The Beard Problem

As you may know, I am deep in the revision of my latest novel, the concluding volume of my vampire trilogy, ostensibly based on medically accurate and historical accountability. Like many writers do, I go through a manuscript in waves, focusing on different issues in each pass. In a later chapter, I realized I had made a dreadful mistake: I had failed to account for the beard. 

It is the future and the beard and cassock look has returned, at least in the Hungarian Empire of 2101. The chief prosecutor wears a red cassock and red skullcap in his duties in the High Court of Justice - and sports a long gray beard. So far, so good. However, later, when he has a prisoner in his quarters (the illegality of this situation is another story, obviously), nothing happens with his beard. I was shocked. Shocked, I tell you!

A long beard - which I've never had personally - will get in the way of many things. While dining, it gets in the food - unless I write a sentence mentioning how "he swept his beard aside". The beard would be stained with blood if he took a bite as any good vampire likely would. Crumbs would collect. These need to be accounted for. The only two fellows I've known who wore long beards (defined as hanging lower than the chin by an inch or more) have described these problems.

Then comes the seduction following the dinner. It is not meant to be an innocent affair. However, the beard again gets in the way. Hanging from the chin and cheeks, a beard would touch the other person when in close proximity, right? The beard would tickle at best, would scratch at worst. Probably it would be an unpleasant experience for the other person. Especially if the beard were soiled by various food dishes from the dinner. The other person would be quite distraught for that reason alone. 

It seems a lot of the male characters sport beards in this volume. Was his black or gray? Black with streaks of gray? And how long was it? Trimmed or unruly? Does he tend to give it a tug from time to time? Does it get caught in zippers? It really becomes a problem keeping track of all these different beard issues. It adds to the word count just by describing how he takes care of the beard in each scene. Next time I shall definitely make every guy clean-shaven. 

The problem exists also for women's hair styles. Does she wear her hair up in this scene? Is it up for the entire scene, or does it fall at some point, especially during the fight? Not being a hair stylist by any stretch of the imagination, I pay little attention to hair styles.Yes, I see the character in my mind's eye but somehow little of that image gets on the page. Long, straight hair, like my 7th grade girlfriend had, or flowing, wavy hair like a girlfriend in college had. Or the curly hair I've seen in a lot of shampoo commercials - that's the limit of my choices, it seems. I prefer to get on with the story.

Men's hair, too, may change with the physical action. If there is a ceremony, the well-coiffed might be more formally arranged, I imagine. For battle, perhaps a close-cut style to fit under a helmet. For an emperor, his long, flowing mane might add to his aura of masculinity. Long hair with a long beard suggests otherworldliness, a true warrior-king. It all depends on what you want as the author.  

And I'm not even going to get into clothing fashions. One thing that I appreciate with George R. R. Martin's Game of Thrones novels is his attention to details when it comes to what the characters are wearing. It almost becomes too much at times, but I still like that he went to the trouble to do it. That leads me to check once more whether her evening gown is black with red trim or violet with white trim. What is the dress material? Does it crinkle or swish as she walks? And when the dress is torn off, how does the maid know to have replacement clothing nearby? Perhaps, it's time for yet another pass through the manuscript.

And yet, for a vampire novel, it seems that the clean-shaven look is more appropriate. Men struck with the curse of vampirism tend to lose their hair much as a cancer patient on chemotherapy loses hair. For that matter, females would become hairless, too, for the same reason (based on my medical research into porphyria). Therefore, the typical depiction of the famous Count Dracula (played by Bela Lugosi) below would be inaccurate. Hair on the head but no facial hair would seem to be a fashion choice, not the result of any biological abnormality. Check your sources. Check the continuity and consistency of your details is today's lesson. After all, it's a salon out there!

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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.

The Wonderful World of Projection

In the world of science fiction writers there is the trope of the present reality being projected into the future. Take what is happening now and extrapolate how it might develop logically ten or twenty or a hundred years in the future. H.G. Wells did this with The Time Machine, speculating how humanity would divide into Eloi (dumb surface dwelling cattle) and Morlocks (hideous underground consumers of Eloi). Writers of both utopias and dystopias have done the same thing, as far back as Plato and The Republic. Why?

