Dru's Day Off...

Dear Juliet

I hope you're okay today and I hear you're at Monsterpalooza come the end of May.

Well, I hope you have a nice few days there. Give Dru the day off and let her go shopping!

Actually, there's a story about Dru I probably never told you...

You'd probably think I was nuts...

Oh, what the hell, cry havoc and let slip the dogs of war!

Well, I was back in Hollywood in December 2013, at something of a loose end, meeting Gina Gomez, Tom Cruise, Ben Stiller (lucky again!) and despite all that, thinking about Dru. I'd never quite got her out of my head and I didn't really want to, although I must stress I do know she's fictional.

As you may recall, I'd just finished Spike & Dru : the Graveyard of Empires and my creative process is like a production line at Ford. I finish a story, it takes a week off and then the next instalment starts magically assembling itself.

Such was the case with Dru V. True Blood was still on TV at the time and I'd mentioned the idea of vampires receiving human rights in Drusilla Revenant, so my subconscious started producing the idea of Spike and Dru going to Washington:

"Dru made her excuses and slid away into the dark with practised ease, but she had no idea what to do next and the old fear of loneliness came burning up from her gut, threatening to overpower her fragile rationality. 

She wandered past a news-stand, already feeling a little hungry, when her eye fell on a newspaper and her steps jolted to a halt.

The headline was strange enough.

CONGRESS DEBATES NEW VAMPIRE RIGHTS AMENDMENTS BILL

Oooooh! 

Drusilla’s jaw dropped. Legal rights for her kind? It could not be. The Orders would never demean themselves to debate matters with humans. Her former kin considered themselves the master race, above and beyond the petty concerns of their sun-worshipping inferiors.

Yet there they were. Columns of print telling of master vampires lobbying Congress and speaking before the Senate. One eccentric old Aurelian dressed as George Washington, claiming (possibly truthfully) to have met Washington and paraphrasing the Gettysburg Address: 

“And if your fathers did indeed bring forth a new nation conceived in liberty and dedicated to the proposition that all men are created equal, then I put it to you that now you face the greatest test of all.

For does the soul maketh the man, or do those from whose bodies their souls were torn nevertheless remain equal with those not turned?

We are your dead, from Shiloh and Appomattox, and I ask you now, did we die in vain or not? Are we, living or dead, soulless or ensouled, any less American? Are we not the people by whom this government was birthed, and in whose name it shall never perish?”

Drusilla raised her hands to her temples in confusion. Where – when – was she?

The Oracles had told her time had passed, and she had a sickening feeling the clock had not, after all, stopped for her...

(Drusilla Revenant)

There was a real news-stand near the hostel on Schrader which I'd seen, and that headline did set up some interesting possibilities. However, near the end of Graveyard, it was almost as if I felt a twitch upon the thread (G. K. Chesterton/Brideshead Revisited) or a tremor in the foundations of Olympus, as if things were coming to a conclusion. Researching dense political practice and procedure didn't seem like too much fun either although, I dunno, Spike as a senator...

However, I would have had a go. I remember often thinking of some seemingly unwritable idea, assuming I could never do it and then knocking it off in five minutes flat...

However...

Well...

It's like I got a postcard from Dru, and in it she said:

"It's okay, you've done it. You can stop now."

In her fictional world, she then took the day off and celebrated at a place called The Blood Bar on the beach in Malibu.

I never wrote her again, although I suppose a Dru V could be done now. I very carefully tidied up the Dru Quartet (as I call it) three years ago and moved Graveyard to late 2019. It had been 2032 which always felt a bit futuristic.

I don't have any intention of doing so, but Spike and Dru dealing with Trump... That might have been quite a scene.

Anyway, that's it. I guess she's still in the back of my head, but quite content and quiescent.

And I did always love her.

I moved the revised Roses and Redemption to Archive of Our Own in 2023. Here's the link.

I've still got the hard-copy versions of the Quartet, all four signed by you.

And Dru still sings Scarborough Fair.

Love,

James