Texas writer smackdown: who's queen of the vampires?

We're deep in the spooky season (and I'm not just talking about elections!). So how about about pitting two Texans who write (or wrote) about vampires against each other? 

First up, of course, is Anne Rice. 

Her Interview with the Vampire will live long as the book that put the blood suckers back on the literary map. Sure, they’d been around for ages, or at least since Bram Stocker’s late 19^th-century Dracula opus. But what a dreary group they were. Asocial beings, they spent the day sleeping in dusty coffins, rising at night, clad in outdated garb, only to eat. Despite the implied sexuality of their blood lust, their romantic life was a dead end. Literally.

Wait! How is this a post about Texas writers? Anne Rice a Texan? Yes, because I count as Texas writers any who were born, lived, or worked in the state. Even those who later forsook it. And although born in New Orleans, she moved to Texas with her family at age 16. The family lived in Richardson, Texas, a Dallas suburb, where Anne attended Richardson High School and met her future husband, Stan Rice, in journalism class where they were both students.

Anne also attended college briefly in Texas, and she and Stan were married in the town of Denton before moving to San Francisco.

Now  that Rice's Texas bonafides are established, on to the novel that made her famous, and which probably could not have been written in Texas at the time.

Decades after its 1976 appearance, Interview  now seems prescient. No longer dated and dreary, Rice made vampires cool. They were rich, they lived in mansions, socialized, and dressed elegantly. They loved, they squabbled, they even have children, of sorts. People wanted to be them.

And often, they were gay.

I initially resisted the lure of Rice’s vampires. What kind of repression insists on bloodletting as a metaphor for sex? The notion of a child as vampire seemed like an especially creepy form of kiddie porn. And the limited diet? No way I could sympathize with the renunciation of chocolate, even to secure immortality.

Finally, I delved into Interview, finishing on a suitably dark and stormy night. A freak storm had cut electrical power to my Dallas neighborhood, setting the scene for the physical darkness of the year 1791 when Louis, in despairing guilt over his brother’s suicide, meets the vampire Lestat in a dark alley.

Lestat drains Louis nearly to death, but stops short of physical death, changing Louis into a vampire instead, for the mundane purpose of bleeding him of his money. Many great love affairs have had equally prosaic beginnings.

Although Interview seemed full of coded homoeroticism, it was still early days for gay pride. Rice (or perhaps her editors) stated explicitly that love between vampires can never be physical. The only physical sensuality of a vampire’s life must lie in killing.

It would take the decade of the 1980’s, with its plague of AIDS, to open more frank conversations about connections between sex and blood and death. And to turn Rice’s book from a cult classic to a media phenomenon.

Learning as I did that Rice modeled child vampire Claudia after her dead daughter Michele helped make the passages more palatable. Claudia in the book is only five, a good bit younger than her postulated age in the Interview movie. She’s also the same age as Michele when she died of leukemia, significantly, a disease of the blood, shortly before Rice wrote her ground-breaking book. And, of course, went on to write many more.

***

Image by Jerry from Pixabay

 Next up, the newcomer, Charlaine Harris. Her Southern vampires are also cool. With so many books about them, and of course, the obligatory drama series, I'll only mention one of the latter books, A Touch of Dead.

 Anne Rice brought the vampire legends back to life but Charlaine Harris made them funny. And still more socially relevant. Now freed from the constraints of having to conceal themselves from the “normal” humans (due to the invention of synthetic blood), they lead active social lives and consort with a still-broader range of paranormal beings: witches, fairies (in the classical sense), goblins, a whole lot of “weres” (not just wolves), and telepathic humans, among others.

While Rice left Texas, returning only briefly to marry, Harris got to Texas late and stayed. Her  second Southern Vampire novel was Living Dead in Dallas, and she has officially been a Texas resident for nearly a decade.

A Touch of Dead is Harris’s compilation of short stories starring her most famous character, telepathic wise-cracking Southern barmaid, Sookie Stackhouse.

Whether ruminating on the difficulties of doing a post-mortem on a murdered fairy (their bodies disintegrate rapidly after death) to the purported return of Dracula at his own birthday party, to the greed of witches trying to corner the local supply of good luck – and more--Sookie is never without an opinion.

It's a quick and easy read, understandable to even the novice reader of the Southern Vampire phenomenon. 

Wordcraft -- Charlaine Harris tells all -- almost -- to MWA

Bestselling author Charlaine Harris was happy to talk about everything to do with writing at last Saturday’s meeting of the Dallas Mystery Writers of America. Everything except one, that is.

“I can’t tell you how to write a query letter, because I’ve been published so long they don’t expect them from me.” Her first mystery was published in 1981, although she’s been most famous since 2008 for her Sookie Stackhouse urban fantasies, basis for HBO’s True Blood TV series.

“I got published over the transom, when there were transoms,” she said. “And there were more publishers. Now you almost have to have an agent, or at least a connection. My agent called and asked if he could represent me. I’ve had one agent for my entire career--I’ve had him longer than I’ve had my daughter.”

