Dave's Anatomy: My History As a Writer, #103: Vampire Justice: "Nocturne in a Deserted Brickyard.

Vampire stories take place at night, since that's the only time vampires can emerge from the safety of their dark hiding places. Night always has romantic associations, and especially since the 1800s. In the age of Beethoven, Chopin, and other romantic composers we get things like the "Moonlight" sonata and lots of compositions called "nocturnes," which meant music written to evoke the mysterious, quiet, semi-magical state of darkness. A literary example of this is a short poem by Carl Sandburg, famous for his work "Chicago." Many will remember reading it in high school and encountering the memorable first line of the poem, "Hog butcher for the world." Sandburg was popular when I was in grade school and anthologized in many textbooks. His popularity has dropped off quite a bit, but one of his poems, "Nocturne in a Deserted Brickyard," figures in one of my vampire stories. Here is the poem:

Stuff of the moon
Runs on the lapping sand
Out to the longest shadows.
Under the curving willows,
And round the creep of the wave line,
Fluxions of yellow and dusk on the waters
Make a wide dreaming pansy of an old pond in the night.

"Stuff" of the moon catches the reader's attention right away—not "light of the moon" or "rays of the moon." Stuff, as if it were not particles of light but something of substance, something you could pick up and handle. And, of course, the poet evokes night, willow trees, watery ripples, moonbeams on the water of an old pond. It is very much the "stuff" of romantic writing and music.

Jancinda

The night, though, is not always a romantic, numinous, mysterious time. It can be dangerous. It is a time when criminals stalk, looking for victims. In this story, it is also a time when vampires roam about to hunt. Jancinda Lamott, swoops into a deserted area to enjoy the quiet and repose of it before she goes to hunt. Jancinda is a conflicted vampire. She feels remorse that she must kill once a month to satisfy her need for blood. She will later express the anguish she feels from her Calvinistic background, saying, "How can God let something like this [becoming a vampire] happen and then hold us responsible for it?" She knows there are no answers for her question. The peace and serenity of the deserted tourist park with its old mill and mill pond, calms her.

Her calm is broken when someone seizes her and puts a knife against her cheek. She has been seized by a serial killer who says he plans to assault her and then kill her. Jancinda is in no danger and plays along, asking him why he wants to kill her, how many victims he has taken, and tells him she's sorry he lives such a twisted life. This strikes a chord and he tells her not to psychoanalyze him and to stay within her "her bounds." She asks what her bounds are and he says it is what he tells her to do.

Hop Cat Bar, Grand Rapids, MI

Tiring of the ruse, Jancinda turns around, bears her fangs, and shows her talons. Terror-stricken, he falls back and swings his knife at her. She catches it and snaps the blade in half with finger and thumb. She kills him, drinks his blood, and feels a little better about herself because she has destroyed a reprehensible person. She has done good. But not all her victims are bad. The conflicts mount in her mind. She calls her boyfriend, Wesley—a human mortal who knows she's a vampire and whom she protects from her undead friends. They meet at a local bar.

Wesley smiles when he sees her and asks her if she's been out hunting. She admits what he, familiar with her moods, already knows and tells him about her experience: “I went hunting. It was supreme irony. A guy grabbed me and put a knife to my throat. He said he was going to fuck me and then kill me.” Wesley laughs, says he wishes he could see the look on the would-be killer's face when he found out who he had encountered. Jancinda, however, is still in a funk. She invites Wesley to her place.

When they are finished and she is asleep, she contemplates the morality of her existence. How is what she does any different from what the serial killer she eliminated does? She thinks of the good she has done by stopping him. She also thinks of vampire friends who have done things for the good of individuals and nations. She realizes there are no clear-cut answers. One simply must cling to things one believes are right. She has her life. She has Wesley. She has a good job she can work at without going into sunlight. Jancinda must leave it at that. She must live the life she has and not expect to understand it.

The story appeared in Danse Macabre, a journal no longer available and with no archive (a journal by that name is currently being published, but it is not the same one in which my story appeared).

For more titles, see my Writer's Page.

The sequel to Sinfonia: The First Notes on the Lute will be released soon. Read the original you will have the backstory for the sequel.

I would love to hear your comments.

Happy reading.

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 #90: Vampires Again: “Flowers of Evil.”

