January blog the fourth!
May I hear a tah dah? And a thank gods January has 31 days...
gilana asks: As someone who's written vampire books, I'd love to hear your take on what the attraction is.
This is me not making a crack about spackling... I'm sorry, sparkling.
This is also an answer in two parts.
Part One: Literary
Vampire fiction, as it's written now, is written predominantly using romance tropes -- where the relationship powers the plot -- and is part of the fine tradition of "Beauty and the Beast". Love can tame the monster. Not that today's vampires are particularly monstrous being as how they're invariably extremely attractive and living relatively normal lives except for that pesky needing to drink blood thing, but they carry their monstrous past with them.
Who doesn't want to be the one, the only person who can reach the good deep inside? The one, the only person for whom a powerful creature quells their blood-lust?
Part Two: Societal
I was part of a panel on vampires last year at the Merrill Collection in Toronto and we talked about a study that said vampires become more popular when times are tough. We couldn't actually find any strong evidence to support that but we did acknowledge that this is just one of many periods of popularity for the modern vampire.
Bram Stoker's Dracula wasn't particularly popular when he wrote it, it wasn't even mentioned in his obituary, but after the play came out in the twenties it acquired more the following we're used to thinking it has. (if you haven't seen the play, it's a lot sexier than the book) The Hammer films created a resurgence. The television show Dark Shadows had a huge following, with books, comics, lunch boxes, and more than one mini series. Interview with the Vampire caused a certain hysteria in the reading public at large.
Here's a thought, maybe instead of vampires becoming popular when times are tough, vampires become popular when times are in reaction to a sexual revolution. In reaction to the freedom of the twenties, the restrictions of the fifties, the post free love of the sixties/early seventies, the AIDs crisis, the reworking of traditional definitions of relationships. Vampires representing penetrative sex without the need for any messy intercourse.
Maybe not.
As a society, we're ramping everything up BIGGER! BETTER! and Vampires are the Byronic hero super-sized. Better looking, stronger, more self-contained, with lifetimes to become emotionally screwed up. (Henry was not Byronic. Henry didn't brood.) If a mortal man, gives you a key to his apartment, that shows one level of trust. If a vampire does it, he not only trusts you with his coffee maker, he trusts you with an immortal life. You have been given a great responsibility. You have been given POWER!
Conclusion:
Power is sexy. We all like to imagine ourselves as powerful. Vampire fiction provides an easy template.
Why did I write vampire books?
Because we wanted to move out of the city and to do that we needed to get a mortgage and to do that I needed bigger numbers. I'd been working at Bakka Books and I'd observed that the readers of vampire fiction are very loyal to their genre; they'll read anything with a set of fangs on the cover in the desperate hope of finding something decent. So I figured if I wrote a good vampire book, they'd be happy and I'd have a guarenteed audience, and my numbers would go up, and then I could get a mortgage.
And that's what happened. And then Blood Ties paid off my mortgage.
I totally rock at that whole financial planning thing.
Sidebar:
This past October at RingCon in Germany, I did a Q&A with Dylan Neal and Kyle Schmid the actors who played Mike Celluci and Henry Fitzroy in Blood Ties. (actually, they're better looking up close)(and they both smell very nice) One of the questions to all three of us was: "If you were given a chance to become a vampire would you take it." Kyle said no, because he believed in true love and he couldn't cope with watching his love grow older and die while he remained the same. And Dylan said no, because he wouldn't want to watch his wife and children grow old and die.
And I said, "No, because my time has passed. Had I been asked at Kyle's age I'd probably have said yes but I'm 53 and I don't want to be 53 forever. Hell, I don't want to be 53 for the rest of the weekend..."
gilana asks: As someone who's written vampire books, I'd love to hear your take on what the attraction is.
This is me not making a crack about spackling... I'm sorry, sparkling.
This is also an answer in two parts.
Part One: Literary
Vampire fiction, as it's written now, is written predominantly using romance tropes -- where the relationship powers the plot -- and is part of the fine tradition of "Beauty and the Beast". Love can tame the monster. Not that today's vampires are particularly monstrous being as how they're invariably extremely attractive and living relatively normal lives except for that pesky needing to drink blood thing, but they carry their monstrous past with them.
Who doesn't want to be the one, the only person who can reach the good deep inside? The one, the only person for whom a powerful creature quells their blood-lust?
Part Two: Societal
I was part of a panel on vampires last year at the Merrill Collection in Toronto and we talked about a study that said vampires become more popular when times are tough. We couldn't actually find any strong evidence to support that but we did acknowledge that this is just one of many periods of popularity for the modern vampire.
Bram Stoker's Dracula wasn't particularly popular when he wrote it, it wasn't even mentioned in his obituary, but after the play came out in the twenties it acquired more the following we're used to thinking it has. (if you haven't seen the play, it's a lot sexier than the book) The Hammer films created a resurgence. The television show Dark Shadows had a huge following, with books, comics, lunch boxes, and more than one mini series. Interview with the Vampire caused a certain hysteria in the reading public at large.
Here's a thought, maybe instead of vampires becoming popular when times are tough, vampires become popular when times are in reaction to a sexual revolution. In reaction to the freedom of the twenties, the restrictions of the fifties, the post free love of the sixties/early seventies, the AIDs crisis, the reworking of traditional definitions of relationships. Vampires representing penetrative sex without the need for any messy intercourse.
Maybe not.
As a society, we're ramping everything up BIGGER! BETTER! and Vampires are the Byronic hero super-sized. Better looking, stronger, more self-contained, with lifetimes to become emotionally screwed up. (Henry was not Byronic. Henry didn't brood.) If a mortal man, gives you a key to his apartment, that shows one level of trust. If a vampire does it, he not only trusts you with his coffee maker, he trusts you with an immortal life. You have been given a great responsibility. You have been given POWER!
Conclusion:
Power is sexy. We all like to imagine ourselves as powerful. Vampire fiction provides an easy template.
Why did I write vampire books?
Because we wanted to move out of the city and to do that we needed to get a mortgage and to do that I needed bigger numbers. I'd been working at Bakka Books and I'd observed that the readers of vampire fiction are very loyal to their genre; they'll read anything with a set of fangs on the cover in the desperate hope of finding something decent. So I figured if I wrote a good vampire book, they'd be happy and I'd have a guarenteed audience, and my numbers would go up, and then I could get a mortgage.
And that's what happened. And then Blood Ties paid off my mortgage.
I totally rock at that whole financial planning thing.
Sidebar:
This past October at RingCon in Germany, I did a Q&A with Dylan Neal and Kyle Schmid the actors who played Mike Celluci and Henry Fitzroy in Blood Ties. (actually, they're better looking up close)(and they both smell very nice) One of the questions to all three of us was: "If you were given a chance to become a vampire would you take it." Kyle said no, because he believed in true love and he couldn't cope with watching his love grow older and die while he remained the same. And Dylan said no, because he wouldn't want to watch his wife and children grow old and die.
And I said, "No, because my time has passed. Had I been asked at Kyle's age I'd probably have said yes but I'm 53 and I don't want to be 53 forever. Hell, I don't want to be 53 for the rest of the weekend..."