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Post by NoLeafClover on Aug 26, 2009 16:51:27 GMT -5
I think the main thing you need to do, if one day you hope to be published, is to make sure that whatever you do, the characters who are vampires in your book are YOURS--that they are built around your own definition and that they can stand on their own. Otherwise, you might not want to have vampires at all.
I'm not joking when I say there are WALLS of vampire books in book stores nowadays, and eventually the whole vampire lore genre is going to fall on it's fuggin' head from overload. I think I'd ask if they really need to be vampires or vampire like...
Then again, it could just be my complete hatred of Twilight coloring my opinion...
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Post by Sandafluffoid on Aug 26, 2009 16:59:48 GMT -5
Yeah, I know I'm guilty of using the name 'vampire' when I probably shouldn't have. I've had a race that were about as unvampire like as you can get, but they picked up the name in the earlier drafts and stuck, I'm still not happy with the shit reasons I filled in for that name.
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Post by Ian1732 on Aug 26, 2009 18:39:56 GMT -5
In Runescape, there's actually a family of vampyres (yes, it's spelled with a 'y'.") that rules over the eastern continent of Morytania. They're called The Drakans. The significant thing is that they survive off of blood tithes from Morytania's people, and have even enslaved an entire population of humans. There's a series of quests dealing with them, too. A group called the Myreque is an underground rebellion against the tyranny of the Drakans. Those with knowledge of World War II might notice how this is a reference to the Marquis, I think that's how it's spelled, but they were another underground rebellion in France, when it was overtaken by the Nazis. An adequate metaphor, if I do say so myself.
Wait a minute, I've dwindled quite far from the original topic, haven't I? Aaaanyway... Maybe you could include some sort of reference to Twilight, maybe some obese fangirl commenting that vampires are supposed to sparkle.
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Post by NoLeafClover on Aug 26, 2009 18:48:26 GMT -5
Yeeeaaah, pretty much every vampire story I've read lately somehow references how they're not like the sparkly kind of vampires. It's kind of becoming a cliche.
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Post by kristine on Aug 27, 2009 23:28:54 GMT -5
one of the most original group of vampire stories I've ever read was Gifts of Blood by SUSAN PETREY - her race of vampires are called the Varkela, peace-loving healers who exchange medical care for small amounts of blood called the blood-price. Set on the wild steppes of Tsarist Russia, the healers work amongst the diverse groups of people inhabiting the land, the Cossacks, the Turks and the Tartars.
Tragically the author died accidentally mixing sleeping pills with alcohol but the race is very real and 'touchable' - they make mistakes and have stupid bad habits.
The most important thing about any story is the characters have to be 'real' - the audience has to be able to relate to them in some way and there should be a purpose (literarily) for their oddities and not just to make them odd.
A good example was the aliens in the new movie District 9 - the movie gave you a turned on it's head view of humanity - and the implications of what political systems like apartheid mean to us as a species if we ever do encounter anything extra terrestrial.
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Post by kristine on Aug 29, 2009 13:20:09 GMT -5
COOL TWIST TO ADD TO SCIENCE BASED VAMPIRE FICTION... Tick saliva could hold cancer cure: Brazilian scientistswww.physorg.com/news170661506.htmlWhat if our 'evil' blood sucking creatures of the night held the cure for cancer?
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Post by Sigmaleph on Aug 29, 2009 21:26:34 GMT -5
Ugh, another cure for cancer. They find one of those every other week. My annoyance at the media blowing scientific discoveries out of proportion aside, that is a cool idea for vampires.
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Post by Ian1732 on Aug 29, 2009 22:37:38 GMT -5
Vampires that cure cancer?
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Post by kristine on Aug 29, 2009 23:04:30 GMT -5
Vampires that cure cancer? In one of the storied from Gifts of Blood set in the late 1800s - the doctor vampire sucked bread dough into the glands in his fangs and after a few days created a crude form of penicillin - which he then injected into someone sick (and took his blood price for his trouble when they were well enough.) I just thought it would make a really interesting story to have many different political factions among the vampires (some good some bad) and among the human hunters - something that rivals Tom Clancy in it's complexity and make up of organizations and the personalities within them. Make the fantasy/supernatural element only part of the excitement.
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Post by meshakhad on Aug 31, 2009 2:00:55 GMT -5
Vampires that cure cancer? In one of the storied from Gifts of Blood set in the late 1800s - the doctor vampire sucked bread dough into the glands in his fangs and after a few days created a crude form of penicillin - which he then injected into someone sick (and took his blood price for his trouble when they were well enough.) I just thought it would make a really interesting story to have many different political factions among the vampires (some good some bad) and among the human hunters - something that rivals Tom Clancy in it's complexity and make up of organizations and the personalities within them. Make the fantasy/supernatural element only part of the excitement. In the Mercy Thompson series, being fed on by a vampire repeatedly has health benefits, particularly with regards to bloodborne diseases.
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Post by Amaranth on Sept 19, 2009 21:15:57 GMT -5
I think the main thing you need to do, if one day you hope to be published, is to make sure that whatever you do, the characters who are vampires in your book are YOURS--that they are built around your own definition and that they can stand on their own. Otherwise, you might not want to have vampires at all. I'm not joking when I say there are WALLS of vampire books in book stores nowadays, and eventually the whole vampire lore genre is going to fall on it's fuggin' head from overload. I think I'd ask if they really need to be vampires or vampire like... Then again, it could just be my complete hatred of Twilight coloring my opinion... I don't really thinkg Vampire novels are going anywhere. Though I'd hate to do a pure Vampire series any time soon.
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Post by DeadpanDoubter on Sept 28, 2009 14:42:10 GMT -5
In one of the storied from Gifts of Blood set in the late 1800s - the doctor vampire sucked bread dough into the glands in his fangs and after a few days created a crude form of penicillin - which he then injected into someone sick (and took his blood price for his trouble when they were well enough.) I just thought it would make a really interesting story to have many different political factions among the vampires (some good some bad) and among the human hunters - something that rivals Tom Clancy in it's complexity and make up of organizations and the personalities within them. Make the fantasy/supernatural element only part of the excitement. In the Mercy Thompson series, being fed on by a vampire repeatedly has health benefits, particularly with regards to bloodborne diseases. The vampires we've (my co-author and I) been using, though, tend to do more harm than good with repeated feedings. There's a different type of venom than the "turning" venom that can, depending on the vampire's body's tenseness (fighting for their life vs. love making, for instance) be altered to either paralyze or please their 'victim'. Yeah it's an obvious romance device, but...IDK, I'm not terribly willing to change it too much. Paralyzing venom could be too useful, especially when the non-powerful humans find out about the vamps and attempt to overthrow their societies. I can't remember who brought up the "silver skin" condition, but THANK YOU and it will DEFINITELY be used; human hobos and kids nobody will want will probably become the silver-tinted bait. It'll be a nice way of showing that despite the vampires' elders being backwards Medieval-era lovers, humans haven't really gotten that much better. Drat it all. ): I've got a race of Healers that I might rename (currently called Empaths- I blame the "Hercules" live action show) but they're only loosely tied to the vampires...the vampires as a whole don't have much use for non-vampires except for food and healing. They're kinda...medieval, actually. I wasn't really trying for that, but they sneer at human things, believing that humans are always weaker and only certain ones are useful for food, that the Empaths should be bred pure and allied to their vampiric lord's house, that the Lycans should bloody well die the fuck off already... Holy crap, my vampires are dicks!
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