When Joanne McLaughlin’s husband, Paul Hathaway, wanted to be left alone, he would always say, “Oh, go write a book.”
After being sick for quite some time, Hathaway died in 2011. A couple months after that, when the memorial services had passed and she wondered what she would do next, McLaughlin, a 1977 Penn State journalism graduate, decided to take her husband’s advice.
She decided to write a book.
McLaughlin already had a title, “Never Before Noon” -- the couple owned their own firm, Never Before Noon Artist Management, from 1996 to 2002, managing, publicizing and booking shows for blues musicians.
“I thought, ‘What does this title go with?’” said McLaughlin. “I thought, ‘OK, I’ll write a vampire novel.’ I decided to make it about a family of musicians. It just kind of took off.” In early March, McLaughlin’s first novel was published by Eternal Press, an imprint of Caliburn Press. The story, which McLaughlin calls a “dark romance,” is about a dysfunctional vampire family and specifically a 31-year-old woman, Chloe Hart. Hart, a spunky millennial, is an only child and grew up in a family of “crazy musicians.”
“They are always in character and they’re manipulative and weird and they ship her off to boarding school,” said McLaughlin. “She has just had it with these people, so she disappears for a dozen years. Then, suddenly, they sort of summon her back in a way that seems different than everything from before.”
When Hart returns, she finds out her parents are vampires. With no signs of herself being a vampire, Hart has to re-examine herself and everything she thinks she knows about her life.
Since writing the first novel, McLaughlin has written two sequels, “Never Until Now” and “Never Ever Again,” which have not been published yet, but she hopes will be in the future. Each book took about a year to write, with some breaks in between. Though she had a full-time job, McLaughlin said finding time to write the novel wasn’t difficult. She found herself sitting behind a laptop at the dining room table during much of her free time.
McLaughlin, the deputy business editor at The Philadelphia Inquirer, doesn’t read much nonfiction because “nonfiction is my life.” She did, however, include a business journalist in her story and wrote the book in “real time” to make sure everything seemed authentic.
She wanted to write a “smart” book and something she would like to read, which consists of mysteries, romances, vampire novels, but also “deeper” books.
“I just want people to have a good time reading it,” said McLaughlin. “It’s not a fluffy book. It’s not a feel-good book. If you feel a little disturbed by it, I think that’s probably right, but not in a bad way.”
So far, McLaughlin said, the reception to the book has been good. Right now, it’s available online at Amazon and BarnesandNoble.com. She is in the process of developing relationships with independent bookstores to sell the book.
McLaughlin had always wanted to write a book, and still has a murder-mystery novel that she wrote in the 1980s that she hopes to get back to someday. For now, she’s just taking in publishing this first one, which she said is still always in her head.
“It’s like you live with these characters. I’ve lived with them for five years. They are in your head, and they’re in your conversations,” said McLaughlin.
“I’ve had this dream in my head for a long, long time. I’m really glad it happened. I can’t believe it happened. When I first got a print copy of my book, I started to cry. It’s so emotional. It’s like holding my baby.