Vampire stories can be addicting. If you start writing them, you end up doing some world building, because not all vampire worlds are alike--and this a lot of fun. I’ve read tales where the vampire only need a few drops of blood per month and never kill anyone in their nocturnal quest to stay alive. There is the most common scenario, derived from Dracula, mother of all vampire novels (though not the first). Whatever you thought of Twilight, the vampire world presented on those novels, the world of “sparkly” vampire who are not killed by sunlight, was unique; its uniqueness made the novels so popular because it was something new. So as a writer you get to formulate the details of your vampire universe—well, or world, since so far, the vampires in these stories have never left the earth. (Spoiler warning:  some have, and I’ll be writing about them in a while.)

My particular vampire world is pretty much the standard one. Vampires cannot go out in the sun or they die gruesome deaths. They must feed once a month. Like a lion, though, they do not kill their victims by biting them. They most often hit them, as a lion will hit its prey with its paws, and break the person’s neck—then feed. My vampires are rather human most of the time:  they eat and drink regular food and their bodies are like human bodies. But when they hunt, when they are afraid and sense danger, what they call their “vampire hormones” kick in. They develop fangs, talons at the end of their fingers, impenetrable skin, and superhuman senses. They can transform into a bat easily; also into a wolf, which is more difficult; and, for the very careful and gifted, into a mist (one vampire in another my stories can change into a cat; South American vampires know how to transform to snakes). They have social networks, even an online dating service (see my story

Jancinda

One of these is an ongoing character, Jancinda Lamott. She is an figure about whom I have published seven stories. In my vampire world, one can become one of the undead by initiation (rare—often frowned upon by other vampires) or, most commonly, by being bitten. One person out of about five thousand transform after being bitten. There are not many vampires the world I created. 

"Flowers of Evil” took a personality from the past and imagined he was a vampire. In this story, the historical figure was the French poet Charles Baudelaire. Baudelaire lived from 1821-1867. His most famous volume of poetry Les Fleurs du mal (Flowers of Evil), a collection of sonnets, was considered decadent and evil by the French public. It dealt with sex and death, which many people at the time thought scandalous. Baudelaire lived a very Parisian life, kept mistresses, drank, and took opium. He also, by the way, translated the works of Edgar Allan Poe into French.

Baudelaire

When the story “Flowers of Evil” begins, Jancinda and her friend Trinity are running from vampire hunters. They manage to escape. The vampire community in West Michigan goes on alert, hoping to stop the vampire hunter (whose last name is Liam Joyce). He strikes once more, this time taking the life of a young woman who worked at a brothel run by a woman who is among the undead. Constantine, one of Jancinda’s lovers, knows forensics, investigates, and finds out someone fired an archaic sort of pistol at whoever killed the working girl.

Later, Jancinda learns it was none other than Baudelaire himself.

You are Charles Baudelaire, the author of Flowers of Evil?”

“I am.”

“I didn’t know”—she could not finish.

“Most people don’t. With me it was an odd story of crossing the River Styx into the world in which we now dwell.” He looked up. “The dawn is near. I need a place to stay.”

She takes Baudelaire home. Jancinda has long loved his poetry. She hears his backstory. And, of course, her desire kicks in. They end up making love. Baudelaire leaves and promises to come back. Jancinda works on projects at her computer, hears a knock at the door, and, thinking it is Baudelaire, opens it. Instead, it is the vampire hunter.

Jeanne Duval painted by Manet

He uses a magical spell to disable her and prepares to drive a stake into her heart. The reason, he says, is that she killed three of s his colleagues once--and a relative. She remembered the incident. Before he can carry out his design, Baudelaire shows up and kills him.

Baudelaire tells Jancinda he used her as “bait” to find Joyce. She is angry but he tells her she was never in any danger. A relative of Joyce had killed Jeanne Duval, Baudelaire’s long-time lover, also a vampire. The role of vampire hunter had passed down to new generations, and Joyce had tracked Baudelaire for years. Finally, the French poet had his revenge on the family that destroyed the one true love of his life. Jancinda cannot stay angry with him long. More love will come. And, Baudelaire says, they will continue to see each other from time to time—if she wishes it so.

"Flowers of Evil" appeared in the anthology Midnight Thirsts II. Available, lots of good stories.

For additional titles, check out my Writer'sPage.

I would love to hear 

your comments.  

