The Future of Vampire Trilogies

I often feel as though half of my job as an English teacher is to get my students excited about writing. I do that by encouraging them to write what they have to say or by writing about the things they have done. I share my own writing adventures with them. I talk about my books, not in a salesman kind of way but as a writer sharing craft tips. The usual response I get is "That's okay for you, you like to write, but we don't." 

To this supposition I retort using a quote which I thought was my own invention but which apparently (much to my chagrin) has been credited to various people from Benjamin Franklin to Ernest Hemingway: "If it is not worth writing about, it is not worth doing." That is the gist of the student writing life: to get it done in as simple a fashion as possible. Sometimes what is "worth writing about" has not actually happened - perhaps can never happen. When I was young, I had not much life experience to write about. Most of it was not worth doing and so not worth writing about. I felt sad at my circumstances.

So I began to make it up. I had few really worthy experiences so I invented experiences. This was the start of fiction. I joined the liars club. No, I didn't lie about important things or even ordinary things, but it was easy to exaggerate, to put a spin on what I said and wrote. Teachers loved that about me: I always had an interesting tale to tell. Take 7th grade, for example, when our teacher liked to have the class write stories. On Fridays we would share our stories by standing at the front of the room and reading what we had written - which was also an exercise in heart palpitation and social anxiety!

Even today, someone will ask me how I got the idea for my book - whatever my latest is - and I shrug humbly and say something like, "Well, I had a dream, see, and . . . ." The truth, however, may be much more ominous. In the case of my so-called "vampire" trilogy, there are two answers. The first book, A Dry Patch of Skin (referring to the first symptom of transforming into a vampire) was intended as a stand-alone novel, a one and done, because paranormal or Gothic or horror was not my usual genre. I just wanted to explain to my teenage daughter who was hooked on the Twilight series that vampirism was an actual disease affecting real people, something painful and disfiguring, not glittery and glamorous.

The research involved took me through a lot of medical texts and anthropological accounts of legends and ancient reports to bring the truth about vampires to light - pardon the pun. My own doctor (who was working on an MFA degree on the side) read it and said I got the medical things correct. (You can read a blog post about the medical issues here.) The story ended with a proper conclusion. I believed the story was done. I moved on to write two more novels on completely different subjects.

Then I realized something from that vampire novel continued to pester me. What would happen next? That is always the bugbear for writers. We just cannot put it down, can't leave a sleeping bear alone, can't stop picking that scab. And so I conceived a new story, one that by necessity had to be less "medically accurate" and more along the lines of futuristic science fiction. Naturally I had to put myself in the shoes of my protagonist and hero, Stefan Szekely, who at the end of the first book, had accepted his sorry fate like a good trooper. How would he react to the passage of time? What would he want to do?

I've blogged previously about how I considered Book 2 here. 

When I decided to go ahead and write a second book, thus making it a series, I knew there would be a third book - to make it a trilogy. Trilogies are all the rage now; I wrote about trilogies on a previous blog. However, I did not sit down and plan out both books together. When I finished writing Book 2, I really had no idea what would happen in Book 3. It did not take long, however, for a dream to show me a scene that would become the starting point for Book 3 - and then I was off and running!

So the third book of any trilogy must:

1) further the adventures (or misadventures) of the cast, especially the main character of the previous book;

2) be an exciting, compelling journey in itself; and

3) bring all the story lines together in a satisfying, plausible conclusion - and possibly make certain there is no need for a fourth book.

The Vampire Genre has developed its own tropes, symbols, motifs, and customs, starting with John Polidori's invention "The Vampyre" and fully realized in Bram Stoker's turn in Dracula. Others followed until the preponderance of the evidence created a vast multi-channel marketing juggernaut that an outsider could never hope to penetrate. And yet, it is the variety of vampire themes and story lines that give the genre so much richness. No one is solely correct about what a vampire is or is not. Not even me, though I profess to have written (Book 1, that is), a "medically accurate" version where our tragic hero transforms against his will into what he does not want to become. I continue to try to keep it as "real" as possible.

And so I give you, the reading world, what I hope is an enjoyably different take on a vampire society. If medical accuracy was possible in a 2014 novel (set in 2013-14), then a story set in 2027-28 would have to include futuristic aspects. A Book 3 which is set in 2099 would take the differences to a much greater extreme, it would follow. Less Gothic horror in the traditional sense and more science fiction in the dystopian sense. I apologize; the usual tropes cannot be sustained in a futuristic setting ("Vampires on Mars" being one exception). However, like any good author, I bend over backwards to keep things as believable and plausible as possible given what we can and cannot know about the future and about our own predilections as humans - and as humans transformed into vampires.

The story must be compelling in other ways, too, not just extending the vampire "elements" into the 22nd century. Blood is still blood. Ways of getting it may change but the fundamental issue remains. Yet after that - after our lovely dinner of red - what next? Power! The rise to power. Because power means always getting what you want, what you need, assuring its constant supply. Absolute power, with a strong hand behind the throne, works best. However, power that is absolute necessarily corrupts absolutely, it seems. How can one escape such corruption? That is the focus of Book 3 in the Stefan Szekely Trilogy.


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(C) Copyright 2010-2018 by Stephen M. Swartz. All Rights Reserved. No part of this blog, whether text or image, may be used without me giving you written permission, except for brief excerpts that are accompanied by a link to this entire blog. Violators shall be written into novels as characters who are killed off. Serious violators shall be identified and dealt with according to the laws of the United States of America.

On Sequel Addiction

Are you addicted to sequels? What's up with that? Sure, you liked the first book, so you have to get the next, right? And then there's another? Let me at it! And another? How many are there? Ok, how long do I need to keep up with these characters? I'm not sure I can just stop reading and forget them. So I must continue. These characters are part of my life now.

