An interview with an Immortal

First off I’d like to wish you y’all a happy Good Friday! This blog post is going to be a bit different from my others.    Through twitter I “met” a fellow author, Gene Doucette, and he has a new book out called Immortal.  He decided to do a blog tour and I jumped on board.  I was able to procure an interview with the immortal man, Adam, himself. *wink* Enjoy, I did!

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So Adam, after being alive for sixty thousand years what made you decide to tell your story now?

Well for starters it’s not the first time I’ve told my story, but… Let’s just say oral tradition is not the best way to relate facts.  It is an exceptional way to mythologize someone, however.  So there are parts of my life that have appeared in the historical record before, but I had almost no control over how much of it was accurate.  I like the idea of being the only person responsible for embellishing my own life story for a change.

Are you suggesting the events in Immortal aren’t accurate?

I was being tongue-in-cheek.  According to some of the reviews I’m an unreliable narrator.  I’m just having some fun.  The book is very accurate insofar as Gene wrote down what I told him, and I told him what I remembered to the best of my own recollection.  It’s fair to say I elided over some details when the story warranted it.  But to answer your first question more completely, it just seemed like the right time. Nobody born in this era fully understands how significantly the rapid exchange of information—news—has changed everything.  It used to be that letters carried by trusted parties were the only way to find out one had become a father, or someone important had died, or whatever.  And it used to be if you met an immortal man there were upper limits to the number of people you could possibly talk about him to.  So, like I said, I’d rather be the one doing the embellishing.  The information was already getting out; I’m being proactive.

You talk a lot about how different things are now.  Do we over-romanticize the past?

Oh, it’s terrible.  Just… okay, look at medieval times.  If you’re a twenty-five year old in, say, medieval France you should expect to be missing half of your teeth and at least one finger.  You have fleas and you shit in a field, and if you try to relieve yourself at night there is a decent chance you’re going to be eaten by something.  You can’t read and you probably don’t own anything other than your clothes.  If you’re a woman, you’ve likely been raped at least three or four times by now.  And if you’re fifty years old, you’ve probably been dead for a decade.  It doesn’t sound like fun.  And I’m being gentle.  The truth is for a vast portion of history the only thing anybody did was look for food and a safe place to sleep.  We would have done more, but food and shelter took up all of our time.

That brings up another question: how did you survive this long?

Not getting sick is kind of huge, and I didn’t have anything to do with that; it’s just the way my body works. Some of it was just luck.  Probably a lot more of it than I’m willing to admit while sober, actually.  For the rest… well, societies have a certain rhythm to them.  You spend enough time in enough cultures you start to recognize the signs that it’s time to go.  I left Rome two weeks before the Visigoths turned up at the gates, for example.  You also want to get to know power without becoming too powerful yourself.  A king’s manservant has a much better life expectancy than a king, believe it or not.  And there are other tips, like: avoid volcanoes and demons; never come between an armed man and a succubus; never become a soldier; avoid religion-based political systems… common-sense stuff.

Now that Immortal is out, what’s next?

Gene and I are working on Hellenic Immortal right now.  Actually, Gene is.  I already dictated everything to him, but he’s complaining that he needs more background on a couple of things so I’m probably going to have to sit down with him again.  We’re expecting there to be a third book once he’s done with the second.
Excerpt:

I chose this excerpt because it literally made me laugh out loud. There are many scenes that made me LOL, but because it also contained vamp humour, I couldn’t resist and wanted to share.  Just to set it up, this is the scene after a vampire named Brenda fed on Adam:

Brenda nudged me awake with a glass of orange juice in her hand. “You okay?” she
asked.
I sat up slowly and took the glass. “What time is it?”
“Daytime,” she said. It was impossible to tell with the windows masked.
“Yeah, but what time is it?”
“Dunno. I don’t own a watch. What do I need one for?”
True enough.
The juice was cool and tasted supermarket fresh. “Where’d this come from?” I
asked.
“I have a cooler under the bed,” she explained. “I like to keep juice on ice just in
case. I figure the Red Cross gives OJ to its donors, I should do the same thing, you
know?”
“Do you charge extra for it?”
“No, silly, it’s free,” she smiled. “You know…you taste, um, you taste really good.
Has anyone ever told you that?”
“I bet you say that to all the boys.”
“I’m serious! It’s really weird, your blood it’s, like…”
“Old,” I offered. “I have heard it before. I’m a very old vintage.”
Brenda smiled again. She had quite a nice smile.