Getting into the O.G. Vampire Novel

 Given that I'm writing (more slowly these past two weeks or so) my rather epic novel about a Dhampir and his quest to be free of the destiny laid out by his vampiric father, it seemed appropriate for me to visit the quintessential vampire, so I've been reading Bram Stoker's Dracula. (Funny how, given its marketing and how it was referred to, the Francis Ford Coppola movie from the early 90s tends to be what I think of when I put the words "Bram Stoker's Dracula" into that sequence).

I'm still only a quarter or so into the book, but it's that funny thing where the story is so familiar due to pop culture osmosis for now 126 years that many elements are instantly recognizable. Just this year, we had a comedy imagining Renfield as a young man (how long do I get to think of Nicolas Hoult, who is three years younger than I am, as a "young man?") with Dracula as a toxic and overbearing boss. Later this year, The Last Voyage of the Demeter takes a couple-page passage from the novel that, in its epistolary format, is minimalistic terror as we get the logs of the captain of the ship that takes Dracula to England as his crew begins to vanish one by one while the Count feeds on them one by one.

I think what's surprising about the novel is how modern it feels. I read Frankenstein in high school, which I'd argue is, outside of Poe's short fiction, the other most quintessential gothic horror story, but it's sometimes easy to forget that Frankenstein and Dracula came 79 years apart, in wildly different cultural and historical contexts.

Indeed, I'd argue that the two might even take opposite positions, culturally. Frankenstein is all about the cold, industrial future leading to alienation and a heartlessness that can only result in violence taking the place of familial love, while Dracula is very much about the rational, modern world needing to fight against the archaic, mystical past.

Because Dracula is not just a bloodsucker and a sexual libertine (the latter somewhat implied, though heavily). He's also a brutal autocratic noble. In what might be the most chilling part of the story, after Jonathan Harker has realized he's not so much a guest as a prisoner of Dracula and his three vampiric women (often portrayed as a sort of harem, though it's not clear that he has that relationship with them,) a woman comes to the castle to demand her child back - a baby that Dracula fed to the women. She knows the baby is dead, but she demands to at least have the body to bury, and in response, Dracula sics his wolves on her, having them tear her apart in an act of unmitigated cruelty.

England of course has its history of exploitation by nobles, but there is also a tradition (adopted as well by Americans) of civil liberties - protections that the common people should have against those in power. Given Stoker was Irish, I wonder to what extent he was being ironic about the English claim to liberal ideals, but at least on the surface, the evil of Dracula is the logical extreme of aristocratic entitlement.

The format is also somewhat unconventional - it's an epistolary novel, which means that it takes the form of journals, news articles, and letters, as if Bram Stoker had discovered and collated these into a coherent narrative (though conveniently, the characters often write like novelists.)

Dracula, from the start, is a force of nature, but there's also a great deal of weirdness - when Jonathan first shows up to come to the castle in Transylvania, the carriage driver is very transparently Dracula himself, in disguise. If there's any reason to find sympathy with the Count (and not really,) it's that the guy needs to work very hard to make it look like he's actually got people working for him. The grandeur of his nobility is a facade, and he's only living (well, un-living) off of gold that was buried around his domain by people fearing it would be stolen in the many wars that were fought over it.

Anyway, I know how this all goes down, for the most part, but it is a good read.

The Twist and the Telegraph

 In 2015, I started playing Dungeons & Dragons. I leapt into the deep end, building a world to set my games and then running them for a group of friends. It's an amazing system for creative people to make a game out of telling fantasy adventure tales, and the role of Dungeon Master is something like an author, while the role of Player is somewhat like an actor. I'm a writer, and many of my players are actors, so this fits very well.

Anyway, during this original campaign (a 'campaign' is an ongoing story that follows the same player characters over a lengthy time, from their origins as wandering mercenaries to their climactic height as epic heroes, and can take years to complete) I had the players meet a friendly patron who gave them a headquarters and access to his airship so that they could travel easily around the world I had created.

The patron, and his family, were all vampires. They were good vampires, who abstained from drinking the blood of humanoids, only subsisting on the blood left over from the butcher's shop, but they had your standard vampiric qualities - agelessness, a great vulnerability to sunlight, and, well, the blood-drinking.

