Dave's Anatomy: My History As a Writer, #98: Writing About Vampires: "Jancinda"

Bella Lagassi as Dracula

I started writing vampire stories about the time the Twilight series was winding down. I did not follow the series. I read one of the book and, for all the criticism of the writing I did not think it was all that bad for a Young Adult novel; I saw the last film and, once more, didn’t think it was stupid or kitschy. In fact, I thought that the twist at the end (that the battle between the two armies of vampires did not really happen but was only virtual reality) was clever. The main thing about Twilight, though, was that it gave vampires a bad name. I saw submission guidelines that said “No Vampire Stories”; some would allow the genre but said “no sparkly vampires.” I had some ideas so came up with my breed of vampire tales. The first one I wrote and published was called “Jancinda,” the name of the female protagonist in the tale. She would become an on-going character.

Vampire literature has changed and developed since it began in early 1800s. The vampires of the earliest stories, The Vampyre by John William Polidori (1819) and Carmilla by Sheridan Le Fanu (1872) were quite different from Bram Stoker’s Dracula (1897). Later on, Anne Rice’s novels, such as Interview With a Vampire, changed the vampire “world.” Other writers, like Stephenie Meyer with Twilight, continued to develop and alter the nature of vampire literature. I added my contribution, small though it may be, with the series of stories about the vampire Jancinda Lamott.

Carmilla and Laura

Vampires started out as creatures of complete evil. Dracula was bad and nothing else; no redeeming qualities in him. Carmilla, the lesbian vampire in that novel that bears her name, only wants to satisfy her thirst for blood and her passion for a young human girl, Laura. But by the time of Anne Rice, 1976 and onward, vampires become more complex, conflicted, and multilayered. By the time of Buffy, the Vampire Slayer and The Vampire Diaries they are complex characters.

Jancinda Lamott

My character Jancinda crosses over to the world of vampirism one winter night when she is bitten by one of the undead named Julian. Of those bitten, all but one in three thousand die. Some, though, become vampires through this contact, and Jancinda is one of the few that does. When a vampire bites a person who will transform, he or she has the duty to care for them and introduce them to the world of the undying. Julian, however, has no such scruples and leaves Jancinda lying in the snow to die when the sun comes up. A woman named Bonita Perez senses her and takes her into her apartment. The vampire Bonita begins to teach Jancinda how to live the new life she has entered.

Jancinda is able to adapt but struggles with what has happened to her. She has to kill (my vampires only need blood once a month). She sometimes anguishes over the ethics of this. Once she asks a friend, “How can God let something like this happen to us and then hold us responsible for it?” She sets up an online business that does resumes, grant writing, and editing, and does quite well. And she maintains a relationship with a human boyfriend named Wesley.

Bonita

The story “Jancinda” is about this. Wesley is suddenly dumped by Jancinda, wonders why, and persistently asks her why. She will not return his calls. She will not answer his letters. One night, drunk, he goes to her apartment and pounds on the door, demanding entry. To his surprise she lets him in. After some obfuscation, she tells him the truth:  that she has become a vampire.  He is afraid, thinking she is deluded and might kill him in her delusion that she is one of the undead. She proves it to him by showing how she has no reflection. Then he is afraid she will kill him because she is not deluded and wants to get his blood.

Jancinda promises Wesley she will not harm him. He sympathizes. He knows vampires drink blood, but he does not know that being a vampire enhances and sharpens your sexual desire. Jancinda’s vampire nature takes over, and they fall into their old lovemaking routine. He describes Jancinda as passion seizes her:  As I ran my hands over her breasts and stomach and down past the waistband of her shorts, I became aware of changes. Her skin pulsated with bursts of heat—so much heat I thought it might burn my fingers. Her skin paled. Her eyes filled with a fiery, hungry look. I felt her hands run over my back. Her nails had changed to sharp talons. Kissing her and putting my tongue in her mouth, I felt the smooth, sharp spears of fangs.

But their lovemaking does not change things a lot. Wesley sees her from time to time, though she still will not date him. When he runs into her and she is with her vampire friends, it makes him uneasy. They eye him like he’s a very attractive piece of meat they would love to wrap up, carry home, and dine upon.

Later, though, he gets a desperate phone call from Jancinda. She has been in an automobile accident that jammed the doors of her car shut. The police and a crowd of people are there, so can’t use her vampire super-strength to break the doors or transform to a bat and fly away. She asks him to come. He arrives just before dawn. The police say she can go. Hardly able to breathe because the sunrise is upon them, she wraps up in a sun-proof blanket, Wesley secures her in the trunk of his car and delivers her to a “safe house” where she will be shielded from light.

