VaNoWriMo
I can't walk ten blocks in the city anymore without seeing a vampire.
They're everywhere. They're staring at you from book covers, movie posters, T-shirts. When I ride the subway, any crowded car is gonna have at least one young woman reading a vampire novel. They're ubiquitous, classy, and modern. They are the default and the ideal. They are, in short, the opposite of everything that made vampires scare me as a kid.
When I was little, vampires were terrifying. They were human-shaped and yet far from human-stronger, faster, stealthier than me; and their desires and natures were alien and fearsome. Even that Bugs Bunny cartoon where he meets a vampire scared me. Later in life, I read legends of Vlad Ţepeş over and over, and I trembled. Man-shaped creatures appearing beside my bed to suck my blood were bad enough, but this guy was reportedly human and yet he impaled his enemies slowly on huge wooden stakes, and nailed ambassadors' turbans to their heads, and sat nearby enjoying a meal all the while. Finally, when I was thirteen I read Dracula. Bram Stoker's Count was a monstrous badass whom I learned about in snips and whispers through Jonathan Harker's letters: a winged, misshapen humanoid fluttering at a window; a mysterious empty box on an empty ship, its crew slain; a calm, polite man who quietly and carefully traps his human prey in a castle, using its very architecture to drive him mad even before the whole business with controlling the dude's mind with a wave of his hand. It took them forever to kill Count Dracula and the body count was damn high by the time they did. And these are just the European vampires! We haven't even gotten into the chupacabra and the abonsam and the stiff corpse and the penangallan.
And now they sparkle in sunlight. Every derogatory joke that can possibly be told about the sparkling has been told. At the end, though, it's pretty sad, because the terrifying, inhuman predators of my nightmares were gone. So now we're all sitting here with the fragments of our beloved fears in hand, flipping through Twilight and thinking, "I wrote better than this ten years ago."
Guess what, homes? Now it's our turn. I hereby announce the first ever …
Vampire Novel Writing Month
Think of a trashy vampire novel idea you had once. If you never had one, take thirty seconds to make one up. We all on the same page now? Good. So here's what we're gonna do: We're all gonna spend the next month (or six weeks, or two months, whatever-does it really matter?) jotting down notes and copy for some truly awful vampire novels. If you're into the sparkles, fine-write about those. If you want to write Vampire: the Requiem fanfic, no problem-how bad could it be? We're gonna compare notes, make fun of each other's writing, and generally engage in the cathartic experience of reclaiming the vampires of our imaginations. And the best part is, 95% of these things are going to be much, much better than Twilight.
VaNoWriMo, motherfuckers. Let's take back the nightmare.
They're everywhere. They're staring at you from book covers, movie posters, T-shirts. When I ride the subway, any crowded car is gonna have at least one young woman reading a vampire novel. They're ubiquitous, classy, and modern. They are the default and the ideal. They are, in short, the opposite of everything that made vampires scare me as a kid.
When I was little, vampires were terrifying. They were human-shaped and yet far from human-stronger, faster, stealthier than me; and their desires and natures were alien and fearsome. Even that Bugs Bunny cartoon where he meets a vampire scared me. Later in life, I read legends of Vlad Ţepeş over and over, and I trembled. Man-shaped creatures appearing beside my bed to suck my blood were bad enough, but this guy was reportedly human and yet he impaled his enemies slowly on huge wooden stakes, and nailed ambassadors' turbans to their heads, and sat nearby enjoying a meal all the while. Finally, when I was thirteen I read Dracula. Bram Stoker's Count was a monstrous badass whom I learned about in snips and whispers through Jonathan Harker's letters: a winged, misshapen humanoid fluttering at a window; a mysterious empty box on an empty ship, its crew slain; a calm, polite man who quietly and carefully traps his human prey in a castle, using its very architecture to drive him mad even before the whole business with controlling the dude's mind with a wave of his hand. It took them forever to kill Count Dracula and the body count was damn high by the time they did. And these are just the European vampires! We haven't even gotten into the chupacabra and the abonsam and the stiff corpse and the penangallan.
And now they sparkle in sunlight. Every derogatory joke that can possibly be told about the sparkling has been told. At the end, though, it's pretty sad, because the terrifying, inhuman predators of my nightmares were gone. So now we're all sitting here with the fragments of our beloved fears in hand, flipping through Twilight and thinking, "I wrote better than this ten years ago."
Guess what, homes? Now it's our turn. I hereby announce the first ever …
Vampire Novel Writing Month
Think of a trashy vampire novel idea you had once. If you never had one, take thirty seconds to make one up. We all on the same page now? Good. So here's what we're gonna do: We're all gonna spend the next month (or six weeks, or two months, whatever-does it really matter?) jotting down notes and copy for some truly awful vampire novels. If you're into the sparkles, fine-write about those. If you want to write Vampire: the Requiem fanfic, no problem-how bad could it be? We're gonna compare notes, make fun of each other's writing, and generally engage in the cathartic experience of reclaiming the vampires of our imaginations. And the best part is, 95% of these things are going to be much, much better than Twilight.
VaNoWriMo, motherfuckers. Let's take back the nightmare.