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, #96. Writing from Long-Held Questions: “The Slave Girl and the Angel Israfel.”

I had always been intrigued by the quotation Edgar Alan Poe uses as an epigraph for his poem, “Israfel.”  It is this:  And the angel Israfel, whose heart-strings are a lute, and who has the sweetest voice of all God’s creatures. —KORAN.” I got a copy of Poe’s works for Christmas when I was age thirteen, but I didn’t examine the quotation until many years later. I looked for it in the Qur’an, but could not find it. I did some searches and couldn’t find it on any of the popular search engines. I did, however, run across someone who had a much better knowledge of the Qur’an (I knew this because he used technical terms I did not know). It seems that Poe either just made the quotation up or got it from a source that misquoted it. I liked the poem, the opening stanza of which reads

In Heaven a spirit doth dwell 

   “Whose heart-strings are a lute”;   

None sing so wildly well 

As the angel Israfel, 

And the giddy stars (so legends tell),   

Ceasing their hymns, attend the spell   

   Of his voice, all mute. 

Even misquotes, however, can begin the imagination working and I came up with an erotic story, “The Slave Girl and the Angel Israfel.”

Hala

It centers on a young woman named Hala. She is sold as a slave to pay a debt and lives in a coastal city. She is a Christian, her owners are benevolent, though when she comes of age, her duties include servicing their son, a thing Hala comes to accept and eventually enjoy. She wonders if he will marry her but her world is jarred when he gets in trouble with the authorities. To pay his fine, or to perhaps pay a bribe, the family sells her. She ends up in the slave market in Baghdad. She is sold to an older man and takes up his place in his home.

As his mistress, she has privileged status in the house. Very quickly, however, she encounters a woman named Fatima, who bullies her. After her first experience in bed with her master, she is lying down, contemplating, when Fatima bustles into the room:

“Get up, you lazy whore,” she said.

Hala glared at her.

“Up, unbeliever—and don’t look at me like that or I’ll make you pay for your insolence.”

Hala got up. The woman led her to a bath chamber. Again, she pushed her along, cursing her all the way. Hala’s anger flared. She turned and again glared at the woman. She swung her hand to slap Hala, who seized her fingers and sunk her teeth in them.

She bit down as hard as she could. The woman began to scream.

“Murder!” she cried at the top of her voice. “Murder! This kaffir is trying to kill me!” She bellowed and roared as Hala clamped her teeth with all the force she could call up.

She heard scrambling and clattering. The young man she had admired earlier in the day came bursting into the room, scimitar drawn.

The young man who comes to the scene, named Suleiman, creates order. After he leaves, taking Fatima, Hala realizes she has been standing there, naked as the day she was born, all the time he was in the room. She thinks him extremely attractive.

Fatima is disciplined and reduced in rank as a servant for her behavior. Hala is assigned a servant girl who tells her Suleiman is their master Daroysh’s bodyguard. Like them, he is a Christian but is not permitted to serve in the army or the police because of his religion. Hala begins to dream of him and the two of them get to know each other. Suleiman is attracted to Hala, but does not think they should risk being found out and so will not become her lover.

Time passes. One night she dreams of the Angel Israfel, whose heartstrings are a lute. She awakes from the dream to find Suleiman in her room. He has not been able to resist the love he feel for her and she joyfully yields to his embrace. They become lovers.

During her time in the seaside town where she lived her many years, Hala had learned to play the lute from the daughter of English merchants residing there. She has asked Daroysh to purchase one for her and he does. She tells Suleiman she will be playing at a dinner tonight for Daroysh’s friend Kharki, who is highly critical of him for hiring unbelievers, Christians, Jews, and Zoroastrians.  Kharki will not sit with unbelievers, so Suleiman says he will listen from within the next room.

That night, Kharki makes an attempt on Daroysh’s life, hoping to take his position working for the government. Aided by Fatima, he announces he will kill Hala first. Just then Suleiman and some guards come into the banquet hall, kill Kharki, and capture his henchmen. He later tells Daroysh that he knew to come to his aid when he heard discordances from Hala’s lute. She never played discordant music. Daroysh is grateful, gives Hala her freedom and permission to marry Suleiman. They live long and happy years together. She never forgets her dream of the Angel Israfel.

