Bloodite Interview: The Wallflower
Interviewed by Tchernobog, July 24, 2008

Name: Eric J. Juneau 
Alternate Names: The Wallflower, Komkat
Born: May 18, 1981 (age 27) 
Nationality: American 
Location: Minnesota, United States of America
Hobbies : Hacking, writing, video games

How and when did you discover Blood?:
During in 1997 I was on AOL a lot.  Everyday I logged on and made sure to check three areas for new files – Star Trek, Video Games, and Games.  I loved shareware games, especially anything with Apogee or 3D Realms in the name.  Bio-Menace, Doom, Blake Stone, Wolfenstein 3-D, Redneck Rampage, Quake, Carmageddon, Duke-Nukem 3-D and all their clones were the games of the day.  And shareware was great because you got nearly a third or fourth of the game for free.  That and the variety was plenty to satisfy me.  I didn't need to buy the full version of anything (although a few like Duke Nukem and Quake I bought on discount).  

Then this game Blood came out.  At first I didn’t think much of it – the amount of terrible games with gothic demonic themes was ridiculous.  They all had names like Rise of the Night Thief in the Dark Shadow Rift Chasm Curse.  Plus Blood was so large you had to download 13 different files.  That was too complicated.  In my experience, programs like that would end up not working, and then you'd wasted your precious minutes (before AOL became a buffet).  But I believe they eventually made into one file and, running low on new games, I downloaded it.  

I was instantly impressed.  The animations were smooth and fluid, the atmosphere was like a real 80's horror movie, but most of all the environment simulated a real experience closer than I'd ever seen.  Think of it – the first thing you do is you jump out of a grave (and you actually have to jump to do it).  Then you move out of a mausoleum, and here's some graves, but oh wait, some zombies come out of the ground.  But you have no gun.  Most games give you your first gun right off the bat, but you wake up with nothing but your melee weapon.  So you have to dodge in and out, avoiding their axes and trying to lay in some pokes.  Then they scream in pain, collapse, and you can move on.  

But oh no you don't.  They pop back up and start attacking again.  That's the sort of experience that drew me in, little touches that put you in the driver's seat, and make you feel like you're actually somewhere.  Most games to this point just slapped a coat of paint on a rat maze to make it look like a space station, or an ancient temple, or a castle.  Real space stations and temples and castles don't wind around non-sensically or have rooms with no other purpose than to hold keys and monsters.  The levels in Blood looked like real things.  The funeral home looked like a funeral home.  The carnival looked like a carnival.  That's the reason why Blood has stuck with me all this time – because it was escapist to the letter. 

What made you first get active in the Blood Community (PlanetBlood)?:
Fan fiction was my entry point.  I kept bookmarks of Blood sites in my browser to keep abreast of news of my favorite game.  But I didn't find PlanetBlood until after the Fan Fiction contest had passed.  Seeing they were interested in such things, I e-mailed them my work, even though it wasn't under a formal process.  There were few avenues for fan fiction those days, and even fewer for Blood.  AOL was dying to make way for the real Internet, and I don’t think Fanfiction.net was up yet.  I wouldn't say I was very active in the community.  I'm quite the lurker, as the name would suggest, and the anonymity of the Internet allows me to observe, and participate in my own way.

What was your fist piece of Fan Fiction, and why did you make it?:
The very first thing I wrote seriously was Mortal Kombat, based on the eponymous video game.  Again, this harkens back to my AOL days when I discovered the Star Trek fan fiction forum.  I must have printed out every single work ever posted there.  I had stacks of paper by my bed, divided and categorized.  It was probably a fire hazard.  

At the time, I was also a big fan of Mortal Kombat, but that forum was much less popular than others.  There were files and even fewer literary works.  Most were pictures of the same palette swapped ninjas with ridiculous names.  I thought to myself, "Gee, I wish someone would write some Mortal Kombat fan fiction like Star Trek fan fiction".  Which was then proceeded with "Well, why don't I write something.  If no one else will, why not me?"  So I did.  And the rest is history.  You can read this story now on Fanfiction.net under the same pen name.  My motivations for Blood fanfic was much the same.

How long did it take you to make your various works, most of my fiction I did in a night but you took a lot more care with yours (and it shows). How long does it usually take for you to write a story?:
Leonardo DaVinci said "No work of art is ever completed, only abandoned."  Boy is that ever true for my first writings.  Mortal Kombat took 12 revisions before I finally said I was done with it, and most of that was sentence structure and punctuation – I changed little of the original structure.  Nowadays, I look more at the structure and readability than punctuation and grammar.  

First writings are always experimental.  No one hits a home run out of the gate, and many times you fall flat on your face.  Blood had a tumultuous history of revisions, since it was my second or third work.  When I stopped, I stopped at revision four, because I think I heard somewhere that most works should go through four or five revisions.  I took that to mean I should stop after four or five, because if I didn't I could go on forever.  I was meticulous in my revising.  I had to have a print copy that was flawless.  If there was a spelling error, I'd have to go through it all over again, because that meant there was potentially something else I missed.  

After four revisions, I published it.  But even after that, I had gnawing feelings that parts of the story just weren't right.  I didn’t like some of Sophia's dialogue in the beginning, and some of the cultural references were too obscure, not meant for a wider audience.  

I was torn, because I had already sent the story out amongst the tubes.  Making a revision after the story was 'published' is a no-no for writers, since it's not a live document anymore.  But in the end, I decided that the story needed more work to make it the best possible.  Fortunately I had the relative obscurity of Blood fan fiction and the flexibility of the Internet on my side.  It went through two more revisions before I sent out the real finished copy.

