It’s been a very long time since I last posted or blogged about anything. I’ve been convalescing at home from a recent surgery, and while I’m waiting and waiting… and waiting to fully heal, I’ve decided during my hiatus to write a sequel to one of my other vampire novels. I was reading through one of my novels on my kindle (something I just found the time to do) and caught a scene that didn’t quite make sense. Ah, but in my mind’s eye where the fictional movie plays out like a well scripted action sequence doesn’t appear that way when I read it on my kindle… so is it back to the drawing board? Or… will I just leave the scene remain as it reads for the present time, then decide to go back in at a much later date to add in some more descriptive detail? I do plan to just at some point. I was also skimming through my other short story about an angel… and yep, caught an “AE” fused together in the return paragraphs version of my short story.
For the life of me how did an “AE” begin at one of my sentences, and then I noticed I made a goof in some dialog. Well, darn it. Really… sometimes my brain and thought process fires off plot lines faster than my fingers can type. What I visualize in my mind’s eye won’t be what grabs the readers attention. In fact, I had noticed a few scenes throughout Abide with Me that could use a little more explanation how the characters arrived on the scene so… eh, unexpectedly. However, I have a bad habit of typing first, revising, going back through the whole story from start to finish to add in either more dialog or try to refine a situation or setting.
I see that my editing skills need some fine-tuning as well. I’m not the greatest editor out there, but I simply don’t trust my precious labors of love to just anyone. I like to take control of everything I write and self-publish, which could be the reason why I’m just now getting around to reformatting a cover to another short story of mine so it can be included into a premium catalog and auto vetter errors run rampant more so than my evil characters.
Yes, I did take Graphic Software Applications (that’s working with designs and images in Adobe CS6, etc.), however, for the life of me, I still struggle with formatting a book cover to fit exact specifications in pixels.
I will resolve the needed corrections. When the urge to write strikes, I find it helps to write and keep a notebook handy to jot down and form a plot, characters, situations and go from there. How long will this current sequel be in word length? At least as long as my first vampire novel, I hope. I have it in my mind the way I want this sequel to open up and since the readers will hopefully be familiar with the mainstay protagonists in my vampire novel, I can focus less on the little details and go straight for the action, suspense, etc.
Don’t expect anything over-the-top explicit with sexual content in this next sequel. Nothing will kill off a potential enticing situation than having to wade through a sex scene that’s no different from when a mortal couple go to bed... unless, say for example, they can hang upside down for a duration of time and not be effected by their blood rushing to their heads. Even that strange sexual position is too complicated for me to take from how I visualize it in my mind and then try and write it so it flows. Why the acrobatic contortionists? Who knows. It was just an idea.
Sometimes in the first novel the bad guy can be maimed, blown to bits, chopped, sliced and diced… and they still manage to crawl out of the depths of the blackest pit or return from another worldly realm of time and space. After reading through most of my vampire novel on my kindle last night I came up with several good angles to possibly use, expand upon and develop. Will the bad guy ever actually get killed off for good? Well, you’ll have to read the novel when it’s published. And just what genre will this sequel fall under? Well, hopefully I will steer as far away as possible from this new cookie cutter vampire romance trend that’s sucking in (no pun intended) the Tweens/ early Twenty crowds.
I never see any of my vampire protagonists being lumped into a category for teenagers and I hope my aim was geared away from this “Twilight” driven era where all vampires *sparkle* and shimmer, and go out in broad daylight, not have a need to sleep, take up cooking, continually attend high school and graduate for eternity with a new mortal crowd that have this mindset of, “Oh, look… the clouds are as depressing as the mood I’m in right now,”
One thing I have noticed about vampire movies and books nowadays is this trend to change the stereotypical concepts of what we once were exposed to. Maybe they're dredged up from the vaults of time when vampires were once depicted as being these evil, suave, tall dark and handsome forbidden creatures of the night. The literary vampire was drawn from actual historic accounts of Vlad the Impaler, etc. While the cinematic counterpart blended with movie magic, and again, some elements of danger and unspeakable evil resonated in their onscreen persona.
But in this twenty-first century, high tech gizmo and cell phone addicted world, the fictional and literary vampires are getting a complete makeover. For instance, The Lost Boys from 1987. I was both horrified and awed by the contact lenses, fang caps, make up and other special effects. Perhaps some [then] brand new state-of-the-art computer graphics went into creating some physically demanding stunts when two actors need to fly at each other and fight. But what I didn’t see in The Lost Boys movie were teenagers saying their lines with little emotion or always crying like what I forced myself to watch with Twilight.