His act of valor makes Jancinda see why she loved him when she was mortal. They begin their relationship once more. Jancinda says she will accommodate him and tell the other vampires to leave him alone. Neither of them know where the relationship will go, but they intend to maintain it. More stories about the vampire Jancinda Lamott would follow.

“Jancinda" appeared in the anthology Bite from the Heart, available on Amazon. Get a copy here. 

If vampire stories are your thing, check out my novella, Sinfonia:  The First Notes on the Lute, A Vampire Chronicle, Part I, available here.

I would love to hear your comments.

Happy reading.

Dave's Anatomy: My History As a Writer, #36: First Vampire Tale, "Prima Noctis"

Actor Jack Palance as Dracula

 Vampires are always a fascination. They become popular and then people get tired of the films and books. In the 1930s you had the Dracula films. They faded after a while. Then, years later, Twilight came along. Despite its immense popularity, especially with the young, a lot of writers hooted and jeered both at the films and at the books. (I only saw one of the films and read one of the books and thought they were, really, not that bad.) But vampires bounce back. Not surprising, since they are the undead! You can't kill vampires, and the genre seems undying as well!

One of Buffy's many vampire enemies

At that time in my writing career I had not done a vampire story. I decided to give it a shot, maybe because Buffy was still on TV and Twilight was all the rage and because of the fascination vampires pose. For example, what would it be like to live forever if the prices of doing so was to kill people so you could renew your eternal life? A vampire character in one of my later stories laments to her mortal boyfriend, "How can God let something like this [becoming a vampire] happen to us and then hold us responsible for it?" Maybe this is a question we ask whether we believe in divinity or not. How can we be morally responsible when we weren't asked to be born, don't understand why we do unethical things, and feel we're doing wrong but can't help it? These questions are perpetual. Maybe that's why the vampire myth is so popular. They cope with these questions as a point of their very existence.

And there is the question of ethics. Are vampires completely evil? The old ones, like Dracula, were. They were evil creatures driven by a desire for blood and had no good traits whatsoever. The novel Dracula and my favorite vampire movies, Taste the Blood of Dracula and the made-for-TV movie of Dracula with Jack Palance playing the lead role, presented this sort of vampire:  evil, driven, with no redeeming virtues whatsoever. But soon Ann Rice's Interview With a Vampire came along and we saw conflicted, anguished, morally ambiguous but not evil vampires. The same was true for some of the characters in Buffy. These things play into my first vampire story, "Prima Noctis."

Heston in The War Lord

Prima Noctis means "first night" and refers to the idea that a nobleman in medieval times had the right to take a peasant girl's virginity to "begin her life." This custom is essential to the plot of an old movie called The War Lord with Charlton Heston; if you saw Braveheart, it is a part of that film as well. Now, I must play myth-buster here. Prima noctis is completely fictitious. Never happened, not in the Middle Ages or anytime. It is something modern people made up. Ancient kings used to accuse other kings of it, usually to get their people up in arms and on their side when an invasion threatened them:  "If these people conquer us, they will take your virgin daughters on their wedding night!" they would say. But it was an untruth. Still, it makes for good stories.

  

In my story, an English noble named Berwyk rules an area of Scotland and has instituted prima noctis. The Scots respond by not getting married. After three years with no weddings, however, the people tell them there will be a marriage and he will take his privilege. They have a great feast. The young people are married, but Berwyk notices a lot of the Scots are wearing necklaces of garlic (a local custom he had not noticed, he thinks). And the married couple look a bit a pale, as if they had not been out in the sun. The wedding takes place at moonrise. His servant-woman/mistress warns him about the Scots:  “They have one foot in the world and one in the kingdom of darkness. They dance with the dead and kiss the very Devil’s ass.” Berwyk laughs at her

When he takes the woman up to his chamber, he quickly finds out she is a vampire. She bears her fangs and, he sees, her vampire bridegroom has gotten into the house and killed and feasted on the blood of Amaryllis, the serving woman who tried to warn him. The Scots have set him up.

Berwyk knows about vampires and flees to his room, where he has, on the wall, a crucifix and a picture of the Virgin. Vampires will flee from the cross and from other holy objects. To his horror, those items are gone from his bed chamber where he hoped to enjoy the body of the woman married that day. The Scots have sneaked into his room and removed them, leaving him at the mercy of the vampire couple. He fights them, but his weapons are useless. The bride he had hoped to "swyve" ends up not with hymeneal blood on her body but with his as she kills him and drains his vital life. Prima noctis turns out to be something the English knight never dreamed it would be.

Ethics come into play in this story. Vampires are evil, but in this case they are doing good by serving as the instruments of justice. Are right and wrong so easy to define? Vampire tales, at least the newer ones, suggest they are not. In the yin and yang of the universe, there is a bit of evil in good and a bit of good in evil.