Dave's Anatomy: My History As a Writer #58: Ghost Stories: "The Understudy"

Steven King once wrote that ghost stories are not a sub-genre within short stories; the opposite is true:  short stories—literary short stories—arose from ghost stories. Ghost stories predated the literary version of that kind of literature.  King may be overstating, but ghost tales have been with us ever since people told stories around the tribal campfire. Ghost stories are, and were, a big part of literature. And everyone from Poe to Henry James and onward has written them. My first ghost story, "The Understudy," was written a little ways into my career as a writer. After going through several revisions it finally got printed in a journal and then by a company that sold online books. That company seems to have gone defunct, though the journal is still in print. Every writer has a story that he or she likes but not many other people seem to like, and this story is one of them. The company that printed the story folded and I have not been able to find any other publishers interested in a reprint.

Ghost light burning on a dark stage

The idea for this story came from an old theater superstition. Theaters always keep a light burning backstage. The reason: if you don't, you will get a ghost. Actors can be superstitious. They won't say "Macbeth," and refer to it as "the Scottish play." And the same with the stage light. I played guitar in a pit orchestra at an evangelical Christian college a couple of times  (played for productions of The Sound of Music) and noticed they kept a light burning backstage. One would think evangelical Christians would not believe in ghosts, but apparently they do—or at least kept the light burning for the sake of tradition.

In "The Understudy" my on-going character Sossity Chandler gets a role in a stage play that requires a character who can sing and play guitar. The hard-driving director has instituted a cost-cutting program. Part of the cost-cutting got rid of the stage light—despite the objections of the actors. Sossity comes in early one night and encounters a woman wandering on the stage, looking bewildered, and greets her, thinking she is a cast member. The woman introduces herself as Elaine Boswell. They talk and, when Sossity momentarily looks away and then looks back at the woman, she is gone. The next day she goes to the theater and sees the woman, who vanishes. Upset, Sossity goes to Adrienne (the director's) office and sees a photograph of Elaine hanging on the wall with shots of the other actors who have performed there over the years.

She learns Elaine's story:  a celebrated actress with a rising career, she returns her home town of Grand Rapids, Michigan, to play a role celebrating the remodeling and expansion of City Theater. This is during the Prohibition Era. She and her boyfriend are drunk one night and her boyfriend kills her. He is eventually executed for murder and Elaine is trapped as a stage ghost. The light has kept her away for several decades. When Adrienne has it removed, she returns.

She is a benevolent ghost—for the most part. But when she gets angry, she turns into a frightening wraith with bloody hands, chains, green skin, and flaming hair. Sossity knows that ghosts haunt places because they are connected to them by bad memories. And if they can do something to disconnect, they will go to their rest. After a while, Elaine says she is attached to the theater because she never got to the play the role that meant so much to her. If she could act in a play on the stage, she would be free. But, she says, that would be impossible.

Sossity isn’t so sure.

In my "ghost universe," ghosts have bodies at night. They are transparent and specter-like the rest of the time. Since Elaine is corporal enough to play on stage during the hours the play is being performed, Sossity arranges for an audition and she gets a minor part. There are, of course, complications, dangers, obstacles to be overcome, but Elaine acts the part. Afterwards, she is free to go.

After the final performance, the two of them stand in the snow outside of the theater. Elaine thanks Sossity and asks her if her career as a singer is going well. She says it is not. Elaine assures her things will go better and, once more when Sossity is looking away, vanishes. But she leaves behind a scarf with her initials embroidered in it. Sossity takes it home with her. It is implied this good-luck object, given in gratitude for what Sossity has done for Elaine, will be what she needs to see her career as a singer pick up.

The Understudy was published in Bewildering Stories, a journal still alive and well after many years. Read it here.

 For more tales of the undead (vampires, not ghosts), pick up a copy of Sinfonia: the First Notes on the Lute.  Nelleke Reitsma is a world-renowned guitarist and lutenist. She should be:  she has had 300 years to practice. And after concerts at night, her passion for music is changed to a different set of passions and desires.

For additional titles, check out my Writer's Page.  If you are interested in the many anthologies I've printed stories in, look me up on Amazon, starting with my Amazon Writer's Page. Lots of good stuff to read.

I would love to hear your comments.

Do you like ghost stories?

Have you ever really been scared by one? Scared somebody else?

Read and keep 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.