McAnally's (The Community Pub) > Author Craft
Vampire Use In Contemporary Fantasy
BigMama:
I'll be the first to tell you I'm not an expert but I do read a lot and I post on many boards and on a lot of them readers are getting tired of paranormals. It is becoming hard to find anything new that has not been done by someone else and done better. For that reason, I think the paranormal has crested and will begin to give way to another fav, and I think it may be the supernatural. One opinion among many. ;)
Dom:
--- Quote from: Richelle on September 13, 2006, 07:54:26 AM ---Not me, though. There are two vampires in Succubus Blues who have a very silly sidekick role. They're not even very good vampires--they mostly get raw meat from butcher shops. And on the topic of Succubus Blues, I thought I was the hottest thing around to think of putting succubi in urban fantasy. Then author Jackie Kessler sold her succubus book a month or so after me. We both cried upon discovering each other, then got over it. Now we're promoting our stuff together. No doubt other succubus franchises will follow.
--- End quote ---
I have an Incubus. :D Or rather two; one's half-Incubus, one's quarter-incubus. Given how Incubi...er...get around...there's a lot of halfbreeds out there. ;) Or so my reasoning goes.
Tersa:
"Strike that, the health concious kid sister made it two.... succubuses. Succubusees? Succubi? Stupid Latin correspondence course."
Sorry, with all of this talk about succubi and incubi, I couldn't pass up a chance to quote Harry. Ah, how I love Blood Rites. ;)
Cathy Clamp, thanks for posting about The Ultimate Encyclopedia of Mythology . I love reading myths to get inspiration for stories, so I'll have to go track a copy down. ;D
fjeastman:
One thing I've noticed ... I went to several Big Name Booksellers in various cities and went through their scifi/fantasy sections looking for books that obviously billed themselves as contemporary supernatural/occult.
About 2 in 3 were written by women about female protagonists and contained vampires or some variation of "The Hot'n'sexy Dangerous Supernatural Guy/Girl" in positions of romantic or at least sexual interest.
THAT combination, I think, is outplayed. Two prominently displayed series were female witches of some stripe who are strong/sassy/sexy and yet frightened and thrilled by how easily their supernatural lovers could overpower them.
One, of course, involves a (mostly ex now, eh?) vampire hunter boffing kennels full of supernatural hunks.
Most have a universality of skewed english faerie mythology (faeries, often with wings, and Victorian to the hilt). Out of hand I can only think of one that dealt with native american mythological themes (and turned them romantic).
I would say my favorite authors in the general area would be Butcher and Neil Gaiman, and Gaiman's stuff has been billed more as Horror and Contemporary Literary than fantasy.
--fje
Richelle Mead:
Funny you mentioned the predominance of female protagonists. I'm beating my head against the wall with a current urban fantasy project. My agent and I were discussing it and both agreed the female narrator's love interest had a far more compelling tale to tell and that I should bring that out more. I noted that it would work better and be more interesting if I made him the first person narrator instead of her. My agent was cautious about endorsing that, noting that it might not fly in what's otherwise a female dominated market. So now what line to walk? Would I be consigning the book to oblivion by having a guy tell it? Or is the market ready for more of that kind of thing (Harry being a success)? Of course, the correct answer is to write whatever makes a good story, and that's what I'll do. But still, it's just another example of how mind-boggling it is trying to figure out what this genre's going to do.
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