Vampires and Pop Culture

When I started writing Vampirism and You! it was a direct response to what I was seeing in vampire teen fiction. It wasn't just the sparkling, it was also a real lack of vampires that behaved as I thought vampires should behave.

Forgive me, I'm a purist, my first love was Bram Stoker's Dracula. A book I assigned myself way back in high school for an English project which had a book list sadly lacking in classic literature.

Writing the first draft of this I had in mind, "What would it be like to be a teenager vampire in our society?" I thought about the influences of pop culture a lot. My own childhood was defined by vampire pop culture. Buffy, Angel, the sneak-reading of Anne Rice when she was sane and then as I got older there was Moonlight and Castlevania and so much more.

So there are a lot of references in this little book. To some well known and some not so well known, media vampires. Some references are subtle, some are not. Some references may only be for immortals and not vampires.

Of course, when you do use pop culture as a starting point, there is every chance that something you write will become dated quickly. That's one of things, however, that I like about writing vampires. They are dated. They always will be. Vampires are, by their nature, stuck in a point in time. In Dracula, that made the villain a tragic figure. I wanted more humor than tragic in this iteration, but there is a thread of it here.

There should always be something dark in comedy, for me anyhow, to make it more plausible.

And now I must go, because a cat is trying to sit on my hands.

Cheers, and happy reading!

- MIssouri