing it.
Seriously, every single monster in the book, even those that are just a passing reference come from somewhere, even if it is just a local bit of folklore. Even the obscure monsters that are only referenced once (even the South American ones) come from someplace.