Perhaps it is a desire to assure ourselves, in the case of the utopia, that good times are coming, or, in the case of the dystopia, that our lives could be far worse than they are now. In fiction, when writers try to predict the future (in my experience as a reader), there are two ways: 1) leap far ahead in time so that nothing of today remains and there is no need to consider a timeline of progression of social, political, technological development. Or, 2) start with the way things are today and project them into the future in a logical way. The former works well if the story is set, say, ten thousand years in the future; the latter works best for a 20 or 100 year setting advancement. The point in this latter method, I believe, is expressly to show how today will become tomorrow.

So I've tried that method with my so-called medically accurate vampire trilogy. My point then was to expressly illustrate the medical aspects of vampirism. Book 1 starts in 2013-14, the same time period in which I was writing it. In previous blog posts I explained how I took the issues of today and projected them 13 years into the future for Book 2. In Book 3, we go to 2099 - not a huge leap in time but a significant chunk to deal with in terms of showing the changes that are possible. So a Book 1 which was grounded in science had to stretch a bit for Book 2, and now Book 3 is allowed to speculate much further and by necessity introduce some good ol' sci-fi (i.e., "speculation based on science"). 

And then there are the usual vampire tropes, or features, readers expect to see in vampire novels. There is a lot of blood, of course, lots of throat biting, lusting for blood, blood starvation, hibernation, etc. There is the trope of vampires being associated with bats - when the "vampire bat" was named after the fictional character and lives far away from Transylvania. There is the attempted explanation of the origin of vampires, of the legends which circumscribe the phenomena. There have been glittering vampires and those who have become hideously disfigured. There have been alternate histories written based on vampires rising to power in real places. In the genre it seems there is a vampire style for every reader. And we can enjoy them all.

I chose from the start to take the "disease" seriously, a genetic disorder which runs in families - which fits many of the ancient reports of vampire-like people (research!). There is also a curious correlation with the ethnic group residing in the isolated tracks of Transylvania, an area settled by large numbers of Hungarians, and that is the propensity to have Type AB blood - so rare that only 5% of people in the world have it. (Read Book 1 of the Stefan Szekely Trilogy for an explanation of how their blood type can change back and forth - and with the change comes physical abnormalities.) 

Then there is the projection: what is now becomes what will be. For example, take politics. Nationalism seems on the rise in the United States and in Europe, a backlash against recent government policies and the results of those policies. Regardless of how you may feel personally about such matters, for the sake of the story - the sake of a good, realistic, plausible story - let us say that trend continues. We then would find nations breaking out of the European Union and going their own way. Geographic and political pressures may force the breakaway nations to ban together. Project a little further and that group becomes an empire. 

Take another example: technology. We love our social media so much today but already we are seeing problems with data collection and misuse, with identity theft, with other internet-related commerce such as cryptocurrency. It would not take much for that grid to come crashing down. An electromagnetic pulse in the atmosphere would wipe out all electronic systems for miles around, crippling banking and utilities. Back to the pre-electronic age we go. In another way, social pressures could result in rebellion against such systems, or a government might ban the internet (already being limited to citizens in several countries today). It is easy to imagine - to project from today - a society where the modern, the electronic, the technological has been rejected. People would go about by horse and carriage again instead of electric cars. But I digress . . . 

"In the multiverse all possibilities can be projected simultaneously."

It makes for interesting thought experiments. The what-if scenarios are played out. The thinking goes that by projecting a situation into the future, we can see where problems today exist and repair them so the "awful" future that could happen will not happen. Projection of happier times and a more pleasant world, even a paradise of free love and ice cream for everyone, is also a scenario which may have dire consequences. For example, everyone is so comfortable that nobody works, nothing gets done, society falls apart, blame ensues, people form blocs and fight against each other, thus transforming a utopia into a dystopia within a generation. Or is that just me observing our world today? 

As one great writer reportedly said, "Every work of literature [regardless of its setting's time and place] is a reflection of the author's [present] situation."


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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.