The Original Vampire...

Vampires have come a long way since the days when they were supernatural monsters, creatures that were all horror, little beauty...and certainly no romance. It sometimes seems like they’ve been hijacked by authors looking to spice up their romance novels - but the feeling is both disingenuous and mistaken. It seems to me that vampires became the subject of allure and very human dilemmas since they first found their way into fiction.

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.