I made a lot of friends in HWA -- that's how I got talked into running for president. Since I stopped writing horror around the turn of the century and effectively dropped out of HWA in 1996, I've lost touch with a lot of them, unfortunately.

Some of those friends edited and published stuff, and would ask me to write for them. One of those was David Niall Wilson, who was responsible for an irregularly-published magazine called The Tome. He said he was going to be doing a special issue, and asked if I might have a story for it.

Funny thing is, I forget just what the theme of the special issue was. Vampires? Gothic? Gothic vampires? Something else entirely? I don't know.

Anyway, I wrote "The Pimp" for that issue, trying to do as creepy and non-standard a vampire story as I could. I think it's pretty good. People had written about memory vampires before, and about humans who feed other people to vampires, but I don't think anyone ever did it quite like this.

But then that issue of The Tome didn't happen, or at any rate was delayed, and I sort of lost contact with Dave, and eventually I got tired of having "The Pimp" sitting around and sent it to Weird Tales, and they bought it and published it in #315, Spring 1999.

And since it is a vampire story, it's included in In the Blood.

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