Here’s a question I get- why did I write nine vampire
novels?
When I was at the 2009 Willamette Writers
conference, I spoke to two agents who both made the
assertion that it’s a bad thing for a potential
first-time author to write a large number of
novels. It demonstrates a lack of focus- editing a
novel takes a huge amount of time and only experienced
authors can create multiple works of art. For most
of us normal mortals, a single novel takes so much time
it would be like trying to get five Ph.D.s.
Furthermore, if an aspiring author has completed a
series of novels, he or she will be resistant to
criticism that implies changes in the novels that appear
later (“I can’t do that; it would change the meaning of
book 3”).
When I started my
first novel, I discovered something quite profound about
myself: I don’t know how to write well. I made
every possible mistake. I used “purple
prose”. I never showed a situation, I just told
each situation. Most of my characters were clichés
that engaged in dialogue without doing a single
character action.
How is a
person supposed to learn? I needed to keep
practicing. After completing my first novel, and
spending ten years editing it, I started an interesting
new technique in 2005. I started a series of seven
novels. After I wrote each novel, instead of
fixing the obvious problems, I would try to address
those issues as I wrote the next novel. On August
30, 2008, I finished the first draft of a series of
seven novels. Am I unwilling to change the first
novel if it implies contradicting something in the other
six? The next six are already obsolete. I’m
constantly cannibalizing them, pulling things from them
to make the first in the series more interesting.
Stephen King wrote that every novelist must write at
least two novels for every novel sold, and combine the
best of these into a single piece. For an
inexperienced author as myself, perhaps seven was a good
implementation of King’s idea. I wrote seven in
the series to learn, but I edit the first novel in the
series to make it good.
It’s all
about learning. I took some writing courses at the
local community college (both noncredit and
credit.) I joined writing groups. I
volunteered for the 2009 Willamette Writers Conference
(and I won a scholarship for it.) I’ve read
everything I can get my hands on with regard to
writing. The one consistent advice from nearly
every writer’s resource is the same – write, write,
write. These days, I spend an inordinate amount of
time editing my first novel in the series of seven,
regardless of whether it implies changes in the other
novels or not, and sometimes I write new things just to
practice. I completed a first draft of my ninth
novel in July 2009, and even though it had nothing to do
with my previous eight, I still learned a few important
techniques.
After writing nine
novels, I confess I still have a lot to learn and that’s
why I keep practicing. I write new things
occasionally to practice, but focus on editing the first
in my series of seven to learn how to edit.
Friday, August 7, 2009
Vampirism and the Five-Year Rule
When I started graduate school at Cornell, I had no
idea how I’d get from inspiring student to Ph.D..
Making matters interesting, my thesis advisor, Prof.
Charlie Van Loan, already had tenure and no personal
stake in my success. In fact, the three students
he had before me never made it (with him at
least). One dropped out of school, and two others
left him to graduate later with someone else.
Moreover, the person who dropped out advised me that my
subject matter was a dead one, and people who had
preceded me had already solved all problems. Of
course, he was wrong, and gave up, which is why he
dropped out of graduate school. I just remember
working hard; I literally tried hundreds of topics and
ideas before graduating. It took five
years.
Later in life, my oldest
daughter Elizabeth started Taekwondo. I joined
her, as did my middle daughter, Rosey.
Unfortunately, my oldest dropped it. But within
five years, both Rosey and I had black belts and were on
our way to our second degree black
belts.
I’ve recently completed a
vampire series of seven books (I’ve written nine books
altogether, but seven of them are from a series.)
Each book in the series stands on its own and has a
distinct beginning, middle, and end. A reader can
read each book in the series before any of the other
books (although reading the last books first may spoil
much). The series does have an overriding theme,
and unlike a television series, the characters and
situations change over time so that the living
conditions and circumstances of the protagonist in the
seventh book are vastly different from the first
book. I also pushed myself to make every conflict
in each book different from the others. I didn’t
just create a formula and rubber stamp it a number of
times, but instead I created seven different
novels. Nevertheless, the process took just over
four years.
