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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