Written Whispers

Alright, time for a brand new first post of W-W 2.0 (a.k.a. the new flavor of this blog). Tonight I’d like to write about something that affects me as both a writer and an avid reader.

Vampire obsession overdose.

Yes. I’m serious.

Please don’t get me wrong as I start this post out. I enjoyed the Twilight series and would have devoured the books in mere hours if I didn’t have to work. Not because they were ‘in fashion’ but because I felt they were a good read and I do enjoy Stephanie Meyer’s writing style and I don’t care what anyone else has to say about it. This post isn’t about the hordes of people who either hate or love her series. No, I have bigger concerns such as what has become of the monster known as the publishing industry and the skyrocketing amount of vampire fiction that’s out there.

After Harry Potter reached it’s peak I saw multitudes of magic and mayhem on the shelves at my local bookstores. Wizardry became a familiar friend in many of the books I opened and I was alright with that. I haven’t even finished the HP series (too much going on in my life when it was a craze) and I just didn’t get into it as much as other people but it was a good read. A lot of the books that came out around that time were awesome as well- some of them are still among my favorites. Now though, the tides have changed and instead of finding myself overjoyed at the abundance of vampire literature… I find myself more than a little disappointed.

Where once finding a blood tinted read with sexy vampires and dramatic plots was like a rare gem amidst the shelves I now wish I wasn’t so intent on looking in the first place. There’s this whole section at my local bookstore dedicated to vampire novels and I’m sad to say every time I pass through the isles I feel like it’s free range on the writing market where anything with vampires can get published. I see all these books with wonderfully dark and beautiful covers- so tempting and yet, while not total drivel… I’m just tired of the all too common handful of plots and well… some of them just aren’t that great.

At least not where my opinion is concerned though I have found quite a few who share it.

As a writer I’ve done some reading on the publishing industry and while I fear I will never understand it entirely- in which case maybe I’m better off, but one thing I do understand is this: the writing market eats them up alive. Slowly chewing and savoring each bite until it’s so full it gets sick. I’m thinking we’re nearly at the end of the vicious cycle where it can begin again with a new series of books and another genre can be gobbled up painfully. My point?

Trends are both a curse and a blessing. On the one hand- they’re awesome for the publishing industry and any writer who just so happens to be submitting the right thing at the right time but on the other end- when we all get sick of it if the market doesn’t catch on soon enough sales crash and a bunch of overstocked books are going to be sitting on some mighty lonely shelves unsold unless they’re worth their salt. Or lucky.

That’s what bothered me as a reader.

Now comes the bigger problem- when the reading material I find myself surrounded with starts to frustrate my muse and throw me into a stuttering fit everyone time someone asks me to summarize my own work in progress.

It seems like everyone is writing about vampires these days and every time someone asks me what my book is about I end up squirming in embarrassment, half unwilling to even mention that vampires are essential to my plot. Why? Because when someone says “Uhm, it’s about this girl who falls in love with a vampire…” I know for a fact I don’t take that person very seriously as a writer because it is a trend right now. Not just to read about vampires but also to write about them (obviously, else where would the books for the fans come from?).  Some are still caught up in the Twilight craze and others are just following the wagon and it’s hard to tell if anyone I’m talking to after such information is a serious writer or just an over zealous fan. I don’t mean to not take them seriously, I love having more writer buddies, but so far… it just seems to be another part of the fad.

I know I don’t take a lot of the vampire fiction writers I meet seriously. Problem is… I’m one of them and I want to be taken seriously!

I could have screamed the other day. Nearly all of my coworkers know I’m obsessed with writing. I may have been working in the kitchen for five years now but that’s not even close to where my passions lay. Still, despite this knowlege I found myself in one of these conversations the other day.

Coworker: “Oh, so what’s your book going to be about?”

Me: (I suck at summaries by the way) “Well, there’s this girl who has no memory from before five years ago and she’s discovered along the way that she can turn into a cat. Her big thing is finding out who she really is and she gets really close this one time but then something happens and she’s drawn into all this drama.”

Coworker: “What happens?”

Me: “Well, this vampire comes along and…”

Coworker: “Oh… So you’re into writing those kind of books. You must have read Twilight.”

No. No. No! You see why I could have screamed?

Yes, I understand a lot of writer’s of vampire fiction were inspired by Twilight. Coolbeans for them but I’m honestly not one of them and I’m not saying this just because I don’t want to be grouped with the mass of people wearing “I love Edward Cullen” T-shirts. My inspiration- no, that’s the wrong word… The kick in the butt I needed to actually go through with writing a story with vampires in it is all thanks to a wonderful author named Karen Chance.

Yes, I did start working on my novel around the time Twilight came out but I’d been toying with the idea of writing a book with vampires in it on and off for a long time. My issue was that there are so many vampire books out there and they all seem to have a girl who either wants to be bitten or ‘turned’ or the girl is constantly being saved. The vampire is handsome, rich, and has all kinds of ways out of bad situations at his disposal- oh, and while I’m at it he’s probably angsting about having to drink blood even though (depending on the world you’re reading) he’s been doing it for hundreds of years. Cool, yeah, I like those stories too but I didn’t want to write something that had been done a million and one times before. I wanted to write something different. That’s when I came across Karen Chance’s works. She is a vampire novelist and there’s a huge difference from her stories to a lot of what is out there- her female characters kick ass, her vampires have issues, and the teenage romance dramatic happy ending couldn’t be farther away in her universe. Yay for her!

It was after I saw that it was possible to write something like that that I really started to pen down all the vampire related ideas that came to mind with a serious attitude. Not long after that my muse delivered me this really awesome plot and wham! I had my novel.

Perhaps I’ve made my point or perhaps I haven’t. Either way I’d love to hear from some of my fellow writers out there. Have you ever been afraid of falling into the trends? Accused of doing so? What do you think about book trends? Leave a comment!

Tags: book trends, Cassandra Palmer, Karen Chance, publishing industry, Stephanie Meyer, Touch the Dark, Twilight, vampire, vampire books, vampire novel craze, writing market