Medical school
(ignoring residency) takes around five
years.
A person spending three or
more hours a week can probably get good at a foreign
language in around five years.
I
call this the five-year rule. The basic premise is
this- if you want to do something, don’t give up, but
persist at it for at least five years. After five
years, your perspective on it may be different. Of
course, this isn’t to say that if you hate something you
should force yourself to do it. Time is too
precious for that. However, if you doubt or feel
uncertain about something, simply trying for a year may
not be enough.
I often wish
children realized this. Persist at something, and
within a few years, you may not have mastered it, but
you’ll have something to show for your
efforts.
Yet I can name a number of
fictional vampires sporting ages of several hundred
years that may have no special skills other than the
ability to speak several languages. What are they
doing with their time?
George
Bernard Shaw tells us “Youth is wasted on the
young.” Such a theme is perfect in a vampire
story, but often when reading vampire fiction I believe
that there should be a corollary to this statement,
“Immortality is wasted on the vampires.” This
belief centers around the concept of this five-year
rule. If a vampire were to put their mind to it,
think of all the things that they could
accomplish. Unless, of course, learning and
growing as an individual doesn’t hold value to them,
which would be the case for some vampires. There
is something about the “bad boy/girl” image where the
vampire is just a fascinating monster, and there is
always room in fiction for another example of
this. And while I may have some vampires that fit
into that category, I feel that some of my more
interesting vampires are interesting because of their
perspective on life and learning.
Sunday, August 2, 2009
Vampires and Money Someone once asked me
why all the vampires in my stories are wealthy.
The quick answer is that not all of them are wealthy, as
that would be ridiculous. However, the average
vampire has a lot more money than the average human, and
the older the vampire, the greater the gap. This
isn’t because I’m into escapism, vampires
aside. This is just a practical observation
about our economic system.
For starters, our economic system is based on the
human life span. Think about the types of the big
debts that most humans accrue- mortgages, raising
children, medical expenses. Just when you think
you’re getting ahead, something called life comes along
and gives you another surprise. If everyone lived
forever, many things would have to change in order to
maintain some kind of balance. Vampires don’t have to
worry about everyone living forever. They only
have to worry about vampires living forever. What
to do? Make long-term investments. They say
it takes money to make money. That’s probably
true. What does it mean to the vampire just
starting in the world? It means that if they put
aside just a small amount of money each day, after a
long period, they’ll have a lot more money to invest
than even the most frugal person starting with similar
means.
One might argue that the same could be said for
people, but people aren’t always the wisest with their
money. This would explain why there might be some
poor elder vampires in the world no doubt.
However, people learn from their mistakes, so why can’t
vampires? Perhaps for the first seventy years they
might make all kinds of stupid investment choices- like
putting all their eggs into one basket. If a human
did the same, they’d be broke. Nevertheless, the
amazing thing about many investments is this – if you
want short-term gain, you must take higher risk.
If you want long-term gain, the risk is lower.
A vampire trying to make investments over a two
hundred year period could easily make the most
conservative choices available and still come out
ahead. Just think about one investment choice-
real estate. It’s true that if you purchased a
home in the Bay Area at the wrong time, you could be
paying two million for a dinky place and never able to
sell it for anywhere near that amount. However, I
don’t know of many places that if you purchased land
years ago, where the value of that land would not have
grown considerably. Remember, the Louisiana
Purchase was only fifteen million
dollars. Alaska cost around seven
million. I’ve read countless stories where the
vampires were around during these purchases.
Perhaps they didn’t have millions to spend at the time,
but the point was that no matter how much land they did
buy, it’d be worth a fortune later.
The only downside to being a vampire investor is
how do you keep your long-term investment in a society
that knows nothing about vampires? This would be a
problem that the vampires must have thought about, and
they must have developed creative solutions for.
