anna katherine

Whoops — we seem to have written another guest post, with another giveaway! It’s up at Deadline Dames — it’s about writing characters without a spreadsheet:

When I was a full time professional fiction editor, and even for a couple of years after that, I spent a good deal of time talking about characters. I even did a couple of panels/lectures on the subject. How to create them. How to make them three dimensional. How to critique someone else’s characters. How to use the characters to either make the plot build up around them or further the plot you’ve already got. (more…)

There’s a guest post up on Dionne Galace’s it’s not chick porn — and there will shortly be a contest for a signed copy of the book. The post itself deals with “inspiration”:

Inspiration is a tricksy thing. There are many authors out there who will say that it is a glorious god come from on high, or maybe a muse who drifts down on occasion and drops off morsels of characterization for the poor frazzled author who must then ration it for the dark, blocked times ahead.

I don’t particularly like the muse theory. (more…)

Well, I imagine some people know these things. In fact, I bet a bunch of people know them, and are now wondering why I am even bringing this up.

The next book from the Anna Katherine Co-op of Evil will be set in our Door-filled New York, and it will star vampires. I’ve gotten into a couple of comment-conversations with people regarding vampires and their current sexy popularity (while trying to explain that there are no sexy vamps in Salt and Silver!), and those conversations — and the thinking we’re doing regarding vampires in general — led me to wonder: How much does the average reader know about the foundations of vampire literature and/or folklore?

Vampire Lit

There is so much cool stuff out there, it is unbelievable. I am also vastly unqualified to talk about it, since it has been years since I wrote an academic paper, and I do not have a university library at my fingertips. Let us say the vampire has been a sexy (or at least highly/inappropriately sexed) thing in literature for a very long time — early 1700s, at least. Examples of this include John Polidori’s The Vampyre, the penny-dreadful Varney the Vampire; or, The Feast of Blood, Le Fanu’s Carmilla, and, of course, Stoker’s Dracula.

On top of this, there is the long history of balladry and so forth that talks about romantic (or pseudo-romantic) “undead” figures, much of which influenced the vampire fiction listed above, such as Gottfried August Bürger’s Lenore and the Child ballad The Suffolk Miracle. I can’t delve too deep into these, though, because really then I start heading into the realm of…

Vampire Folklore

Oh, I am so in love.

I say in one of the comments on the Darque Reviews blog post that:

In straight-up folklore, though, while there can be a sexual edge to whatever’s going on, mostly vampires are just representatives of the Unacceptable Other (for instance, in Mediterranean regions people with red hair are or could become vampires. And let’s not even talk about Bulgarian vampires — the one-nostril thing? Yeah, I’d stake one of those in a heartbeat).

The Other is what “monsters” typically are — they are those who are socially cast out of humanity due to unfortunate physical abnormalities, mental difficulties, personal/social nonconformity, or simply being “not from around here” (which is often related to “boy, you look just like our god of death, maybe that is not such a good thing”).

Folkloric/historic vampires are also representatives of death and disease. Dead bodies (due to soil composition and other such mundane things) don’t necessarily decompose at the same rate — mix that up with mass graves being continually reopened, and you can have a case of a dead girl being suspected of vampirism during a plague year. Chinese vampires apparently have a greenish fuzz on them — either from the fungus that grows on the funeral clothes, as suggested by Montague Summers in The Vampire: His Kith and Kin (1928), or perhaps from decomposition in general. Death isn’t pretty, and it’s tough to understand what’s going on if you don’t have a microscope and a lot of time on your hands with which to desecrate the dead.

Of course, death/disease/Othering all fall under a single psychological drive: they’re all a function of humans trying to describe/systematize the Unknown, and then apply logic thereafter. Why do livestock die off suddenly? What’s up with plagues? Why would anyone want to become a cannibal? Can anyone explain why young Lucille is so sexed up? Or is Lucille instead “wasting away” for unknown reasons? Heinrich-the-new-guy is awfully weird — almost too weird. Butterflies eating carrion is really… gross. And you know, cats aren’t a good idea (for reasons we won’t go into here), so I bet it’s extra bad if they jump over the dead.

