Friday, September 11, 2009

I've Been Bad

I meant to post something last weekend, but I have a great excuse. I was writing. (Yay!) Vampires (boo!) again (sigh)

I may be the only person in the world who truly doesn't get the whole vampire thing. Considering how easy it is to turn my mind to naughty thoughts, you'd think I'd find something to like about them. There's the whole savage beast thing, the angst, and of course, the costumes! Even without finding them sexy, you'd think my intellectual side would get into the whole vampire as a metaphor for just about everything, with a soupcon of Freudian analysis. But no.

So of course, after I rewrote a vampire short, and produced a new one for an anthology, I was ready to take a break from the bloodsuckers for a while and write something that got my pulse fluttering. But then I was blindsided by a vampire novella that sprung fully formed from my skull like Athena, only with fangs.

I knocked out over 20,000 words last weekend. That's unprecedented output for me. I'm usually a slow writer.

So if I hate vampires, why do I write them? You're so cute. But I'll tell you a horrible truth: if you want to eventually become a professional writer, you have to write what sells. Vampires sell. So I blame the public. And I hope to god their fascination switches to something else soon. Just, you know, please no fairies. I may be a writer whore, but I have limits.

4 comments:

D. L. King said...

Yeah, you hate vampires--yada, yada, yada--you're a writer whore--yeah, yeah, yet you wrote 20,000 words in a weekend. That spells involvement, rather than writer whore, to me. Seems like that story needed to be told. 'Fess up, you were into it!

There's no way I can write 20K words in a couple of days without being into it or turned on by it. Come to think of it, I don't think I've ever written 20K words in a weekend--even when The Melinoe Project was screaming to get out of my head!

Can't wait to read it!

Kathleen Bradean said...

Well, it was a three-day weekend...

Helen said...

Tsk. You've sold your soul to Twilight, haven't you?

};) Just kidding. I'm not sure what it is about vampires either, to be honest. They've been done to more than death lately. But obviously something caught your fancy, to write 20K words in 3 days.

I'm guessing you did NOT take patty breaks during that time...

Gillette said...

I do not like vampire stories. I find it interesting that any writer would write something that they apparently have no enthusiasm for. I guess you have to pay the bills and all that; I just think of writers as being more "free" than those of us in less interesting and more structured jobs.