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| The Vampire Jancinda Lamott |
Vampire stories became simultaneously popular in
unpopular with the publication of the Twilight
series. Lots of people wanted to read about vampires and were interested in the
genre that has been popular since Lord Byron's buddie William Polidori wrote The Vampyre in 1819. Bram Stoker's
Dracula established the genre and it has been popular in print and film ever
since then. Twilight renewed interest
in the genre. But there was anti-vampire reaction. The vampires of Twilight were different: they sparkled when they came out in the light
and they were hip, cool people, not the traditional vampires of old legend.
People began to scoff and sneer at this development. I remember encountering
"no vampire stories" when I would check the guidelines of journals;
or, sometimes, "no sparkly vampires." But I wrote some stories anyway,
created an ongoing vampire character named Jancinda Lamott and published
several stories about her, the one I will discuss here included. (By the way, I
am currently writing a new series about a vampire named Nelleke Reitsma—Sinfonia:
The First Notes on the Lute is book one in the series. Order a copy
here.)
The first story I published about Jancinda was a
funny one called "The After-Hours Dating Service." Jancinda crosses
over—the term vampires in her world use to denote the transformation from human
to one of the undying—and manages to make adjustment pretty well. A friend
teaches her to hunt. She owns an online business, an editing service, and is
able to earn a good living and not go out in the day, so the money is not a
problem. But there is one big problem:
she can't meet guys.
There are vampire men, but not many, and a lot of
them are taken. One night at a bar with some vampire friends she laments her
situation. She asks an experienced vampire woman, Celia Campion, who has lived
the vampire life since 1632, if she has had trouble finding dates:
“I’ve been in a
couple of long-term relationships—very long term, I might add.”
“Not me. I can’t
find a date to save me. I use the internet a lot with my job, and every search engine I track data on has a
dating service. I can’t help looking at them. I wish there was one for”—she hesitated, not liking to say the
word, but then finished her sentence—“vampires.”
Celia Campion
leaned in closer to her.
“Child, what
makes you so certain there isn’t such a thing?”
Celia
provides her with a web address for a vampire dating site. It is called The
After-Hours Dating Service. Jancinda looks at profiles and arranges to meet a
vampire man whose writes a fascinating description of himself.
The
first man she meets is Constantine—Constantine Quintus Horatius Dominicus
Maximus—who has lived since the days of Julius Caesar. She likes him, they hit
it off and, in keeping with vampire habits of sexuality, soon become intimate.
She learns his story. After a while, though, his melancholy bothers her. She
finds out he has not gotten over the death of woman named Neria. Though she
likes him, she is still restless and seeks out the company of another man, one
named Deronda.
Deronda
is handsome, dresses in Victorian clothing, and always shows his fangs. Knowing
fangs emerge only when vampires hunt or are in danger, she asks him about them.
He tells her there are ways to make them stay out all the time. He takes her to
Goth bars, they hunt together, but after a while his dress and manner annoy
her. When he wants her to dress up in a Victorian gown and chase her with a
riding crop, Jancinda draws the line and goes back to the dating service.
She
meets a Renaissance man called Aquinas and eventually finds out he belonged to
the Borgia family, though he was not one of the major players in that rather
infamous clan. He is religious as well and likes to go to church when he can,
at night and in winter when the days are short. This annoys her. He has spoken
to Calvin, Giovanni had talked with John Calvin, Melanchthon, Menno Simons,
Ignatius of Loyola, Elizabeth Ann Seton, and Karl
Barthes in attempts to come to grips with the religious questions connected
with being a vampire.
Once
he and Jancinda are out and are surrounded by vampire hunters who have been
tracking Aquinas. They have magic to paralyze the couple while they get the
stakes read. Jancinda manages to transform to a wolf and kills the hunters so
the others flee. Rather than being thankful, Aquinas begins to treat her with
coolness. She finds out her actions interdicted his ideal of what a woman
should be like: distant, pure, and other,
like an angel. They split up after an angry quarrel in public. Jancinda is back
to square one. She decides to call up Constantine. And, when she checks the
dating service page, she has forty-three inquires. She smiles. Whatever her
difficulties, the problem of not being able to find a date is at an end.
"The
After-Hours Dating Service appeared in an anthology Mon Coeur Mort published by
Press. It is still available and you can get a copy.
Stories about Jancinda Lamott appeared in several anthologies and magazines. I will be writing more about her in the future.
And, to underscore, my latest vampire book, about a vampire who is a lutenist and classical guitarist who knew, in her time, Shakespeare and Queen Elizabeth, Sinfonia: the First Notes on the Lute, is available from Amazon. Get a copy here.
For more titles, check out my Writer's Page.
I would love to hear your comments.
Happy reading.
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