The story appeared in a journal called Infinite Windows, closed down now, with no archive.

If you want to read one of my vampire stories, I would suggest The Angel from the Dead from the (also shut down) journal Roar and Thunder. This journal maintains an archive and you can read the story there. I'll have a new vampire novel, Sinfonia:  First Notes on the Lute, coming out next year.

For a Christmas stocking stuffer I would suggest ShadowCity. A dark world, an unwilling savior, an old lover who follows her in and gets caught up in unbelievable danger, and a maenad who is a slave fight the darkness, which has grown to dangerous levels. In a dark world, the light within is all you have. 

 For additional titles, see 

my Writer's Page. 

Dave's Anatomy: My History As a Writer #31: "Wolf Moon," Writing About Werewolves

If you write paranormal fiction, you will eventually deal with werewolves. Some really high-up people wrote about them. Rudyard Kipling had a story called "The Mark of the Beast," where a British guy defiles a Hindu temple and turns into a werewolf; but the other British guys torture the priest and he turns the guy back to a human. Great colonial story! Frank Norris, a socialist writer from the turn of the century wrote a story called Vandover and the Brute, about a businessman who periodically turns into a werewolf. So some major players in the world of literature took the genre on.

For me, it was movies starring Lon Chaney:  The Wolfman, Frankenstein Meets the Wolfman, Abbot and Costello Meet the Monsters. Later came The Howling and, of course, that classic, An American Werewolf in London. Maybe the best one of them all was the 1957 film, I Was a Teenage Werewolf starring Michael Landon. I had never tried to write anything but then the idea for a mixed genre story came to mind and I started composing "Wolf Moon."

Michael Landon as a teenage werewolf

Werewolves, like vampires, are tormented by what has happened to them. They don’t' want to be caught up in a life that turns them into a monster, but they don't know how to get out of the situation. So they are lost, tormented souls who are very nice guys sometimes, but when the full moon emerges, watch out. There's a scene in Abbot and Costello Meet the Monsters where Bud is tied up by Dracula. Lawrence Tabot shows up to rescue him, but just then the full moon comes out from behind a cloud and he transforms scene. Bud is okay and at the end of the film Talbot the wolfman plunges into a lake after getting his vengeful hands on Dracula, who has just transformed to a bat.

"Wolf Moon" is the story of a group of alien slavers who capture some Terrans living on a remote planet. The captain of the ship is a little puzzled over them. They are the only humanoid inhabitants of the planet. They live in small houses and have modern accommodations but no communication equipment and supplies that look like they have been dropped off by a government or other agency. There are many more men than women.

The crew of the ship wants a woman and he gives them one. They plan to take her to a house on the planet they have landed on to refuel. The full moon on the wintry world makes the night bright, but the minute the crew of three drags the woman outside, she rips them apart and disappears into the frigid landscape.

The planet is part of the Italian League. In my sci-fi universe, there are still nation states on Earth and some of them maintain colonies. Italy is one of these. The Italians tell the slavers they need to leave at once, threaten to kill them if they won't and tell them the Terrans are werewolves. The captain doesn't understand the word, though he recognizes the word "wolf" in the compound. When he comes back on board, the other Terrans have escaped. They send him out to find the woman, saying they can't go out in the moonlight themselves. When he asks if this is a religious restriction they laugh at him. He finds the woman in a cave. She attacks him and tackles and scratches him before he is able to stun her with a blaster.

He wraps the naked woman in his coat and carries her back to the ship, wondering how she has survived the cold and wondering why, when he first saw her, she looked like a bear or some other upright-standing animal. The other Terrans care for her. Their leader tells him he will be required to take them back to their home planet. They also notice a scratch on his neck.

The captain is a Housali, a race with blue skin. The physician among them wondered if he will transform, but their leader reminds her that some of their numbers are not Terrans but come from other planets. She wonders if he'll have blue fur and starts to clean his wound. The ship is sealed up so no moonlight can get inside, but the Housali feels a wild stirring in his blood—something savage he had never felt before. He knows it lies outside, waiting for him, something frightening but also oddly appealing.

The journal in which this story was published is defunct. It does not have an archive. I've been marketing it to other journals, but with no success so far. 

A scary non-werewolf tale, Le Cafe de la Mort, 

is available from Amazon. 

 See more titles on my Writer's Page.

I would love to hear your comments!

What's your favorite werewolf movie?

Where did the legend originate?

Werewolf is from Anglo-Saxon, but the legend goes all the way back to the ancient Greeks. 

Revision note!  A journal called Grey Matter will be printing "Wolf Moon" in the near future.