Please welcome Theresa Myers!!
March 15 Guest Blog at Bitten by Paranormal Romance
How I got Bitten (or why did I start writing vampires?)
As a Nocturne author one question I get quite frequently is “What got you started writing vampires?” Well, to be perfectly truthful I wasn’t a huge vampire fan to begin with. I had loved the movie Lost Boys as a teen. I read a few things here and there that had a vampire in it (like a Linda Lael Miller’s Forever series, a few J.R. Ward books and some of P.C. and Kristin Cast’s Marked series), but by in large I wasn’t a vampire fanatic. But then one night (and I swear I’m not riffing off of Stephenie Meyer) it was a very vivid dream.
I saw a beautiful woman and man dancing in a ballroom walled with mirrors and lit by thousands of candles. Then later she was shown a coffin containing a skeleton with bones so old and smooth they looked almost polished. What really surprised me was the skeleton had fangs. The woman later was led to that same coffin and disappeared and the fanged-skeleton reappeared in her place. It was as though small invisible spiders began to knit a white shroud over the skeleton, filling it out until it took the woman’s form. And when they were done, she lay in the coffin still as stone, until the male vampire kissed her. All of that became my novella Salvation of the Damned and started the world where my new Sons of Midnight mini-series is based.
In this month’s book, The Truth About Vampires, we see the coming out of vampires to human society. Now I’ve had some critics ask, why would vampires even bother, they’ve done fine for all these years? I’d have to answer, well, wouldn’t you get tired of hiding everything you did, acting like some kind of second-class citizen that had to lurk in the shadows, even though you knew that you had far more experience and were far more powerful?
That’s the point at which the Cascade Vampire Clan that’s been surviving in the Seattle Underground since the late 1890s has reached. They see investigative reporter Kristin Reed’s interest as a chance to tell their side of the story before someone else does. (One of the basic tenets of crisis communications 101 in the public relations industry – tell your side first.) Clan Trejan, Dmitri Dionotte is assigned to not only guide Kristin’s research (making sure that she doesn’t stumble upon the less savory aspects of vampire culture – like the reivers who see humans as disposable juice pouches) but also to protect her.
In many ways revealing vampire society to Kristin teaches Dmitri how to appreciate it as well. You see, he never intended to become a vampire and really isn’t all that happy about his state.
Once I got into these two characters I started to find out all kinds of things about the vampire culture I was discovering as Kristin discovered it – their political set up, how they treat things medically, their weaknesses and strengths, their unique view of their place in the world and how their society functioned. And like every society, they had a history and those who run outside society’s rules.
So you might say the reason I write vampires is because I got caught up in their story. I’m currently writing book three in the Sons of Midnight and discovering that even vampires have prejudices against other supernaturals. Just how far will the series go? Well, that remains to be seen. I might write this world, but I’m still learning new things about it every day from the characters.
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