Fortunately there are plenty of trilogies around today. It seems to be the preferred format for books of science fiction, fantasy, and urban fantasy, especially if marketed to young readers. It has to do with marketing, I suppose: get the readers hooked and they will buy two more books. I always believed, apparently erroneously, that the trilogy is based on a good plot arc. Hence the story needed to be told across three books, regardless of the profits that might be made. 

Check out these trilogies. 

As a reader, I'm hesitant to commit to a multiple-book package. It's not the money, not the shelf space involved. It's the time and emotional expenditure involved. Usually I will read the first book and then go ahead and get the second book when I am sufficiently invested in the first book - after the first chapter, half-way through book 1, etc. If a novel has plenty of publicity, made into a TV series, I may get the whole set of books at once. (I did that with George R. R. Martin's Game of Thrones and Robert Jordan's Wheel of Time series yet I'm still in book 1.) 

As a writer, however, I was always dead-set on writing stand-alone books. But when the story, the world, the characters are still there at the end of book 1 calling to you...well, you have to return. Both times I've worked on a trilogy they started with one book which I expected to be it, the whole thing, one and done, enough said. Then, sometime later, with the story still bobbling back and forth in my head, unable to let it go, I sit myself down and begin book 2. Then book 3 usually follows quickly after book 2 because it will certainly be a trilogy. There are not many 2-book series.

I have written two trilogies. The second one was completed last night: book 3 of that trilogy.

The first was my sci-fi/steampunk interdimensional warhorse The Dream Land. Book 1 introduces the main characters and how they discover a doorway to another world and learn to function there, even to rise to prominent ranks and affect their new world. One returns home, however, and finds the situation intolerable. Thus, book 2 - what happens next? Inquiring minds wanted to know. 

In the case of this first book, it was going to be a stand-alone, but immediately upon finishing book 1, I had the idea where to go next. Then I got stuck in a plot conundrum after 50 pages and let it sit for what turned out to be ten years. Life and a lot of academic/ scholarly writing took over. It wasn't until a student of mine showed me his story on a similar theme as mine that I was reminded of the novel I'd left unfinished on my computer. I found that file, saw where I'd left off, and now that the plot conundrum had magically resolved itself in my head during the interim, I could continue. I knew what would happen in book 3 before I finished book 2. I started on a book 4 before I was finished with book 3. I knew I was addicted. I just could not stop living in this world, interacting with these people - er, umm, those characters. (I've left book 4 - just a few pages - to smolder a while and see if I want to write it.)

My second trilogy began as a stand-alone. I had said what I wanted to say in that book and believed the story done. With my daughter hooked on the Twilight series - during which her reading time really expanded! - I was determined to convince her of the truth of vampirism, about the medical conditions which led people to appear as vampires and who populated real reports that became the legends that prompted first Mr. Polidori then Mr. Stoker to pen their Gothic tales. A Dry Patch of Skin was my "medically accurate" vampire story, set in the same year I was writing it (2013-14) and, in part, in the same city where I was living and writing it. I made my point about vampires. My own doctor (who was also working on an MFA in creative writing) found no flaws in the medical side of the story. But what would happen next to my tragic hero? Gotcha.

The question nagged me through the writing of two other stand-alone novels.* Finally, I decided to see where the story might go. I started writing, just as a test. It had to be in the future since book 1 was set in my present. That turned book 2 into a sci-fi novel, which made it more interesting to me as a writer. At that point, I knew there would be a book 3 but I did not yet know what would happen in book 3. The main thing in starting the sequel was picking up the same character again but having him changed over the period of time between the books. The world had changed, too. Depicting that change was the fun part. You can read more about plot considerations on earlier blog posts here and here. All right, and here, too. You're welcome.

Now I have book 3 of this trilogy sitting on my doorstep (metaphor, not literally), the first complete draft literally finished last night. I still have that burst of electricity flashing through me, could hardly sleep, and still thinking about what I might have missed in the story that I need to address this morning. Plenty of time for revision, and editing, and proofreading, of course - and beta reading, and more tweaking, and looking for those five words in the manuscript that everybody but me will see are misspelled. I believe I have fulfilled the promise of a book 3: to give main characters their final arc, to wrap up plot points, to put a nice bow on the end of a three book experience. More on this book next time. For now, the experience of writing a trilogy is both rewarding and sad; we work hard to make things happen, like having our protagonist suffer, our antagonist delight in the suffering, a few jokes tossed here and there, some philosophy delivered by the serious character, a flash of eroticism, and voila! Trilogy. 

Then, almost too quickly it is done. And we have the emptiness in our guts as though someone close to us had died. We want that person back in our lives again. So we imagine it was so. And the sequel is born, the characters re-born, and all is well. A sequel has saved us. A trilogy will save us longer.


*A Girl Called Wolf, although a stand-alone, could be considered a sequel of my novel A Beautiful Chill (which was written first) because the main characters of the latter novel appear in the former novel.

After writing my quest novel Epic Fantasy *With Dragons, I felt compelled to continue the story despite having announced to everyone that I had said everything I needed to say about life and love, heroism, and the universe in that book. However, some of the characters wanted me to go on, so I started a sequel but it remains unfinished after about 75 pages.


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(C) Copyright 2010-2018 by Stephen M. Swartz. All Rights Reserved. No part of this blog, whether text or image, may be used without me giving you written permission, except for brief excerpts that are accompanied by a link to this entire blog. Violators shall be written into novels as characters who are killed off. Serious violators shall be identified and dealt with according to the laws of the United States of America.