No Knights

My mother subscribes to a certain book club, and when one of my books shows up in their catalog, she always sends me a full color copy of the page. I think she expects me to frame it. Forget making the Times list twice; my novel is in the book club -- this to her is authentic fame.

When these book club folks kindly ran a full-page ad on my work (first time, this) Mom went zinging over the moon with joy and immediately sent me a copy, which I received today. It's a very lovely ad, but at the top of the page is a banner that reads "THE KNIGHTS OF DARKYN."

For a split second I thought Someone helped themselves to my series title? until I saw from the cover art that no, they were talking about my novel. My novel Evermore. That doesn't have any knights in it. Not a one. There are lots of immortal pathogen-mutated beings, tourists, weapons, horses, banquets, dancing, songs, battles and even a working moat with submersible bastions, but I'm sorry, no knights.

The characters in the novel are vampire-like immortals, most of whom were Templars about seven hundred years ago, but fortunately they got over it. They now dress up and pretend they're knights in front of humans as part of their cover in order to live how they want, make a few bucks and co-exist with mortals. Because really, how else are you going to justify living in medieval conditions in a real castle with a working moat in the middle of freaking twenty-first century Florida unless you:

A) Make it invisible with a big honking spell, which is magic, which I don't do.

B) Hide it in an enormous forest of darkness, but this is the sunshine state, and most of our forests burned down during the wildfires last year, so all we have are brightly-lit scorched-black fields with a couple little teeny tiny treelings sprouting at the moment.

C) Use time travel, which would have to be science-based because again, the magic thing, which would then make the story a science fiction time travel vampire fiction paranormal dark fantasy, which I'm pretty sure would make my editor's head explode.

D) Turn it into a tourist attraction and charge everyone fifty bucks to get in.

See? "D" is the best solution, right?

While I thought about it, I remembered that the formal name I gave Byrne's castle/tourist attraction was Knight's Realm, which is likely the keyword culprit here. That or my Kyn are extremely good actors and fooled the book club reader into believing they were knights. I wouldn't put anything past them.

Why make the big deal out of so small a thing? Please, let me make a prediction: in a couple of weeks I'll start getting snail mail and e-mail from every book club member who saw that banner, didn't read the rest of the ad copy (or assumed it was a Jude Devereaux novel or whatever) and ordered the book. They'll complain that they expected a nice historical knightly romance and instead got icky disgusting dark fantasy with vampires dressed up as fake knights. And it'll be my fault. Trust me. It's always the author's fault.

Although I'm not responsible for this banner, I'll make the disclaimer now: there are no knights of Darkyn, I don't write knight books, and no actual knights appear in Evermore. Any knight you may think you're reading about is a vampire-like being dressed up like one to fool you and the tourists. For novels with real knights, please read Jude Devereaux.