If you follow the “humans will do what their brains tell them” psychological idea of folklore creation/perpetuation (which I sort of bring up in the magic post from earlier), then a lot of folklore regarding vampires becomes a lot more understandable — and manipulatable in a fictional context, if you’re so inclined (which I am). You can see this in all that wacky Victorian vampire literature, which took the Unknown concepts from folklore and applied them to both the views (either personal or popular) of sex at the time, and to the dangers of the widening world of communication and travel (hence why so many of the books listed above feature either Eastern European — rather than strictly British — locales, or feature vampires from locations other than England).

Interesting Things

Which gets me to the point of this post: Here, have some interesting vampire folklore! I’ve stolen them utterly from the Summers text, but you can find other (and more varied) sources easily. You might want to consider how this folklore could’ve started — maybe even how it’s changed into the sparkly sex-darlings we have today. And, of course: Wouldn’t it be neat if someone wrote vampire romances using some of this stuff?

All suicides, after death, become vampires.

A man who is murdered will arise as a vampire to avenge his death.

Vampires, upon rising from their graves, will first attack their family or loved ones.

Being cursed by one’s godfather can lead to becoming a vampire.

Being unbaptized (or not Christian) can lead to becoming a vampire.

Babies born between Christmas and Epiphany will probably become vampires after death (and their lives prior to death aren’t exactly fantastic either — for some explanation of this, you might want to consider both the religious significance of these dates, and also the medieval safe sex flowchart).

If you eat a sheep that’s been killed by a wolf, you’re vampiric chances are pretty high.

Of course, if you’re bitten by a vampire, well. We all know what that means.

If you’re a witch, odds are you’re dabbling in vampirism.

Vampires are generally nocturnal — except when they’re not.

Vampires often have long claws or nails.

Vampires can appear very bloated following, presumably, a feast of blood.

Vampires can turn into mist — or may exist as mist. Like, you know, the plague.

Vampire breath smells super-bad.

People with hare-lips are probably vampires.

People with vast facial port-wine birthmarks are likely to be vampires.

Blue-eyed? Will probably become a vampire.

Red-haired? You totally are a vampire.

Born with teeth? Guess.

Do you hold the traits of someone totally charismatic and sexy? Vampire. No, really.

And finally, I’m just going to quote this directly, because how can I not? Enjoy!:

The vampire is, as we have said, generally believed to embrace his victim who has been thrown into a trance-like sleep, and after greedily kissing the throat suddenly to bite deep into the jugular vein and absorb the warm crimson blood. It has long since been recognized by medico-psychologists that there exists a definite connexion between the fascination of blood and sexual excitation. Owing to custom, to inhibitions and education this emotion generally remains latent, although a certain mental sadism is by no means a mark of degeneracy.

There’s a guest post up at My Book, the Movie — it talks about writing action scenes:

One of my favorite things to come across while I’m reading is a really fantastic action scene. When the author’s somehow managed to tell me where everybody is, what they’re doing, how they’re feeling, what the action means, and what the consequences are — that’s a real talent, and a gem to come across in print. (more…)

There is a very popular idea in fantasy writing that magic should have rules. What I mean is, there should be a system, a consistency to the magic being used by the characters.

I am totally fine with this idea. Since magic often takes the place of (or artificially creates) real-world systems, it makes sense that there should be rules, if only to know when you’re breaking them. (Boy hero survives killing curse — news at 11!)

But here’s the thing: Real world magic, historically speaking, doesn’t really happen that way. It’s not organized, and it’s not bound by a common magical language or a single set of ideas — it’s just a mishmash of anything we humans could get our hands on.

When I talk about “real world magic,” I don’t mean modern Wiccan religion, or Satanism, or whathaveyou. I mean the stuff Classics majors drool over and folklorists clutch to their collective bosoms. The Greek Magical Papyri in Translation; Agrippa’s Natural Magic. In “real” magic, people are walking around living a giant Skinner box experiment:

[A pigeon] is put into an experimental cage for a few minutes each day. A food hopper attached to the cage may be swung into place so that the pigeon can eat from it. A solenoid and a timing relay hold the hopper in place for five sec. at each reinforcement.

