Babel Clash

As I’ve mentioned in previous posts, I’ve been a fan of the paranormal genre since I was a kid. Prior to even starting my own book, I glommed through as many authors as I could find who wrote stories that were dark, dangerous, sexy, and supernatural. After I got my first book contract, it never occurred to me to stop reading in the paranormal genre just because I’d soon be a published author in it. 

However, I know many authors who avoid reading in their own genre because they don’t want to their stories to be influenced by plotlines from other books. I can understand that logic, and I’ve always said that writing isn’t one-size-fits all, so whatever works best for an author is what he/she should stick with. But personally, I don’t worry about being influenced by reading in my genre. Ideas and plotlines, I have a lot of. Too many to ever write, in fact. What I don’t have is another way to gauge what’s been done to death already. For example, I got an idea years ago about a story featuring a teenage heroine who recently relocated to a small town to live with her father (named Charlie, after my grandfather) because her mother was too self-absorbed in her own life. The heroine soon finds out that the small town has a secret – it’s populated by werewolves, and my mythology behind werewolves was based on Native American lore. The heroine was going to end up torn between two boys, one of whom was her age, the other who was hundreds of years old, but still looked like a teen because werewolves didn’t age like humans did. 

Ahem. Many of you will recognize a lot of similarities in this synopsis to Twilight, but I’d never heard of that series when I got this idea. I heard about it later, though, and then realized I’d have to change so many things to avoid the inevitable “rip-off!” comments I’d get if it were published that it wouldn’t even be the same story anymore. I could name dozens of other examples where I *thought* I had a fairly new idea for a storyline, only to find out that it’s been done multiple, multiple times before. Now, I know everything’s been done before and there are no real new ideas, but I find it helpful to have a barometer for what’s a new(ish) spin on a classic trope, and what’s too close to another work to pursue. I get that by being familiar with what’s out in the paranormal market.  

So for  me, reading in my genre is not only what I love – it was love of the genre that led me to want to write in it in the first place, after all – it’s also a way to winnow down future story ideas. If I have a plotline that’s too close to something that’s been done before – especially famously done - I know I either need to put a different twist on it, or abandon it altogether and go with a different idea. As I said, ideas are one thing I have plenty of J.

-Jeaniene Frost

Everyone’s been in that situation where you’re introduced to strangers in a social setting and the question of, “So, what do you do for a living?” comes up. It’s been a source of amusement for me that when I reply, “I’m a writer,” the most frequent response has been, “Really? Children’s books?” as if my gender makes such a connection obvious. The double-take I usually get when I reply, “No. Adult vampire novels” is something I’ve grown to savor, I’ll admit. But after the inevtiable once-over where I wait, fighting the urge to hiss dramatically just to see if the person jumps, I’m often asked what inspired me to write about that instead of “normal” fiction.  

The short answer would be horror movies and romance novels. As a pre-teen, I loved two things that many people would’ve thought I was too young for – scary movies, and my mother’s romance novel collection. Some pre-adolescents swipe their parents’ cigarettes; I took my parents books and snuck to watch the chiller channel when I was supposed to be asleep. Back then, when the TV still cut to static once it got late enough (anyone born after 1980 probably has no idea what I’m talking about, heh) the only movies I found that featured supernatural creatures were horror movies. I glommed through as many as I could watch. Of course, because they were horror movies, most of them didn’t feature supernatural creatures as heroes, much to my dismay. The first movie I saw where the vampire didn’t get killed at the end was Love At First Bite. It was also the first movie I’d seen that incorporated my other great love – a romance storyline.  

The combination of romance with a supernatural creature who wasn’t the villain, all rolled up with humor and sass, was exactly my cup of tea. Problem was, it wasn’t common. To get my romance fix, I usually had to give up paranormal elements. Just like if I wanted to read about worlds where vampires, ghosts, werewolves, and other inhuman creatures existed, that meant romance would be on the very back burner.  

A little over a decade ago, however, something awesome happened. A subgenre of romance became centered on darker paranormals, and the Fantasy/Horror section of the book store started offering titles with more romantic elements in them.  I was finally getting to have my cake and eat it, too. I spent a few years enjoying this trend as a reader before working up the courage to tackle my decades-long dream of writing my own novel. After all, now I knew I wasn’t alone in my preference. I started writing my first novel in 2003 and it had romance, supernatural creatures, action, horror, ass-kicking, and humor. Just the way I liked it. The rest, as they say, is history. 

What drew you to the darker side of the book aisle, readers?

-Jeaniene Frost

Okay, in my previous post, I talked about being a life-long vamp fan and all the things I did/didn’t like about nosferatu mythology. But any frequent paranormal reader knows that if a story contains a vampire, it probably also contains another non-human creature, too. In fantasy, vampires and werewolves tend to go together like corn and mashed potatoes – yes, my Midwestern upbringing is showing with that analogy, heh – but when I created my fictional world, I went another way. While the occasional ghost might float across the scene in my books, the other main supernatural species in my series in addition to vampires is ghouls. 

