Scenes from the writing life: Dead Bodies 101

“…[This] is a seminar run by Allan Jamieson, director of the Forensic Institute in Edinburgh, aimed at writers of crime novels and television thrillers. People are here to brush up on bruises, strangulations, decaying bodies and false identifications: the ins and outs of forensic procedures.….

Fullerton writes political thrillers (his fourth, Give Me Death, came out this month). His fifth has a big scene in which someone’s carotid is cut – that’s why he wants to get the details right. Somehow, in the subsequent discussion, it becomes apparent that Jamieson and his colleagues are in the habit of taking their own blood, then coughing it up, blowing it out of their nostrils, spraying it around to see the patterns it makes, and waiting for the droplets to crust over and harden to see how long these processes take.”

And then you wonder why there’re so many vampire sagas out there.