Why? Because large amounts of money buys
answers. It always has. Now suppose that
society knew about vampires. That would mean
vampires wouldn’t have to inherit (and be potentially
taxed) on money to themselves anymore. Plus, if
the vampires do live forever, I’m willing to bet some
rich guy wouldn’t approach a vampire with the
proposition, “I’ll write you a blank check in return for
immortality.” It’d be yet another reason why even
the poorest vampire should have some funds.
So, the next time you read a story with a bunch
of four hundred year old vampires that are just as broke
as Joe Plumber, you might want to stop and wonder
why.
I had the wonderful good fortune to tour Australia
last summer. One of the things that stuck out in
my mind were the constant reminders of how people had
inadvertently altered the local ecology by introducing
some invasive animal or plant that wasn’t native like
the European bunny rabbit. These innocent little
fuzzballs, without their natural predators, had
run wild over the continent, eating and destroying
the native habitat. It all goes to show you,
everything in nature must have a balance.
Imagine that you pick up today’s copy of the New
York Times, and there on the front cover is the amazing
announcement, “Vampires Exist for Real!” This
could be a good thing or a bad thing. It largely
depends on what kind of vampires we’re talking
about. If it’s Stoker’s vampires, then you’d best
start sharpening all your stakes. What really
amazes me, however, is how many stories are written
where there is no way that vampires wouldn’t immediately
destroy the human ecology.
For example, in some stories, vampires are easily
created. Just a few bites from the offending
vampire, and you have a new one. This new one has
a sudden craving for blood, and it must bite someone
else. Then they become a vampire. This
process continues, until before you know it, the entire
world has fangs. Of course, realistically,
the vampires would first create human farms and sell
human blood at such a premium that broke vampires might
easily starve to death.
I wrote briefly about population growth models in
another blog post, so I won’t repeat it here, but
sometimes I wish authors would take just a little time
to investigate the mathematics behind their story.
Perhaps my perspective as an aspiring author is unique
because I’ve a Ph.D. in Applied Mathematics, but the
point is that if you have any population that grows in
an unbounded sense in proportion to its number, and to
make matters worse is filled with immortals who can die
only by accident, the numbers very quickly add up.
How quickly? Start off with just one
vampire. You can even call him Dracula if you
like. Let’s say that once a year, Dracula meets
some interesting human, perhaps named Lucy, and decides
to make a new vampire. Let’s pretend that no one
stakes Lucy or Dracula, and they are both pretty happy
together, but after another year, each of them gets a
craving to create a new mate. Again, that’s not so
much. I’ve seen stories where the vampire creates
three or four vampires in a matter of days. Let’s
keep our vampire population “controlled” though and keep
it so that they only get this urge once every
year. Let each vampire create a new vampire, but
no more often than that. Again, this
frequency of fledgling vampires is far less than your
typical Dracula story. So, what’s the
population after an insignificant blink of an eye in a
vampire’s centuries of existence- just twenty-five
years? Thirty-three million. In less
than thirty-five years, they’d have overrun the entire
human race.
Naturally, vampires might be reluctant to create
new vampires if it puts them in a position where they
might starve to death. This implies that the
vampires must have some degree of control, which in my
opinion makes for much more interesting fiction
anyhow.
Nevertheless, if you imagine that these vampires
are reluctant to increase their numbers too fast, what’s
stopping the humans from wanting to do the same?
In some stories, the only disadvantages to being a
vampire is that the vampire must avoid daylight, and
they must drink blood. In return, they gain
immortality and immunity to disease (although in many
stories, they gain many more things as well). Some
authors throw a monkey-wrench into the mix, by
suggesting that vampires are evil, and so only evil
people would aspire to become one. The problem
with such moralistic arguments is that humans have never
been known to agree on most theological issues.
While most people agree that killing other people is
wrong, if vampires hide any wrong-doing from society (as
they would), then what evidence would a human have that
they are evil? If the author doesn’t depict a
world where such evil is obvious, then there will always
be some portion of the human population that would
embrace this new species with open arms and an exposed
jugular. The flip side is that if the author
depicts strong incontrovertible evidence that vampires
are vicious, evil killers, then the result of such an
announcement would be widespread vampire hunting.