If a clock is now arranged to present the food hopper at regular intervals with no reference whatsoever to the bird’s behavior, operant conditioning usually takes place. In six out of eight cases the resulting responses were so clearly defined that two observers could agree perfectly in counting instances. One bird was conditioned to turn counter-clockwise about the cage, making two or three turns between reinforcements. Another repeatedly thrust its head into one of the upper corners of the cage. A third developed a ‘tossing’ response, as if placing its head beneath an invisible bar and lifting it repeatedly. Two birds developed a pendulum motion of the head and body, in which the head was extended forward and swung from right to left with a sharp movement followed by a somewhat slower return. The body generally followed the movement and a few steps might be taken when it was extensive. Another bird was conditioned to make incomplete pecking or brushing movements directed toward but not touching the floor. [...]

The conditioning process is usually obvious. The bird happens to be executing some response as the hopper appears; as a result it tends to repeat this response.

Skinner goes on to relate this to common human behavior:

The experiment might be said to demonstrate a sort of superstition. The bird behaves as if there were a causal relation between its behavior and the presentation of food, although such a relation is lacking. There are many analogies in human behavior. Rituals for changing one’s luck at cards are good examples. A few accidental connections between a ritual and favorable consequences suffice to set up and maintain the behavior in spite of many unreinforced instances. The bowler who has released a ball down the alley but continues to behave as if he were controlling it by twisting and turning his arm and shoulder is another case in point. These behaviors have, of course, no real effect upon one’s luck or upon a ball half way down an alley, just as in the present case the food would appear as often if the pigeon did nothing — or, more strictly speaking, did something else.

This accounts for stuff like turning your coat inside-out when you’re having a bad run of cards, throwing salt over your shoulder to avoid bad luck, or any number of childhood magics that we all grew up with (avoiding sidewalk cracks, holding our breath at the graveyard, etc.). But what about the big stuff — the magic you do on purpose?

Turns out that back in the (papyrus) days, if something sounded like a good idea, they’d stick it in on the principle of the thing. For instance, one of my favorite Greek invocations is for Abrasax, the year god. He wasn’t a member of the traditional pantheon, though — someone just took the number of days of the year, added it all up, converted the numbers to letters, and came up with Abrasax. With all that math and cryptography involved, it had to be magical! The logic seemed good, the name was added to a bunch of already-in-progress magic, et voila, Abrasax kind of takes off.

Math wasn’t the only thing that made stuff magical — words, gods, and anything else that was Not From Around Here could easily be taken up and applied to the magic already being done. Georg Luck, in his academic text Arcana Mundi, says:

Incidentally, the borrowing of names, concepts, and rituals from foreign religions is one of the characteristics of ancient witchcraft, as the magical papyri attest. Even though cities like Alexandria and Rome were already full of sanctuaries of exotic deities, apparently there was still room for more speculation and more experiment. No doubt the religions of ancient Egypt were similarly misinterpreted or at least simplified by the Greeks of the Hellensitic period who lived in Egypt, and these religious practices survived, through a series of transformations, in the mainstream of magical doctrine.

So in Salt and Silver, our characters fumble around with magic and demons that have been around forever — or that they maybe just discovered last week. They mix together religions and folklore and cultures, just in case. They do things they don’t understand because it seems to have worked in the past. They make stuff up, just in case it might work.

What this all comes down to is: Rules for magic? What rules? The only rules that apply here are whatever makes people people. Rather than a rigid system of magic, there’s just psychology (as in: “this is how humans behave — because we are humans, we will do what humans do, even if, logically speaking, it makes no sense whatsoever”). In real life, we take stuff that sounds good, and if it works — or seems to, anyway — we’ll keep doing it. We’ll pass it on to others. And at some point we’ll even forget where it came from and just assume that it’s always been like that. The magic may not make sense if you pull it out of context, but that’s kind of the point — the context is us. Without people, there might as well be no magic at all — in either the real world, or, at least in this book, in romantic escapades.