I am so excited to Kathleen McFall and Clark Hayes here to talk about The Meta: Life in between death in a Guest Post here at Paranormal and Romantic Suspense Reviews.
Kathleen McFall and Clark Hayes are currrently touring to promote their newest release Blood and Whiskey, which is the 2nd book in their new The Cowboy and the Vampire Thriller series!
For more information about each book, please visit http://cowboyandvampire.com
Thank you Katheleen for being here today in a Guest Post, I greatly appreciate it!
Please take it away, Kathleen!
The Meta: Life in between death
It’s a rainy Saturday, and I’m drinking coffee, fighting a headache and perusing a cyber vault which contains hundreds and hundreds of near death experiences.
“We floated straight up through the ceiling face first, which I thought might be painful but it did not hurt at all. Flying through a cloud is like being kissed by a marshmallow.” Wow, a marshmallow?
“While in a coma, I remember being sent through a tube. It felt like I was on a roller coaster except this ride was much faster.” Maybe this explains why roller coasters are so popular?
“The best description I can give is that it looked like a very large clothes dryer vent tube. It was spinning and angels were all around it. It looked like an upside down tornado with the large end at the bottom.” Jeez, I hope those angels are not dry clean only.
Near death experiences are fascinating. I’ve been reading about them for years. Across every land, every ethnicity, every age, their basic elements are similar: floating outside your body, rushing through tunnels of lights, joyous reunions with long-lost relatives and friends and a deep sense of peace and understanding. But not everyone who comes so close to dying has this experience. Why is that?
Many scientists explain near death experiences as a comforting, even palliative, hallucination occurring as the brain begins to die and is deprived of oxygen. Reasonable. But like many scientific theories, this is educated speculation that plausibly connects a select few data points. There’s no proof, and there may be many data points excluded.
Those with a more religious bent are typically persuaded that near death experiences are proof of God, heaven and the afterlife. This is probably because so many experiencers see and even talk with angels or long-dead relatives (see comment about angels and clothes dryers). But as with the scientific explanation, the religious perspective is also speculation that plausibly connects a select few data points, albeit a different set than scientists use.
In Blood and Whiskey, we took the explanation of near death experiences in a completely different direction, creating an entire “in-between” life and death world. Our explanation combines the best of science and religion.
Each day, as the sun rises, the combined consciousness of vampires migrates to The Meta to join with others in a disembodied semi-death state as it waits for night to return. The roller coaster marshmallow-like characteristics of The Meta are pulled straight from real near death experience vault I’m perusing today. While there, they become part of an energy field, a shared consciousness that imparts calm and wisdom and a sense of belonging. At sundown, that shared consciousness is shattered apart and they travel back into their resurrected bodies.
Humans with a certain genetic pedigree have the ability to travel to The Meta too — under the specter of their real death or, occasionally, if they are highly evolved, spontaneously (explaining the religious mystical experience).
In Blood and Whiskey, Lizzie, our heroine and new vampire, makes her first visit to The Meta. Her genetic background grants her the ability to make sense of the flowing energy of life and death and she is able to find remnants of her beloved mother and stepfather Lazarus. In The Meta, Lizzie begins to learn how to connect to the “hive mind” of the vampire collective.
The Meta is hinted at in the first book of The Cowboy and the Vampire Thriller Series and then introduced directly in the second book Blood and Whiskey. We intend to spend more time there in the third book (underway!) of The Cowboy and Vampire Thriller Series, taking to heart this review from Kirkus:
“In a way, it’s a shame more time isn’t spent exploring the existence of this meta world where consciousnesses wait out the daylight hours and immortality [which] has all sorts of ramifications for human spirituality.”
Creating new worlds from a few select data points — in the same way that scientists and religious believers do — is one of the more rewarding parts of writing in the paranormal or science fiction realm. And unlike the latter two groups, proof of The Meta is not required in fiction. But we’d like to think it exists.
Visit The Meta in Blood and Whiskey and have a look inside the near death experience vault for yourself over at the International Association for Near Death Experiences: http://iands.org/nde-stories.html
About the books
Blood and Whiskey (Pumpjack Press, May 2012), by Kathleen McFall and Clark Hays, is the second book in the Cowboy and Vampire Thriller Series. It’s a wickedly funny tale of love, loyalty and sacrifice in the modern west.
About the Authors
Stuff Clark likes: sagebrush, the American West, clouds, whiskey and graphic novels. Stuff he hates: running quarterbacks, drivers who don’t use turn signals and the sound of flip-flops.
Stuff Kathleen likes: Russian literature, anarchy, martinis, lava and the ocean. Stuff she hates: intermissions, Halloween corn mazes and high-speed vehicular sandwiches. And the Muppets.
Find out more about The Cowboy and the Vampire Thriller Series:
www.cowboyandvampire.com
www.facebook.com/cowboyandvampire
@cowboyvamp
#bloodandwhiskey
http://www.amazon.com/Blood-Whiskey-Vampire-Thriller-ebook/dp/B007ODV7YO/ref=tmm_kin_title_0?ie=UTF8&m=AG56TWVU5XWC2
1 comment:
Thanks for letting me stop by and share some of the story behind the story of Blood and Whiskey. The Meta is an interesting place!
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