We can look back to Dracula and see a monster, even a rapist
but then we have Lord Ruthven and Camilla, both monsters but both also
seducers. And what of Varney the Vampire, was he not a very human monster?
No, while the vampire as a romantic hero has been popular in
modern fiction at least since Anne Rice penned Interview With A Vampire, the
germ of such characters has been with us for much longer, along with the allure
of immortality and the tragedy of its price. I suspect that Ruthven, Camilla,
Dracula, and Varney have between them given us most of the literary vampires
since. Not all, of course, some writers have looked back to the old myths and
legends of such creatures – but most.
The trick then is, as has been realised by countless author
before me, not to find the original vampire but an original story about
vampires. Not a new monster but a new angle on an old one. And so, that is
where I found myself, two Octobers ago, in a pub with a friend of mine, a
writer of SAS thrillers who was thinking of branching out to other genres. He
had just such an idea and planned to have a go at writing it as a short novella
for the next NaNoWriMo.
And that got me thinking about eBooks and for the first time
about the freedom the medium offered writers. I started thinking about pulp
literature – not the old magazines but the style and spirit of cheap, short,
and fun novels of a kind that I felt sure that folk would still enjoy but which
the economics of print probably didn’t leave room for these days. Over the
following year I started to notice that others were thinking on these lines
also, the novella was clearly returning as a medium, with many shorter books of
around twenty-thousand words doing rather well.
I was not quite idle during this time, almost, but not
quite. What I was doing was thinking, dreaming really, of what kind of stories
I would tell. Eventually the dreams become plans and the plans went onto paper
and become plots.
I am now happy to announce that I’m very close to publishing
the first of what will be a series of short novels of forty-fifty thousand
words a piece. I have decided to set the stories in alternative world, still
much like our own but with sufficient differences to allow me room to play and
do things my way.
Of course, writing the story is only half the work for a
self publisher...I am now faced with the daunting task of creating a web site,
a cover – and with those an image, along with promoting the books and ideas
behind them. And then, thinking optimistically, should I actually sell any then
I’ve got to think about such things as tax and National Insurance. It’s going
to an adventure and I intend to write the process up in this blog. Even if I’m
not successful, perhaps the experience will prove of some use to other budding
writers out there.
Milton.
