Ever since I first dreamed up the premise for Children of Winter, Children of Wolves (which has the unfortunate shortened name of CoW, CoW) last year in Frank Espinosa's world-building class, I knew where I wanted to take the story: Romania. There was something about the lore of Eastern Europe, tied up in all its delicious stories of vampires, werewolves and specters, along with the beauty of the gypsy culture, that I wanted to play with, and so, last night about six o'clock or so (or at the 10,304-word mark) I threw my protagonists on a plane and sent them to Romania.

This has been both awesome and slightly sucky. Awesome, in that I'm having a ton of fun sending them through places with names like Tîrgu Mures, Cluj-Napoca and Alba Ilula and investigating things with names like Biserica Neagră, or the Black Church. Sucky, however, in that it's tricky to conduct a lot of research when you're on a strict timeline. Hence, my writing this morning has only generated a little under a thousand more words. That's okay, because I'll give this another go when I get home tonight, but still... Rats.

That said, how can you not see something like this and think it's awesome?

See? Awesome.