The story appeared in an erotica journal called Oysters and Chocolate, which is no longer published. You can read it, however, in a special issue of Erotique that consists entirely of my erotica—“The Slave Girl and the Angel Israfel,” and a number of other stories about relations and the joy of love. Take a look at their website here.

For additional titles see my Writer's Page.

If vampire stories are your thing, a unique and unusual tale is Sinfonia: The First Notes on the Lute: A Vampire Chronicle, Part I.

For another multicultural story, I recommend The Sorceress of Time.

Happy reading.

Dave's Anatomy: My History As a Writer, #95, ShadowCity

World-building is the prime attraction of fantasy and fabulism. Skillful writers create worlds that are places of danger and adventure—places we want to live despite their threats—magical worlds full of adventure and possibility. Narnia, Middle Earth, Earthsea, Darkover, Avalon—the list is long. When a writer creates a world, he or she can also create the rules. Different races of beings, the existence of magic, religion, topography—everything is at the writer’s power. It is intoxicating. It was the lure that led me to create the world of ShadowCity.

ShadowCity was the third book I published—a novella, a fantasy story about a parallel world that exists in tandem with earth as a dark copy. The world, you come to understand, is a developing word—a site that is embryonic and waiting to take its place in the universe. It has a guardian, a young woman from earth named Jimena Chagall. The main character in the book, Scott Evard, was in love with her but her erratic lifestyle, drug use, and enigmatic disposition has split them up. He meets her by a river walking path near a bridge, a place where panhandlers hang out, begging money. She is thin and smells as if she has not bathed in several days. He gives her money and offers to take her to his apartment where she can rest and bathe. “You just want to see me naked,” she quips. “Like I haven’t seen you that way before,” he mutters. As he walks away, someone tries to murder her. Scott, a boxer in college, manages to save her and beat her assailant insensible. They call the police, who take her for questioning. Mark has a business meeting he has to attend and promises he will come to get her at the police station.

Jimena

When he does, she kills her assailant by removing the shadows from his room. The police think he has had a heart attack. Jimena fills him in on the aspect of her life he has never known about. She the guardian of a world but has neglected her duty. As a result of this, darkness has almost completely taken the forming world over. The evil has become so strong, the evil rulers of the world have sent a killer to Earth to murder Jimena. She realizes she has to go and try to correct things, though at this point it seems like a hopeless endeavor. She and Scott sleep together that night. She dresses and slips off, but Scott wakes up and follows her into a large shadow. He ends up in the parallel world.

The plot is intricate, but the world-building merits mention. The world, Jimena tells Scott, is a copy of Earth “all based on string theory” but too complicated to explain. It is a refuge for people who know darkness and loss:  those who have been harmed by the dark forces on Earth, and those who are themselves dominated by darkness. The latter have gotten the upper hand, and Jimena must right the situation.

But from the beginning, Scott notices her methods smack of darkness and cruelty. She buys a slave (Drya, a Maenad), tortures a woman, bullies and intimidates both enemies and friends. She captures a young woman warrior and promises Scott he will not let her people harm her for treason but ends up doing nothing to stop the girl from being hanged. When Scott chides her, she says he will not like everything she does but she must resort to such methods in order to set the situation right.

Drya

What Jimena does not understand is that in behaving as she does she is letting the darkness that threatens to engulf the world seep into her soul, weakening her. She is in danger of being overwhelmed by the very thing she is fighting.

What happens? You’ll have to get a copy and read it to find out. It is a fast-moving story of love, struggle, adventure, and magic. It explores, like Lord of the Rings and The Earthsea Trilogy, the nature of good and evil. You can order a copy here. It's a great read and an exploration of a fascinating world that exists as a shadow of our own world.

For other great titles, check out my Writer's Page.

Are vampire novels your thing? Read Sinfonia:  The First Notes on the Lute. A young woman's love of music is only matched by her love of human blood. See the video.

I would love to hear your comments.