As regular readers of my blog know I am not a fan of vampires. I’m especially not a fan of the vampire-as-love-interest because falling in love with a vampire is falling in love with a corpse. Frankly, Ewwwwwwwww!!! is too mild a response. Turns out Meg Cabot feels the same way I do (via Diana Peterfreund):
Anyway, as a consequence of that experience [having lyme disease], I just don’t enjoy books (or movies or TV shows) where vampires are the love interest. Because they remind me of the parasite that caused the disease that almost made me bald (if the fiftieth—only a slight exaggeration—doctor in two years that I went to hadn’t successfully figured out what was wrong with me, and cured me before I ended up looking like Britney before her extensions. You will note I am more upset about nearly being bald than I am about nearly dying. That is yet another sign of how shallow I am), and I honestly don’t understand how any girl could not want to spray a vampire in the face with Off.
So me and vampire love stories? Not so much.
Yes, I know, I liked Buffy—but she KILLED vampires, remember, and never toyed with the idea of BECOMING one. I didn’t take my husband’s last NAME when we got married. Do you honestly think I’d like a story about a girl considering changing SPECIES for a guy? No offense to any of you, but as a feminist, I just can’t go there…especially considering it’s a species that has so much in common with the one that tried so hard to make me bald. I mean, kill me.
What she said. Times a billion.
Is the “feels the same way I do” link supposed to refer to the same URL as the “vampires” link?
Thanks! Fixed.
Will you still be my semi-writer-friend (I say semi because we don’t ACTUALLY know each other, but I would like to think that we could be called blog-friends…:))if I get published and my first series is about vampires? Because I’d be very sad if you weren’t my semi-writer-friend anymore.
dawn, i think she may hate uni***ns more. So you’re probably cool…
Dawn: I don’t hold people responsible for writing about abominations. Afterall, Diana has a uni***n trilogy coming out.
It is too late to remove any hint of romance (ewwww!!) between vampires and humans?
All things considered, it world’s better than romance between uni***ns and humans, yes? ^^
falling in love with a vampire is falling in love with a corpse.
while you and meg cabot have a point with the ewww-ness, i still maintain: this depends entirely on which vampire mythology you’re using. 😛 what annoys me about le vampire books lately is that they ALL seem to be about girl meets boy who is vampire and they fall in loooooooove. and it’s always the girl who is human. never the boy. why can’t there be unromantic vampire-human interactions (besides the typical vampire hunter scenario)?
hehehehehe. anyone read the Acorna books? she’s a unicorn/human hybrid. though it wasn’t really a romance thing. but still.
i’d be interested to know which justine thinks is worse. though i’m also betting it’s the uni***ns, b/c i’ve never seen the word “vampire” get bleeped out, not yet. 😀
Corey: At least uni***ns are alive!
Rebecca: It really is the vampire romance thing that squicks me. There are lots of vampire books I’m very fond of. Scott’s for instance and Suzy McKee Charnas’s Vampire Tapestry. But they’re not caught up in the whole romantic in love with death and decay thing.
Also the whole aspiring to live forever thing scares me. I think living forever would be a nightmare. I can’t think of anything less romantic.
If everyone lived forever there would be no change. Ever. Death is about change and change is absolutely necessary. Without death you get stagnation and the disappearance of creativity and originality.
Imagine if politicians didn’t die and could stay in power forever. Scary, huh?
justine: Yeah, I think it would be too late to remove any of that. But there is an upside. Though two of the main characters are vampires, they start out as humans and end up turning into vampires together…so their love is between two vampires, not a human and a vampire.
Two other mains are a creature that we created to be more like supervampires, called Ferradi. They’re pretty darn alive, though, if I do say so myself. The only thing that really connects them to vampires is that they drink blood for sustenance. Other than that, they’re really not like vampires at all.
And just because I’m writing about vampires doesn’t mean I want to become one. Living forever really doesn’t seem ideal for me. As a believer in Heaven and what is on the other side waiting, I’d much rather live a full life and then die than live forever.
Rebecca: I understand what you mean. It isn’t always the girls swooning over the guys, and I’ve certainly made a point to write some things that way. Guys swoon. So hah. 🙂
Agreed, immortality breaks down the very constructs of ‘romance’. All cliche’s aside, love is not literally forever: only within our own _mortal_ perception can forever not seem long enough. That is a blessing in disguise. Why do such delectable things as blackberry pie taste so good? Because you know, inevitably, it will be gone. If you had crates and crates of them, you would feel far less an emotional reaction when you tore into one. When the extraordinary becomes ordinary and the unknowable known: can there be any _worse_ of a curse?