Still, I remember for years hinting at this fact - the players would only ever see them at night, usually having them come down for dinner just after sunset, and I described them as pale, and even had them pointedly eat their food with some sort of 'red sauce' rather than the garlic sauce the player characters had on their food.

Eventually, I had the patron take the group's paladin (a sort of holy warrior, most of whom are vehemently opposed to the undead) on a walk, where he showed the cart from the butcher's shop that brought his family their blood, and made his confession in the hopes that this character would recognize them as being the same good people, and not strike against them out of fear.

I was certain that the players had realized this about the character, and that only their own characters were ignorant of the fact. As it turned out, I was dead wrong. The players' minds were blown, and not a one had guessed at it.

I say this because I think that there's a logical glitch that writers sometimes run into: how to pull off a good twist.

Now, I've written about this before. But I've now hit a point in writing my novel where one of the largest twists has sort of become inevitable. I don't want to go into details, in part because it might change, and in part because if there is anyone who reads this blog and actually wants to read the book, it would be nice to allow that reveal to happen naturally.

But I hit a point where I had a character who understood enough about the world around him and knew enough about the history of one of its characters, that I could not logically keep him from putting two and two together.

Rather than simply have the character act more ignorant than he was, in my current draft of this segment of the story (I've been writing the novel in different parts, and am currently working on the fourth, though I don't know how many there will ultimately be - seven would be very fitting given its alchemical themes, but I don't want to hold myself to that until I have the story's shape) I simply have him come to this realization, or hypothesis at least, when it would make sense for him to do so.

I do worry, though, that this big reveal coming where it does undercuts the dramatic weight to it. This is where rewriting will come into play. I can limit certain information. I don't think I want to have the character acting on knowledge that the reader does not - I've been mostly using a George R. R. Martin-style viewpoint narrative, which is in the third person but still tends to (for the most part) stick to the perspective of one of three characters. As such, I think it would be playing kind of dirty to have one of these characters realize this but wait for a long time to have him reveal this, probably when he tells it to another of these characters.

Still, the basis for why I felt the need to reveal this fact at this point (I hope I'm not being too vague here) is that, to me, the pieces are too plain for the reader to see, and to avoid connecting the points would feel like an insult to their intelligence.

But an author knows all of the facts, or at least all the facts they've decided upon. To me, the answer is obvious, but that is because the answer came to me before I even laid the clues that hinted at this revelation.

A good twist, I think, should be detectable if one is paying close enough attention. But as an author, you can sometimes feel as if any evidence you lay in advance - any foreshadowing of that twist - is too bright and flashing and obvious, and that a reader will grow impatient for the reveal to happen so that they can move on. But the danger on the flip side is that a twist without good supporting evidence will feel unearned, and can wreck a narrative.

Sometimes, then, it can be fun to have your twist revealed early in a story, and to work through the ramifications of that twist as the meat of your narrative.

My story is undeniably an epic - so far, other than the brief vignettes of childhood life for its primary protagonist, it has taken place over the course of eight years, and in my perhaps irrational quest to avoid having the story labeled as "YA" material, I envision it seeing the protagonists into their 30s, which would make it take place over a minimum of fifteen years. (Honestly, I think my own deeply ingrained snobbery is the only reason I'd resist a YA label. The story does deal with young people navigating strong romantic emotions, rebellion against a corrupt older generation, and supernatural forces, so I think I may just have to accept that that is what it is. I hope that my integration of Jungian psychology and my genre-bending Weirdness will be enough to distinguish it from other ready-for-Netflix stories - though I should be so lucky that someone would like this story enough to make a screen adaptation).

Anyway, the fact that it is so large in scale means that this twist needs to land well before the end. But it also needs to be built to and feel like the grand reveal that it is. The fact that the main character is a dhampir and his absent father is an undead vampire are "first chapter" twists (though I think he technically doesn't learn these terms until a little later). We're operating in a world of fantasy and gothic horror here, and that's no twist. But there are twists that will come along the way to open that out - for instance, just how fantastical the world truly is, and also, where the borders of one world end and another's begin.

I'm so hopeful that I can finish this story, and not only write to the last page, but also have the stamina to go back and edit and rewrite it to the point where I feel ready to share it with the world. I'd also love to be able to get it published some day - I dream of being able to look at it on my own bookshelf. But for now, the focus has been on what I can write now, at any given now.