Even if you believe that people would be fearful
of vampires, and avoid them regardless of how well the
vampires tried to adjust, what about the portion of the
human population that is terminally ill? How many
terminally ill people would balk at a chance to live
forever and be cured of their disease just because the
minister at their local church proposed without proof
that vampires are evil? Some brave souls certainly
would avoid the vampires. However, many would
not. There are people that spend billions of
dollars on age-hiding medications, surgeries, make-up,
etc.. Just how tempting would it be for some rich
person not to approach a vampire and say, “Here’s a
million dollars if you can make me forever young?”
I know that in some modern stories, vampires have
come out of the coffin, so to speak. For instance,
Kim Harrison’s, Charlaine Harris’, or Laurell K.
Hamilton's. One must ask a serious question – what
is keeping the vampire/human population of the world
fixed? Wouldn’t the introduction of this new
element completely overwhelm the human population?
Or, perhaps, wouldn’t the human population ban together
to completely destroy this new element?
This brings me to an important notion- the notion of
steady state. Everything must have balance.
For every new vampire that is created, an older vampire
must somewhere be dying. Why? Because
vampires live longer than humans (in most
stories). The consequence of this is that there
must be some reason for the population to be what it is,
not just in the beginning of a story, but before the
story takes place, and fifty years after the story
ends. Unless, of course, the author wishes to
write about the fall of humanity or perhaps the fall of
vampires.
One must keep in mind not just the desires of the
vampires, but the desires of the humans. A
steady state vampire population needs to make sense on
two levels- in terms of the vampire
reproductive/destruction rates, and in terms of the
humans that surround them. 2:53 pm pdt
Good
and Evil Vampires
I love reading vampire fiction. I enjoy all
vampires. It may appear from some of my entries
that I only prefer types that fit into a certain
mold. That’s not really true. I’ll take any
mold an author wishes to give. In many respects,
I’m probably more tolerant of different vampire types
than most people. The only thing I ask is that the
author make some effort to make whatever type of vampire
they create consistent with the world in which they
create it. If the vampire is three thousand years
old, I don’t want them to act like a co-worker; I want
them to show some wisdom. After three thousand
years, they’d better know what they want and I’d be
shocked if they didn’t behave in a self-respecting
fashion. Another example is if the vampire must
feed frequently, and in large quantities, which results
in making many new vampire fledglings, then I expect to
the world the vampire lives in to be highly overrun with
vampires.
When people find out that one of the techniques I
employ as a writer to keep vampire populations to a
minimum is fighting between the vampires, they’ll
sometimes ask me who are the good vampires and who are
the evil vampires (before reading my material
naturally).
My answer is that there are no good vampires and
evil vampires. From a human perspective, I suppose
almost every vampire in most stories might be considered
evil on some level. Sure, many stories purport
“good vampires” that may appear to contradict this
claim. Notice, however, that I said from a human
perspective. Joe Vampire, who is supposedly good,
has a difficult time not killing someone when he bites
them. Please don’t tell me that’s good. I’ll
accept that they are wrestling with their darker side,
and that they have a conscience, perhaps. Or, how
about Betsy Vampire who only kills rapists, child
molesters and murderers. I’m sorry, but these
aren’t good creatures. I remember one novel (which
I won’t name) where the protagonist, a vampire we’ll
call Gina (I’m changing the name), only kills someone
who threatens her, and attacks, but leaves living,
dozens of others. By the end of the novel, I
was repulsed, not sympathetic, with Gina. And it
wasn’t because I didn’t like Gina. I didn’t like
how the humans in her life blindly accepted her as
“good”.
However, this is all from the human perspective,
which is irrelevant to the vampire. From their
perspective, it should never be about good and
evil. I make this claim because I don’t often meet
people that think about doing something because it is
good or evil. For some reason, some people think
villains should. In truth, people think about what
they want and what they’re willing to do to get
it. I may want money, but I’m not willing to steal
to get it. It all boils down to character
motivation. Why should a vampire character be any
different? Each vampire must have some history,
and some desire, and create some plan that they believe
will help them accomplish their desires.
