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Date: 11/30/2017
CHICOPEE – Chicopee resident Warren Onufer knows his vampire character Hadley Price is a work of his imagination, but the writer explained that sometimes it’s more the character telling him what to write than the other way around.
Onufer has been a writer “on and off” most of his adult life. In 2010, he said, “If I’m going to call myself a writer, I have to write a novel.”
His inspiration to begin his novel was the best-selling “Twilight” series. He wondered why Edward, a 100-year-old vampire would fixate on a 17 year-old girl.
“I stewed on that for six to nine months. What I did was to switch the gender roles where the vampire was female and the human was male and he’s a mature man. They fall in love and my initial idea was to just write this love story where I switched the gender roles.”
By the time he was almost done writing the first book, he realized that Hadley had more to say. So what was supposed to be just a single novel became a series set on seven planets.
Onufer has written three books in the series so far with “Torch” being the lasts and released earlier this year. A fourth book is now with this editor and he added he has started the fifth book.
“My head is all over the place in terms of storylines,” he said.
He joked his character is not relation – or a homage – to horror star Vincent Price.
What attracted Onufer to vampires is “they look like us, but they are not us.” He added, “That whole what you see is not what you get is really interesting to me … there are a lot of dramatic possibilities with longevity and with what you see is not what you get.”
Humor is an important part of his vampire stories and he likened the successful relationship between horror and humor to the music of Alice Cooper.
“I think good story-telling of any kind has drama it has humor. To truly disregard humor in horror, your scenes of horror become that much more horrific,” he said.
Onufer has been a retail display specialist for many years and admitted to being tired of traveling around New England creating retail display. Before that career he said he was active in local media. He is currently looking into other jobs.
He said about his interest in writing, “Most of us do it because we can’t not do it.”
He explained it’s a difficult now for him to take a respite from writing. “There are times when I do take a break. I’ll be driving in the car or walking, whatever and all of a sudden Hadley will show up and start talking to me. She tells me stuff I should be writing down at a time I’m not in front of my word processor. I don’t find her annoying, I like her,” Onufer said.
Onufer is planning events to meet the public, but noted how difficult it can be for an independent author to distribute and sell books. He enjoyed his recent appearance at Bing Comic Con, he said.
His books are available at Amazon and Barnes & Noble, among other online booksellers. For more information go to https://hadleyprice.com/category/warren-onufer/ or to his Facebook page.