I started Blood:ILA in 1997.  I think it was 2000 when I really stopped writing in that world.  I could have been faster, but this was something I was doing for fun.  No one was paying me.  School and video games would always take priority when you're that age.

But even then I couldn’t stop thinking about the characters.  I loved them too much.  So I started Dead Reckoning.  I was drafting the first of these while I was still working on the last revisions for Blood: ILA.  I had just started college, so these short stories were my way of coping in the new environment.  I never meant to publish them, I kept them in my yellow scratch notebook.  But I got so many ideas that I thought I should put them out there.  I couldn't publish them as Blood fan fiction, since they were using the characters I created without the faniverse elements.  They were fan fiction of my fan fiction.  They didn't take long to write, maybe a month to final form.  It's impossible to gauge how long it actually took because I worked on them so sporadically.

As for my short stories that did exist in the Blood universe, I only wrote those when inspiration struck sharp.  Throughout Blood: ILA, I always felt bad I never included the actual main character in any part.  This was for two reasons.  One, the Chosen had no place in this story – they were dead, and it would have diminished the impact of the ending (this was before I was aware of Blood II).  The second reason was that I was too afraid to write as Caleb.  I'm a bit of a method writer, and most of the time, the characters have my own voice and different parts of my personality.  That's why it was so hard to let Caleb, Jo, Sophia, and Quentin go, and why they worked so well as characters – they each represent a part of my personality.  To write as Caleb, to be as witty, as diabolical, as strong, as psychopathic, as insane – basically to put myself in his place – was a task unsuited for a 18-year-old boy.  

But I knew that if I wanted to write a sequel to Blood:ILA, I would want to include the one and only Caleb.  The short stories I wrote partly as practice, and partly to add to the miniscule Blood fan fiction collection out there.  I specifically remember getting the inspiration for A Caleb Carol while playing Nintendo with my friend one night, and letting him play while I quick jotted down ideas.  I think that was my best work of the shorts because all the characters fit well in their respective places, but making them fit into Dickens's story was a challenge, because I needed to change their motivations so that they'd enact the right events.  It was like trying to make a mouse walk along a very fine line by leading it with a piece of cheese attached to a string.  I would later do the same thing with ZerOthello (Mega Man X plus Shakespeare's Othello).  It's harder than it looks.  

These days, my time constraints are just as short.  My last two novels, I was able to write in a season, but that was pumping out 2,000 words a day, five days a week.  Lulls at work afforded me more time to write then.  Now, I can only allocate myself 45 minutes a day of concentrated writing, and maybe time on the weekends if I'm lucky.  My only justification for this is that, still, no one is paying me.   I'm still doing this for fun.  But the moment I get something published, I'm sure my priorities will change, because that will mean I'm a commodity.

Any plans for any further works, perhaps a sequel to Blood: I Live Again?:
Well, I could be a douchebag like all those Hollywood types, and say "Mmmmm, maybe.  You never know what the future will hold.  It depends on if the script is right."  But fortunately, this isn't Hollywood.  Blood 2: The Unforgiven just started its final draft.  What Blood: I Live Again was for high school, Blood 2 will be for college.  That's all I'm going to say about it for now.

After that I plan to retire from the fan fiction world and devote my writing to original works in the hope of being published.  I've been bending towards urban fantasy crossed with less common fantasy elements, such as psionics or post-apocalypse.  These are still in their early stages, so everything's still up in the air.  Hopefully, the next time you see my name, it'll be at the bookstore.

What Blood specific stuff have you done recently or think about doing in the future?:
To tell the truth, I think I'm pretty much done with producing anything Blood-related.  It's been 10 years since the last game came out, when I was still in high school, and it doesn't look like anything new is going to happen in that universe.  It's great that the fans are carrying on the legacy.  In fact, I played a little of the original game not too long ago, still just as fun as I remember.  But the Blood franchise is stagnant now.  Its creators have moved on to other things.  It's hard to think about doing anything in the future regarding a universe that is no longer dynamic.

What do you think is the most interesting thing done by the Blood Community?:
I really enjoy the fan games, both the mods and stand-alones.  These really capture the Blood spirit, and I think its where the fan community shines the most.  It's no easy task to be slogging through code and textures and graphics, and especially if you're doing it for the love of the game, that takes heart.  I was particularly impressed by Legends of Iconoclast and Bloodlines.  Both of them go way beyond the concept and potential of games from this era.  I'd venture to say that they rival the original game in playability, environment, and escapism.

Besides Blood, what else do you use to fill your days?:
As I mentioned before, I still write, but I'm trying to focus on original works to get published.  I just got a Wii, so I enjoy playing Smash Bros. Brawl and Wii Sports Boxing when I can.  Netflix movies, Guitar Hero, and of course, my wife and five-month-old daughter fill the rest of the gaps.  I definitely have a full life right now.  Sometimes it's hard to get a breath of fresh air.

Do you have anything you wish to add to this interview?:
I really appreciate the response the Blood Community has given to me from my fan fiction.  I hadn't looked at the Praises of Blood for along time, but it really meant a lot to me that people cared enough to leave feedback, telling me how much it meant to them.  I figure there were probably a hundred others who liked it for every one feedback I got.  It really encouraged to keep going with my writing, and give back to the fans by writing a sequel.  Hopefully, it will get just as a positive response.  

Before we end the interview, what is your favourite game in the Blood Series?:
I enjoyed the Plasma Pak expansion.  The atmosphere was colorful, the new enemies were a treat, and the level design was varied and vibrant, with especially large environments.  It's a great wrap-up to the game.

Interviewer Note: Thank you for your lengthy responses and taking time out of your day to write them.  Good luck with your further stories! -  Tchernobog, July 24, 2008