VAMPIRE WRITERS

[Heather B]

My current WIP has just about every type of mythical creature I can get my hands on - so yes, vampires are involved. But these vampires are evil and monstrous - as any blood sucking creature should be.

[Margo]

My current WIP has just about every type of mythical creature I can get my hands on - so yes, vampires are involved.

Are you mixing mythologies? How do you keep a sense of...order? Coherence? How many types do you have in one project? (There are an awful lot out there...in many different flavors!)

[Heather B]

I have them all feeding off each other. Each creature I use, has a mix of it's 'origins' and whatever spice I have thrown in. In their community, each one helps and hinders another. Plus with so many creatures running around it gives the humans real cause for concern.
Besides I don't have every single one in one MS, I just pick and chose the ones that work well together.
As for keeping it organised; there are a lot of lists and whiteboards involved. ;)

[Margo]

I have them all feeding off each other. Each creature I use, has a mix of it's 'origins' and whatever spice I have thrown in. In their community, each one helps and hinders another. Plus with so many creatures running around it gives the humans real cause for concern.
Besides I don't have every single one in one MS, I just pick and chose the ones that work well together.
As for keeping it organised; there are a lot of lists and whiteboards involved. ;)

I kind of went the other direction and chose to use only creatures from one mythology and tried to keep it tight to documented folklore, even to the point of selecting a particular era of lore (pre-Christian) within that mythology. However, I do have allusions to creatures from other mythologies existing. I also let myself take tiny liberties based on scant evidence, but evidence nonetheless. That probably seems really anal of me, but I was very very very concerned with internal consistency. Plus, I'm the kind who can be hobbled by too many choices.

Seanan McGuire took a different tack with her routewitch stories (which I LOVE!!!). She focuses on one type of supernatural in the stories (ghosts/after-death type spirits) and then threw in every kind there was from every culture. She's got one great story with her MC confronting some type of ghost, and she's ticking off in her head all the kinds of ghost he could or couldn't be from the way he's acting.

[PaulWoodlin]

I have vampires in some of the novels I'm writing, but I've always written them as villains (of varying degrees of complexity, depending upon their importance to the story). A writer really has to work it to convince me of a vampire as a hero, but I have fun figuring out what the life of a vampire villain is like, especially dealing with a society of inherently evil beings. Albert Speer's "Inside the Third Reich" is probably a good primer for that sort of thing.