In one of my projects, I’ve some vampires that
have conflicting desires than the human protagonist
does. Does that mean that they are evil?
Well, if you asked the protagonist, the answer would be
a resounding “yes!” I’m certain, however, from
their perspective, they’re not evil. They’ve
nothing against the protagonist. Why should
they? Villains, who automatically hate the “good
guys”, create disbelief. Similarly, if all the
“good guys” think the protagonist is wonderful, this
also creates disbelief. Real life doesn’t work
like that, so why should vampire fiction? 2:45
pm pdt
Vampires and the Secrecy Paradox
Vampires among us? Why not? I suppose
some might hope for such a thing, especially given the
tremendous amount of fictional attention vampires
receive. In many traditional stories,
vampirism is secret. That is, only a select group
of humans knows about vampires. Most of society
would scoff at such a thing. Characters have said
things like, “We can’t get help! No one would
believe that Count Evil is a vampire!” This always
amuses me. First of all, the premise that you
cannot get help by telling the truth doesn’t account for
stretching the truth. Would the police come
if you had evidence that Count Evil *thought* he was a
vampire and was about to drink some innocent’s
blood? Of course they would.
But what makes a secret a secret? The
primary thing that keeps a secret is to keep the number
of people who know it at a minimum. And so,
many stories use the premise that the minute Count Evil
realizes that you’re on to him, he tries to kill
you. That way, his secret remains safe. Such
a concept isn’t realistic since there’s always someone
willing to investigate a mysterious death.
Perhaps not every mysterious death, but if Count Evil
makes a habit of killing people who witness him killing
people, eventually that’s going to work against him
(remember that Count Evil has been doing this vampire
thing for centuries). Then again, it is a story
about vampires, so perhaps people are willing to take
some leaps of faith.
This is the premise behind your typical Dracula
story. Count Evil has made the mistake of messing
with our protagonist, who investigated a mysterious
death more closely than others did. Count Evil now
has to kill the protagonist in order to keep the secret,
but something goes wrong, and Count Evil, despite being
a thousand years old, forgets when the sun comes up, and
gets burned to a crisp.
Whether you as a reader are willing to swallow all
this is your choice. The thing that often leaves
me wondering, however, is not why there aren’t more
protagonists out there realizing that Count Evil is a
vampire, but what are all the other vampires in the
world doing? I’ve come across a few stories
that propose that Count Evil is the first and only
vampire. I’m happy to accept this. After
all, the author can make whatever they want with the
vampire legend as long as they are consistent. The
consistency, however, breaks when during the course of
the story, Count Evil manages to create two new
vampires. It leaves me doing a little
mathematics. If Count Evil is a thousand years
old, and Count Evil creates two vampires in a story that
takes place over a week period, then it is possible that
Count Evil may have personally created over a hundred
thousand vampires. Of course, it gets worse.
Now suppose each of these vampires also create vampires
at the same frequency of Count Evil. How long
would it take for the entire world to get populated by
vampires? Less than half a year. That’s
right, the guy’s a thousand years old and we witness him
doing something that would overturn the entire human
population in less than half a year. Naturally, at
some point prior to the human race becoming extinct, the
secret would have gotten out.
This leaves one with an inevitable conclusion,
which is slightly counter-intuitive. Most authors
explain why humans don’t know about vampires.
That’s interesting, but the truth is that the puzzle has
nothing to do with the humans. It’s the vampires
themselves that may present the contradiction, and it
all falls out of a little mathematics.
Many authors get around this by proposing
vampires that don’t have an appetite for creating new
vampires. Truthfully, that is the only possible
explanation for this apparent contradiction. In
these stories, vampires only turn those who are most
“deserving” of the dark gift. One might argue that
the problem of secrecy is now solved, however this
brings us back to our original premise.