Before you get a mental image of something out of Night of the Living Dead, let me elaborate. Just as my vampires look human to the untrained eye, my ghouls also would pass the visual Homo Sapien test. After all, appearance-wise, if I have vampires that blended into to the human crowd, it made sense to me that ghouls would, too. But my vampires and ghouls aren’t exactly alike, and their differences consist of more than a variance in diet (my vampires drink blood to maintain their strength, while ghouls derive their nourishment from raw meat and the occasional consumption of the other, other white meat ;-). 

I liked having a way for the two species to be similar in overall power, but have their differences act as a sort of checks and balance system. For instance, ghouls are harder to kill with their immunity to silver, but Master vampires in my books can fly and ghouls never gain that ability. New vampires are susceptible to falling into an unconscious sleep at dawn, but ghouls have no weakness to sunrise no matter how newly created they are. Vampires can make others vampires on their own, but ghouls can’t create more of their species without vampire assistance, specifically in the form of vamp blood. Without some balance between their strengths and weaknesses, it seemed inevitable that one paranormal species would dominate the other, and that wasn’t the route I wanted to go.  

What about you? Which alternate species do you think would exist well alongside vampires, aside from werewolves? Or do you think vamps and weres are such a winning combination, why fix what isn’t broken?

- Jeaniene Frost

I’ve been an avid vampire fan from as far back as I can remember. Even as a child, I used to dismay my parents with my repeated rooting for Dracula instead of VanHelsing. Therefore, it surprised no one in my family when the first book I wrote was based on today’s world, with a little twist - vampires existed alongside humans, even though most humans were unaware of that.  

When I started my novel, I knew exactly three things: my heroine was half-vampire, my hero was a full vampire, and the two of them were having, um, issues ;-). I already knew everything about the human aspect of my world because I based it on the same one all of us live in. What I had to build from the ground up was my supernatural society. This is where the fun started. As the architect of this world, I could take everything that had ever annoyed me about vampire lore and simply not include it. Oh, the power! I was drunk with it! *wink* 

The first thing I knew my vampires wouldn’t have is a lethal reaction to sunlight. Some think I borrowed that from Bram Stoker, as his Dracula could walk in the daylight, but no. I did that because of all the times I’d watch a vampire kick ass throughout a movie, only to be beaten at the end by some previously-inept hero throwing up the blinds. Snort. Not in my world, baby! The other thing I never liked in vampire lore was their lack of reflection. One of the fictional reasons I’d heard for that was because vampires lacked a soul, ergo, no reflection. My thought was that a toaster lacked a soul, too (to the best of my knowledge, and with apologies to any soul-containing toasters ;)) yet it cast a reflection. So why not vampires? Boom, no vampire in my books needed to worry about something stuck in their fangs that they couldn’t look in a mirror to see.  

Crosses. Ah, how many times have we seen in book or film a creature of the night cringing away from a cross? Yet I always wondered, why only crosses? Christianity hasn’t been around forever, and if a vampire pre-dated it – which would be possible considering vampires didn’t die of natural causes – then what did people do before a crucifix was considered holy? Plus, I never liked the idea that a vampire was inherently evil and thus always at odds with God. If a vampire automatically equaled evil, that took a lot of the fascination out of their myth for me. The choice to do right or wrong, the struggle of deciding to respect mortality even if you were no longer mortal…that appealed to my sense of complexity. Why should human beings have a monopoly on moral ambiguity? I asked myself, and in creating my fictional world, the answer was: they didn’t. Thus, my vampires have the choice you and I have to be good or bad or something in between, with no automatic aversion to religious material. 

What about the good old wooden stake? Practically a staple of vampire lore, right? Well, depends on which mythology you consult. Stories of supernatural creatures consuming blood, flesh, or energy from the living can be found in almost every culture around the world. In my books, I decided to go with silver through the heart to dispatch vampires. Silver has been used in vampire mythology before, though it’s more commonly known as werewolf kryptonite, but I chose it for a few reasons. One, it isn’t as frequently found as wood, so my vampires wouldn’t have to worry about their skin burning every time they got a splinter. Two, a percentage of people already have an allergic reaction to silver resulting in rash, welts, or hives, so the idea of amplifying that to a lethal means for vampires wasn’t too hard of a stretch. Three, as a weapon, it was more versatile than wood. My books could have silver knives, silver bullets, silver throwing stars, silver-tipped arrows…I had more room to play, and did I mention creating your own supernatural world was fun?  

So, while my vampires do contain many traditional aspects of mythology (enhanced speed, mind control, dependency on blood, fangs) they also don’t have several of the things that I didn’t care for. Do I think I’m “right” with how I portrayed my vampires versus others? Of course not. I believe one of the reasons for the enduring appeal of vampire mythology is its flexibility. Vampires can be monsters, charmers, predators; blood drinkers, soul stealers, energy drainers; ugly, beautiful, or average. Writers and readers of vampire fiction have the option of choosing which lore fits their personal preference, and no one is wrong - at least, until a real vampire stands up and sets the record straight.  

And if that happens, well, I for one intend to offer a most sincere apology for whatever I’ve gotten incorrect ;-).

-Jeaniene Frost