Payton Baggett Reporting
news@clarksvillenow.com

For fans of animae, sci-fi, horror, and fantasy, the first ever local Comic and Anime Show is scheduled to take place the weekend of July 19 at Governor’s Square Mall located on 2801 Wilma Rudolph Blvd.

Vendors, special guests, and panel discussions will be set up in the food court area of the mall for the family friendly event, which will be free of charge. Comic artist Drew Geraci will be signing autographs Saturday and Sunday, and actress Melissa Cowan will be present all weekend. Better known as “Bicycle Girl” on an episode of AMC’s The Walking Dead, Cowan has also appeared as an extra in TV show The Vampire Diaries, and movies such as Halloween 2 and Due Date. She is now landing more featured roles.

Scheduled for Saturday July 20th is a movie premiere in the old Avenue storefront, with gift bags being handed out to the first 200 people attending. Entitled Unrequited Love, the production is based on a scene from Vampires of Camelot Merlin’s Revenge Part Two, a book written by author Joanne Padgett. She said that she chose Clarksville for the debut of the film because “it is far enough away from Nashville so that Nashvillians can get to it, and it is close enough to Nashville that it has a metropolitan atmosphere.”

The recently released book is the second in a set of five, and to date it has sold 35,000 copies, while the first book of the series sold 100,000 copies. Padgett has described her novel as a “sci-fi historical thriller” featuring medieval character Uther Pendragon as the main character who is tragically in love with a woman engaged to his best friend. “This is the history prior to Camelot, where Camelot came from, how it came about,” Padgett said. “I’ve read Sir Thomas Mallory’s version of Camelot, and it’s in old English, and a lot of it didn’t make sense to me, so I thought to myself, why not modernize it a bit.” The author went on to say that she added vampires to the story “because that was the only thing Camelot was missing.”

Scenes in the movie include Uther meeting his love by a creek, her wedding to his friend, and the characters preparing for war, all of which were filmed at The Duck Pond Farm in Mount Juliet, Tennessee. Padgett said that the location is “a wonderful, majestic place, and I loved it because of the medieval atmosphere. It wasn’t groomed yet, so the brush was grown up.”

A resident of Old Hickory, Tennessee, Padgett also cast all Tennessee based actors in Unrequited Love, and had Tennessee band The Black Collar Outlaw perform her song “Love Is Lost on Me,” in the film’s trailer.

Padgett began writing the first book in her series in 2009 at the age of 30, and with the help of Author University, a writer’s seminar, she had it self-published it by January 2012. She is currently working on the third Vampires of Camelot book, Desmoria’s Downfall, which is due to release in January of 2015.

For more information about the Clarksville Comic and Animae Show, visit http://www.comiccitytn.com/.

To purchase Padgett’s books, visit www.vampiresofcamelot.com.

To receive updates from the author, find her on https://www.facebook.com/CAMELOTTRUESTORY.