What depressed me about Twilight: long gone are the mainstays of crucifixes, garlic, and old-fashioned folklore. I realize to commercialize on this new tween genre and make off like a bandit in the process, movie directors and authors who see their books flash on the big screen probably toss out all the re-hashed, stale mainstays that can kill a vampire… that’s just so… Eighteen-hundreds ass-backwards Bram Stoker, Victorian era rubbish that no teenager alive today would want to crack open a dusty old novel and not find one sex scene or even understand what ideas, situations and other mortal woes Victorian era society grappled with.
Dracula in Bram Stoker’s book represented all things forbidden to women of the era. Dracula is essentially a very evil, yet charming character. A man who would move in, then strange attacks and ailments afflict the mortals around him. Victorian era women were raised to be subservient and obedient housewives that seldom, if ever, were allowed to speak their minds at the dinner table, engage in politics which was taboo back in the day for them to discuss, and hardly ever worked out of the home unless extremely impoverished. The Victorian era woman relied heavily on her husband to bring home money, furnish her with a large house and she would raise either one or two children, at most. The poor Victorian woman of this era… totally different scenario completely. Usually if she had a child (or many) out of wedlock, she was either sent away to a home for unwed mothers or made to live in secrecy and society shunned her actions regardless if she willingly or unwittingly knew what wrong she committed. How does Dracula play into this? He embodied all that was forbidden, dangerous, evil, immoral, immortal and seductive. Hence, prosititution, gambling, drinking, smoking... common things nowadays. Back then, if a woman smoked, drank, and was promiscuous, this was absurd.
Nowadays the vampires sparkle with glitter like on Twilight. The vampires on screen take on a more demonic facial appearance that is in no way remotely attractive in my eyes. Okay, maybe the likes of a suave, handsome and *mature* Bela Lugosi type just won’t cut it in this twenty-first century. Perhaps even my vampire protagonists in both of my vampire novels are bland in appearance to the average reader. But this is where I decided I wanted to put an end to all the demonic facial features that I so often see in the movies. I seen it re-used so often in the modern cinematic vampire made post- early 1990s that it makes me roll my eyes and shut off the movie.
Why the enormous demand to distort the vampire’s facial features anyway?
I must remind myself; “It’s just a movie and these vampires aren’t supposed to be physically attractive when they show their true colors.” I mean, okay… maybe some women out there will fall head over heels for this certain “demonic” distorted facial expression. The wild contact lenses and fang caps are fine. That sets the vampire apart from looking too mundane like that of their mortal counterparts.
I stuck with the common “over-used” classic depiction of the vampire in my novels and tried to refrain from making their facial features distorted until it appears they might suffer from some undiscovered facial swelling disease that would require repeated trips to a dermatologist. I know I’m straying off topic from my original post about writing a sequel, but at least it still relates to what I plan to write about.
For the life of me how did an “AE” begin at one of my sentences, and then I noticed I made a goof in some dialog. Well, darn it. Really… sometimes my brain and thought process fires off plot lines faster than my fingers can type. What I visualize in my mind’s eye won’t be what grabs the readers attention. In fact, I had noticed a few scenes throughout Abide with Me that could use a little more explanation how the characters arrived on the scene so… eh, unexpectedly. However, I have a bad habit of typing first, revising, going back through the whole story from start to finish to add in either more dialog or try to refine a situation or setting.
I see that my editing skills need some fine-tuning as well. I’m not the greatest editor out there, but I simply don’t trust my precious labors of love to just anyone. I like to take control of everything I write and self-publish, which could be the reason why I’m just now getting around to reformatting a cover to another short story of mine so it can be included into a premium catalog and auto vetter errors run rampant more so than my evil characters.
Yes, I did take Graphic Software Applications (that’s working with designs and images in Adobe CS6, etc.), however, for the life of me, I still struggle with formatting a book cover to fit exact specifications in pixels.
I will resolve the needed corrections. When the urge to write strikes, I find it helps to write and keep a notebook handy to jot down and form a plot, characters, situations and go from there. How long will this current sequel be in word length? At least as long as my first vampire novel, I hope. I have it in my mind the way I want this sequel to open up and since the readers will hopefully be familiar with the mainstay protagonists in my vampire novel, I can focus less on the little details and go straight for the action, suspense, etc.
Don’t expect anything over-the-top explicit with sexual content in this next sequel. Nothing will kill off a potential enticing situation than having to wade through a sex scene that’s no different from when a mortal couple go to bed... unless, say for example, they can hang upside down for a duration of time and not be effected by their blood rushing to their heads. Even that strange sexual position is too complicated for me to take from how I visualize it in my mind and then try and write it so it flows. Why the acrobatic contortionists? Who knows. It was just an idea.