I have read one series with a vampire romance. My friend recommended it to me and kept bugging me about it, so I read it. Surprisingly I also liked it, mostly because there was also a werewolf love interest and after Remus Lupin, I love werewolves. Anyway, it was a vampire-human-werewolf love triangle and I kept waiting for the human girl to realize that the vampire is dead and she would have to change species to be with him, but no. She chooses the vampire over the werewolf, which will never make any sense to me no matter how the writer tries to explain it. I mean, werewolves are much better than vampires, right? Just like zombies are better than uni***ns. I do hope you can find some sense in all my babbling. Shutting up now.
~Catherine
“I’m especially not a fan of the vampire-as-love-interest because falling in love with a vampire is falling in love with a corpse.”
“Also the whole aspiring to live forever thing scares me. I think living forever would be a nightmare.”
Given the high squick factor of being a corpse, why are you so reconciled to becoming one?
High squick factor of a corpse that walks around and drinks blood from the living. And in the vampire love stories—has sex with living people. Majorly squicky.
Am I looking forward to dying? No. Most people—except the chronically ill—don’t.
But sometimes death is the only way to get rid of bad science and reactionary ideas. A few centuries ago there were still many people who believed the earth was flat and the sun revolved around the earth. Most of them are dead now and their stupid beliefs with them.
I think Scott wrote a book about that, too. 😉
Seriously, though, when I die, I will not become a corpse. And since I’m a fan of cremation, my body won’t be a corpse very long either. Zombies and vampires get stuck with their corpses.
And I have no problem saying there is not uni****y romance in my books. Strictly human-on-human love. I know. I’m so biased.
I think living forever would be a nightmare.
me too. that is why my vampires do not live forever. i’ve changed the mythology around a lot, so they’re not bram stoker’s brand of vampire. and, morbid as it sounds, it seems to me that you must have death to appreciate life.
dawn: i’m making it a point to write a book with very little vampire-human romantic interaction. mainly b/c i want it to be different from what’s already out there. it’s so hard to be different b/c, as everyone’s always saying, it’s “been done to death.” ahahahaha. and my vampire gets rejected in favor of a human. poor vampire. 😉 😛 why do you like writing about them? i honestly dunno why i’m interested in writing about bloodsuckers. people ask me, and i can’t really give them a good reason for the appeal.
I think the only reason I like to write about vampires is because our vampires (as in my co-writer and mine) are really like no other vampires I’ve ever read, seen, or heard about. 🙂 There is a magic about them that makes them interesting which sounds extremely strange, but there you have it. Other than that, I don’t really have much interest in vampires. 😀
yeah, same here. my vampires are different from anything i’ve already seen. i kinda just stole what i liked from various vampire mythologies, added my own bits, threw in a new species (i’m worried about that, but i don’t think it’s too huge of a leap, so i’m hoping it works out), and put it all together. or anyways, attempted to put it all together. the current draft is so insanely different from the first draft that if the character names weren’t the same, you’d think it was a separate story. 😛 and since i did change some of the character names, even then it’s barely recognizable. and it used to be a trilogy *dies* but books 2 and 3 sucked so bad (they were nanowrimo drafts–have you ever done nano?) and i decided it was b/c there was no substance to them. so now i’m attempting to condense them into one big book. it’s scary.
i have never cowritten anything. is it hard? seems like it’d be hard, but i know lots of writers do it.
Plus, vampires always seem to be really, really old. A 100 year old in a relationship with a 17 year old is rather disturbing, vampire or no.
Rebecca: No, I’ve never done NaNo, bascially because it scares me to be under a time crunch like that. I’m kind of one of those people who believe in muses (kinda sorta)–I like to think that I write best when ideas just come to me. I understand the need to just WRITE sometimes, though, and so I’m not entirely “muse” biased. I’ve co-written more stuff than I’ve written stuff individually, so I would say no, it’s not that bad. I guess it just depends on who you’re writing with, and if their style meshes well with yours. I enjoy it a lot, actually, it gives me much more material to work with.