In my humble opinion, one of the most interesting
things about vampires is that they have
personalities. Unlike other “monsters”, the
vampire doesn’t just have a human form, but can think
like a human and respond like a human. While
making them far more interesting as a potential villain
(or protagonist depending on the story), this has a
consequence. What motivates each human is
different and depends on the human, and if vampires
share this individuality with us, then the same can be
said for vampires. The consequence then is
this- some crazy vampire would fail to grasp the
importance of the secret and let it out.
Vampires, if they really want to keep the secret,
could form their own set of “laws” regarding the
secrecy. If a vampire posed a threat to the
secrecy, the vampire society would kill this rogue
vampire. That would work up to a point.
Eventually, you’d find a self-destructive vampire that
didn’t care. This vampire would expose the secret,
and die in the process, but once the secret is exposed,
it is exposed. This is a probabilistic
argument- the greater the population of vampires, the
more likely someone would breach the secret.
Unless, of course, the world’s population of
vampires is extremely small. I’ve seen this work
in a few stories, and as long as no new vampires are
created, unless the circumstances are extraordinary in
some fashion, I think this is a wonderful solution to
the Secrecy Paradox.
There are other solutions to the Secrecy Paradox-
including not making it a secret to begin with.
That works for me, but if the premise of the story is
that vampirism is known to the world in year 2009, but
it wasn’t known in 2000, or 1950, I’m still left
wondering how could the Secrecy Paradox apply back
then? I present a solution in one of my recent
novels in progress. It may not be perfect, but it
is unique at least. 2:41 pm pdt
To Know a
Vampire is to Be a Vampire
I don’t know how many times I’ve read some criticism
of a vampire story where the critic claims, “That author
got vampires wrong.” They inevitably follow this
up with some comparison to their favorite author.
Perhaps they say, “Real vampires sparkle!” I’m not
sure where they get such ideas. I mean, I’m
familiar with Stephenie Meyer’s works, but what inspires
the concept that vampires must follow a specific
formula, or else they’re “wrong”? What makes a
person so certain that one formula is perfect and
another formula is broken? Sometimes I think it’s
because the reader recalls the first vampire story they
fell in love with, and after that they make subconscious
comparisons.
Here’s the one rule about vampires: there are no
rules. And, as a writer of vampire fiction myself,
I thank the heavens for this. After all, if an
author, other than Stephenie Meyer, created another
Edward Cullen, it would be plagiarism. Vampires have
changed throughout the years. Dracula, as told by
Bram Stoker, was certainly a monster, and had little
humanity. If Dracula showed up at your birthday
party, you’d be a fool to invite him in. Many
modern vampires, however, fit better into modern
society.
I once conducted a survey with several hundred
fans of vampire fiction, asking them a simple question-
if you were visited by a vampire, and they offered to
make you one, would you agree, even if you didn’t know
exactly what type of vampire they were? I was
shocked at how many people said “yes”. Is
vampirism so desirable regardless of the type of
vampirism? Either my respondents hadn’t read
enough vampire fiction to realize just how widely
varying the vampire fiction world is, or they have a
wildly forgiving love for the fanged beasts.
So, when creating a new vampire, what
characteristics are important? Should
mirrors reflect them? Should silver hurt
them? Should a crucifix repel them? Must
they sleep with some of the soil that they were buried
in? Should the sunlight burn them? Should
they be stronger than humans? Should they be
faster? Should they be able to change form- like
into a bat, or a mist? Should they have powers of
hypnosis? Should they have retractable
fangs? Should their bites be pleasurable or
painful? Should they have a soul? Should
they be ageless? Should the sight of blood drive
them crazy? Should they hate garlic? Should
holy water hurt them? Should staking them with
wood in the heart turn them into dust? Should they
need permission to enter your home? Should they
have a beating heart? Should they become “dead”
during the daytime?
In the end, writers should pick characteristics
of their vampires that best move the story
forward. I believe this so strongly that I’ll
often create in my view “imperfect” vampires, because it
propels the story better.
