Mina's Children: The Legacy of Dracula #FreeRead

Good morning all, sorry for being AFK - I've had an awful cold and it took me out for a few days, then I had to scramble to finish and edit Mina's Children: The Legacy of Dracula before the deadline, which was yesterday.

For those who didn't see my last post, Mina's Children is a free read, and an entry into Wattpad's Open Novella Contest, which ended yesterday (31st Jan). Wattpad put out lots of prompts, one of which we had to use to inspire a novella. There were three rounds:

• Round 1 - write 2K words
• Round 2 - write another 6K to make it up to 8K words
• Round 3 - write another 12K to take it up to 20K words

There are winners for Round 1 and Round 2, and at each stage the number of competitors was reduced. There will be overall winners once Round 3 has been judged, which is what is going on at the moment.

Mina's Children won 2nd place in Round 2 - yay!

As you can tell by the title, Mina's Children is technically Dracula fanfiction, but it's relatively removed from the original tale of Dracula. It's set modern day for a start, and the main character is Reggie, Mina Harker's great great granddaughter.

Mina Harker (née Murry) was changed by Dracula's attentions, and so were her descendants. Reggie comes from this line of vampire hunters, nature's definitive balance to the darkness. Her whole life has been building up to this one mission in Romania, to face the evil that started everything for her family. Unfortunately there are others with their eyes on Dracula too, and Reggie has run right into them. She must make them allies or remove them from the game before she can face the ultimate foe.

It is based of this prompt:

In the mythic lands of Transylvania, there lies a legend. The legend of he who does not live. The legend of he who will not die. The legend of he who roams the Borgo atop a carriage driven by steeds of rotten mass.
He has terrorised the region for centuries and now he has the free world in sight.
But there is only one person in the world who can stop this legend, this monster.
This person is the last remaining member of Mina's lineage.

I'm seriously considering expanding the novella once the contest is over, because I had so many ideas for extra scenes that I had to cut out because of the word limit (we could write a longer book, but they were only ever going to read the first 20K so it seemed sensible to use that as the limit). There are background characters I want to flesh out and the plot I want to continue.

Dracula is one of those fantastic cases where the original book is out of copyright, so derivative work is publishable too.

This is totally feeding my love of vampires and getting the creative juices flowing. Reggie is a character I was working on before the contest, but she didn't have any direction or proper roots. The prompt gave me a basis to work from that kick started a whole plot. Other characters have been popping up as I wrote.

I have to admit, for the last four or five months of 2017, creativity was in short supply. Without going into why, I am very glad to see the back of 2017 and the less said about it the better. Having a new project, as well as the ongoing one to move all Wittegen's eBooks into paperback feels brilliant.

Do you have any new projects for 2018 you are excited about, be they writing related or something else?

P.S. if you read Mina's Children and enjoy it, I would really appreciate you clicking the vote button on the story parts. It's one of the ways stories go up the rankings on Wattpad, so they are seen by lots of people. Many thanks in advance.

~*~
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