Sometimes in the first novel the bad guy can be maimed, blown to bits, chopped, sliced and diced… and they still manage to crawl out of the depths of the blackest pit or return from another worldly realm of time and space. After reading through most of my vampire novel on my kindle last night I came up with several good angles to possibly use, expand upon and develop. Will the bad guy ever actually get killed off for good? Well, you’ll have to read the novel when it’s published. And just what genre will this sequel fall under? Well, hopefully I will steer as far away as possible from this new cookie cutter vampire romance trend that’s sucking in (no pun intended) the Tweens/ early Twenty crowds.
I never see any of my vampire protagonists being lumped into a category for teenagers and I hope my aim was geared away from this “Twilight” driven era where all vampires *sparkle* and shimmer, and go out in broad daylight, not have a need to sleep, take up cooking, continually attend high school and graduate for eternity with a new mortal crowd that have this mindset of, “Oh, look… the clouds are as depressing as the mood I’m in right now,”
One thing I have noticed about vampire movies and books nowadays is this trend to change the stereotypical concepts of what we once were exposed to. Maybe they're dredged up from the vaults of time when vampires were once depicted as being these evil, suave, tall dark and handsome forbidden creatures of the night. The literary vampire was drawn from actual historic accounts of Vlad the Impaler, etc. While the cinematic counterpart blended with movie magic, and again, some elements of danger and unspeakable evil resonated in their onscreen persona.
But in this twenty-first century, high tech gizmo and cell phone addicted world, the fictional and literary vampires are getting a complete makeover. For instance, The Lost Boys from 1987. I was both horrified and awed by the contact lenses, fang caps, make up and other special effects. Perhaps some [then] brand new state-of-the-art computer graphics went into creating some physically demanding stunts when two actors need to fly at each other and fight. But what I didn’t see in The Lost Boys movie were teenagers saying their lines with little emotion or always crying like what I forced myself to watch with Twilight.
What depressed me about Twilight: long gone are the mainstays of crucifixes, garlic, and old-fashioned folklore. I realize to commercialize on this new tween genre and make off like a bandit in the process, movie directors and authors who see their books flash on the big screen probably toss out all the re-hashed, stale mainstays that can kill a vampire… that’s just so… Eighteen-hundreds ass-backwards Bram Stoker, Victorian era rubbish that no teenager alive today would want to crack open a dusty old novel and not find one sex scene or even understand what ideas, situations and other mortal woes Victorian era society grappled with.
Dracula in Bram Stoker’s book represented all things forbidden to women of the era. Dracula is essentially a very evil, yet charming character. A man who would move in, then strange attacks and ailments afflict the mortals around him. Victorian era women were raised to be subservient and obedient housewives that seldom, if ever, were allowed to speak their minds at the dinner table, engage in politics which was taboo back in the day for them to discuss, and hardly ever worked out of the home unless extremely impoverished. The Victorian era woman relied heavily on her husband to bring home money, furnish her with a large house and she would raise either one or two children, at most. The poor Victorian woman of this era… totally different scenario completely. Usually if she had a child (or many) out of wedlock, she was either sent away to a home for unwed mothers or made to live in secrecy and society shunned her actions regardless if she willingly or unwittingly knew what wrong she committed. How does Dracula play into this? He embodied all that was forbidden, dangerous, evil, immoral, immortal and seductive. Hence, prosititution, gambling, drinking, smoking... common things nowadays. Back then, if a woman smoked, drank, and was promiscuous, this was absurd.
Nowadays the vampires sparkle with glitter like on Twilight. The vampires on screen take on a more demonic facial appearance that is in no way remotely attractive in my eyes. Okay, maybe the likes of a suave, handsome and *mature* Bela Lugosi type just won’t cut it in this twenty-first century. Perhaps even my vampire protagonists in both of my vampire novels are bland in appearance to the average reader. But this is where I decided I wanted to put an end to all the demonic facial features that I so often see in the movies. I seen it re-used so often in the modern cinematic vampire made post- early 1990s that it makes me roll my eyes and shut off the movie.
Why the enormous demand to distort the vampire’s facial features anyway?
I must remind myself; “It’s just a movie and these vampires aren’t supposed to be physically attractive when they show their true colors.” I mean, okay… maybe some women out there will fall head over heels for this certain “demonic” distorted facial expression. The wild contact lenses and fang caps are fine. That sets the vampire apart from looking too mundane like that of their mortal counterparts.
I stuck with the common “over-used” classic depiction of the vampire in my novels and tried to refrain from making their facial features distorted until it appears they might suffer from some undiscovered facial swelling disease that would require repeated trips to a dermatologist. I know I’m straying off topic from my original post about writing a sequel, but at least it still relates to what I plan to write about.