In creating a vampire, one should pay close
attention to the vampire myths that exist. Should
the vampire exhibit characteristics that don’t fit the
rest of the fictional world? My favorite example
of a strange vampire myth is the one regarding
mirrors. The notion that a vampire shouldn’t
reflect in a mirror is an interesting one, and I
wouldn’t discourage an author from using it. I
would, however, encourage such an author to think about
it carefully. Why shouldn’t vampires reflect in
mirrors? Mirrors, of course, just reflect what is
around us. If a vampire doesn’t appear in a
mirror, it means that the vampire isn’t physically
there. That means that this vampire only appears
visible because he or she is influencing your mind
somehow, altering your perception of vision to see
something that isn’t really there. And if they can
do that, then why can’t they alter what you see when you
look into a mirror? I also wonder exactly how the
vampire alters people’s perceptions. Is it
magic? I hope it is magic, because science holds
no good explanation. If the vampire isn’t really
there, and they are altering your thoughts, that means
that someone could be standing next to you and possibly
not see the vampire you see. It means that your
dog Fido wouldn’t start barking hysterically when the
vampire walks by. It also implies that the
vampire, warping the minds of one individual at a time,
wouldn’t care to go to big party.
Another vampire myth that amazes me is
sunlight. How many times did we see Christopher
Lee as Dracula burn because he simply lost track of time
and get caught in a ray of sunshine? But if
sunlight can burn a vampire, why not moonlight? I
could also ask about starlight? Is there really a
difference? Scientifically, it is only a question
of intensity, although the sun can be almost a million
times brighter than the moon. Does that mean that
moonlight is just mildly annoying to the vampire?
Perhaps that might explain the common knowledge that
vampires and werewolves don’t get along.
Another interesting vampire myth is the
biting. Most writers portray the bite as
horrendous. I applaud Kim Harrison, who added her
own myth that vampire saliva confused pain and pleasure
centers in the brain- and thus what should be painful
gets remapped as intensely pleasurable. In many of
my stories, I’ve often equated vampire saliva as having
anesthetizing characteristics. This would be a
reasonable evolutionary development in the vampire
species, but it would also mean that the initial
piercing of the skin would not be pleasant. Unless
the vampire is altering its victim’s notion of pleasure
and pain, any bite should be extremely painful.
Any person who’s ever been bitten by a wild animal could
tell you that.
I hesitate to mention the crucifix.
There are deep religious undertones to having a vampire
that is afraid of such things.
A common myth is that vampires should be “dead”
during the daytime. This has always been a puzzle
to me, however. After all, what is it in the
vampire that gives them such a good internal
clock? You’d think that Dracula would never forget
the time with such a wonderful internal clock. Of
course, what is the difference between daytime and
nighttime, other than some positioning of our planet
versus the sun? It’s always daytime somewhere on
the planet. I’ve often had to make a trip from
Asia west-ward to the States, and seen days that last
way too long. I’d hate to think about a vampire
flying in a plane where one moment the sun is out and
the next it isn’t and the next it is, etc. (such a thing
is possible if you plan it right.) And what
precisely defines daytime, anyhow? Is it the sun
rising over the horizon? That appears like the
reasonable answer- but what about someone would lives
west of a mountain range that prolongs morning?
Does that mean that the vampires living there get some
extra time? If it is overcast, does that mean that
the vampire can skip their slumber? During a solar
eclipse, do they wake up briefly? I confess that
although this particular myth is distasteful to me, I’ve
used it in stories myself, because it became an integral
part of the story for what happens to the vampire’s
consciousness during this daytime period.
With all these “facts” up in the air, when I pick
up a new vampire novel or story, I make sure I forget
all the other rules that existed in previous
stories. If the author proposes that vampires
can’t even turn other humans (that they are their own
unique species), I’ll go with it. If the author
says that vampires sparkle in the sunlight, I’ll accept
their word for it. If the author shows the
greatest form of ecstasy is a vampire sucking on one’s
neck, I may wonder, but I’ll accept it. If the
author proposes that a crucifix will repel the vampires,
I’ll believe them. Can anyone really know what a
vampire is with all the wildly varying fiction that
exists? My claim is that there is only one group
that can be certain- and they are the vampires
themselves.