That magical call didn’t actually occur out of thin air. She had already written two well-reviewed mysteries that earned her the respect of another writer who recommended her to the agent, Harris said. “It was not natural for me to self-promote. A famous writer once walked up to me and said, I’ve published 25 million books. And I thought, I don’t recall asking. I don’t want to be like that but. . .”

But aren’t agents superfluous in this day of Internet publishing, an audience member asked.

“Poppycock,” Harris replied. “If you want to be published conventionally, you need an agent. Even if you (self) publish by e-book, what about foreign rights, movie rights, TV rights?”

She gave an enthusiastic “yes!” to a question about whether conferences (such as next month’s DFW Writer’s Conference) are good places to make necessary contacts. She also recommended contests--provided you win, of course--as ways to make worthwhile connections with agents and editors.

So how does a woman with as many writing credits as Harris, and TV spin-off, and movie options, start a writing project? “With a character or a place,” she said. The setting for her newest book, Midnight Crossroad, out next month, is a crossroad, “which is very significant in the magical world. And then I have a key scene I want to write. Hopefully, it’s in the middle of the book.” Having in mind a significant scene set mid-book helps avoid the problem of sagging midsections, although, “when my books get slow,” Harris said, her trademark solution is to “kill somebody, and the messier, the better.”

Her usual writing goal is eight new pages a day, which she edits as she goes along. In addition to self-editing, “I have a couple of friends that read my books before I send them to my editor. You’ve got to have somebody you trust, somebody you consider your peer, to point out the black holes in your writing, the things that are invisible to you. Other than that, you’ve got to write the best book you can.”

For more about Harris, books she’s written and books she loves, see her site, http://charlaineharris.com/, and at this site, “Harris gets deadly serious about character,” December 16, 2013.

For more about the Dallas chapter of the Mystery Writers of America and their programs, see http://dallasmysterwriters.com/.

(Next Monday, local writers the Dallas Library’s April 12 Book Fair.)

Wordcraft -- Harris gets deadly serious about characters

The list of teachers and topics for Saturday’s writing workshop from Mystery Writers of America was impressive: college instructors, writers with strings of awards, an investigative journalist. And then there was Charlaine Harris, whose Southern vampire mysteries have all made the New York Times best seller list, and I knew I had no choice but to open this discussion with a few perceptively wacky words from the creator of telepathic, vampire dating, mystery solving barmaid Sookie Stackhouse.

“Here’s the first rule for the characters who populate your book,” Harris told the her sold-out audience, “everybody’s got a job.”

And that’s “job” as in something they get paid for as well as serving multiple functions in the book itself. Harris learned this the hard way when her Sookie Stackhouse series took off, finally developing a character list in the hundreds (most of whom she lists in After Dead, her absolutely last word on the world of all things Sookie).

And with so many characters, “they must be so distinctive that the readers won’t have to keep flipping back the books” to identify them, a distinction aids by careful choice of names. “Do not use names within the same book that start with the same initial,” she said, adding a tongue in cheek admission of her own weakness, “I’m very fond of the letter J.” (Not that you’d guess it from her character list.)

So how does she recommend finding these distinctive names? In obituaries. Or better yet, delinquent tax notices, frequently published in small town newspapers. Although she warned, “Don’t ever use the complete real name from those.”

And remember the common characteristics everyone possesses, including some I‘ll admit never hearing in any other writing class, such as moral code (“even if it’s do unto others before they do it to you”) and sexual orientation (“it informs everything they do”).

Having said all that, and more, Harris admitted to being “a pantser of the worst sort”--an author who writes by the seat of her pants. The one character she said she had “built as a conscious thought” was Sookie Stackhouse herself. “In order to shake up my career, I thought I would make her do something completely different--a woman dating a vampire” because of her strange disability, the ability to read the minds of her fellow human beings.

“Telepathy would be a terrible thing,” Harris said, “Because I believe in the polite lie, because I was brought up Southern.”

Fortunately for the sake of her romantic involvements, Sookie discovered she couldn’t read the minds of dead people, such as vampires, leaving her blissfully unaware of the true answer when she asks a vamp important questions she’d rather not know the answers to.

(Harris cheerfully admitted that though she remained faithful to most traditions of vampire lore, she wasn’t above making things up, like vamps’ lack of brainwaves, when it suited her.)

So what’s she planning to do now that the Sookie series has ended this year? She’s got a new mystery series set in the small town of Midnight, Texas, with the first volume, Midnight Crossing, due out in May. For more about Harris and her writing, I’ll leave you to check out this mistress of mystery,
http://charlaineharris.com/.

And for more about the Mystery Writers of America, contact its Dallas chapter at
http://dallasmysterywriters.com/.

#

One of the instructors at Saturday’s session, Hallie Ephron, will return to Dallas January 25 for a day-long workshop on romantic suspense, courtesy of the Dallas Area Romance Authors. For information and to register, see
www.rwa.org/p/cm/ld/fid=1155/.