Recently, myself and two other writers embarked on a collaboration adventure and started writing Pursuit of Darkness, book one of Unearthing Sarkoczy series. We were part of a real life vampire community, and prospected to a house to learn more of the lore pertaining to origins of vampires for occult research. As opposed to legitimately based researched, we were met with a religious society based vampire house. On top of the disappointment of not finding the legitimate research we were looking for, we were also met with opposition from many members of this select group. Our beliefs were tore from limb to limb and opposed when it came to a “Middle Pillar/Twilight” way of life. Heinous acts were implemented in threats to us. We were told we didn’t belong and to leave. This was not the most delectable experience we thought we were to have. Instead, it was a horrible experience.
From this experience, we gained an aim for a new fiction series called Unearthing Sarkoczy Saga. It is a vampire saga and revolves around the many things we learned while in this society of greed, power, politics, sex, and drama. Although personalities and some traits of the real people of this society were used, the book is purely fiction. We molded what we experienced into a new dramatic view, kind of like Anne Rice meets Vampire Diaries. None of the scenes portrayed in the book literally happened. The names of the people in the book are purely fiction and pulled from generators for pre-1800 Hungarian baby names. All conversations are fiction and all actions portrayed are fiction.
We recently acquired a name for ourselves as “author bullies” as one of the members of this community is an author. We are in no way abusing her name in the book or portraying any real conversations we had with the author. We have not campaigned about her aside from retorting the claims and allegations of “author bullying,” plagiarism (which I will get to in a moment), hijacking a page that we ourselves had created in the beginning under our accounts, and have been accused of being drug heads and smeared in passive-aggressive fiction posts posted to said author’s walls. I myself was called “Spacey” and was said to have been as big as a bus, which was a stab at my weight issue, which is low for anyone. Yet, we seem to be the ones deemed as “author bullies” when in respect to the story the only thing we put in the book was arrogant attitudes that I must say most vampire novels have.
As many of you can see in my posts on here, I am far from being an author bully. I have a number of author spotlights for up and coming indie authors who have self-published on all types of platforms. One of my goals has been to help other indie authors achieve fandom, including said author as I shared her books to my personal Facebook page and profile for free promotion to her and asked for nothing in return.
We are 30,000 words into this novel when people started remarking that is was apparently plagiarized and stolen intellectual property. That is not true, as said series remarked as being what was copied is way before my age and I had never heard of it until told what the proposed plagiarism was. The three main characters known as the Karpati sisters are born vampires that have been pushed from countless homes after being hunted down by vampire hunters. None of their descriptions, nor the descriptions of other characters match any other material out on the market. As a matter of fact, the only resemblance that they have in the BEGINNING of the book are the way the members reacted to us when we were initiated into this community. There are blossoming romances between all three of the Karpati sisters with different members of the clan. In real life, I am married and hardly ever talk to the members of this established house unless they are females. Our first four chapters are up on this blog as well as the fan club website we set up on www.housesarkoczy.com. We did and do not live in a 200 year old plantation house and the established society we initiated into did not have stacks of humans hidden in a dungeon as snacks (that is kidnapping; if they want to claim that by gods let them; it is their funeral not mine). Face it; we are talking lush old world money and paintings from the Louvre and most of the members of the vampire community can barely make monthly bills. So for someone to see themselves in this fiction, and say we are openly writing about them being “author bullies,” then there is a need to know that personality profiles are just that; character profiles learned from mannerisms of multiple people.
Since the alleged accusations of our “smear campaign” came to light, I was removed from a writing group because she was friends with the owner of it and told the reasons were my book. There were no real life events written into this book and it being purely fiction there was no legitimate reason to remove me from the writing group. The owner of the group and a few others in the group (as well as one of the admins) are part of the vampire community. The “threat” posed to this established house offended them and they removed me because of their ties to the vampire community. I myself feel that this is wrong entirely as fiction can be written about anything and everything you choose. Since we used experiences to mold our novels to create “some” of the plots i.e. the attacks in the book were personal attacks on our characters saying we never belonged and shouldn’t belong, I do not feel as if this removal was fair just because they are friends. But, it’s Facebook and group owners can do whatever they wish to do, including emailing Anne Rice and telling her we were publicly stating an endorsement through her for the books (which the allegations were false as well).
This post is to clear our names of what we are being accused of. When writing fiction and using fictionalized characters, there is no way to smear anyone’s name unless they feel guilty about what is portrayed in the story (and I reiterate NOTHING in this book happened for real in real life). My hope is that if you hear any defamation of my character, any slander or bias as to me being a horrible person or an “author bully,” you will turn a deaf ear towards the accuser. We have posted disclaimers everywhere saying that the book is purely fiction with no real conversations that took place in real life, but they push people further into their propaganda and feed them the lies being told on the author’s actual author page on Facebook, where she clearly campaigns to unlike and block our book series/fan club page.
Going undercover for writing research for nonfiction occult books turned into research for an actual novel. We have deeply researched our character’s origins, dates, languages, specific words for architecture of places mentioned; everything. If you could, please pass this by word of mouth to counteract the attacks against my name and the other writers of this series.
In honest regards,
Kasey Hill