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Now that the second season of the Oxford World's Classics Reading Group is drawing to a close, let's see how much you've learnt from reading Bram Stoker's Dracula. Test your knowledge of all things Vampire with our quiz.

The post How much do you know about Dracula?[quiz] appeared first on OUPblog.

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The date-line is 2014. An outbreak of a deadly disease in a remote region, beyond the borders of a complacent Europe. Local deaths multiply. The risk does not end with death, either, because corpses hold the highest risk of contamination and you must work to contain their threat. All this is barely even reported at first, until the health of a Western visitor, a professional man, breaks down.

The post Why bother reading Bram Stoker’s Dracula? appeared first on OUPblog.

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There were many books on vampires before Bram Stoker's Dracula. Early anthropologists wrote accounts of the folkloric vampire -- a stumbling, bloated peasant, never venturing far from home, and easily neutralized with a sexton’s spade and a box of matches. The literary vampire became a highly mobile, svelte aristocratic rake with the appearance of the short tale The Vampyre in 1819.

The post Before Bram: a timeline of vampire literature appeared first on OUPblog.

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Although occultists like the antiquarian Montague Summers would like to claim that the belief in vampires is global and transhistorical (and therefore probably true), the vampire is a thoroughly modern being. Like the Gothic genre itself, stories of vampires emerge in the Age of Enlightenment, as instances of primitive superstition that help define the rational scepticism of northern, Protestant Europe.

The post The birth of the vampyre: Dracula and mythology in Early Modern Europe appeared first on OUPblog.

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Modern Vampire

The classic story of Dracula, by Bram Stoker, originally published in 1887, has had a long, and continuing run with readers of fiction--or was it even fiction?  In the 2008 special edition by W. W. Norton, with an introduction by Neil Gaiman, and annotated by Leslie S. Klinger, we read in the preface by Klinger:

My principal aim...has been to restore a sense of wonder, excitement, and sheer fun to this great work.  To that end, perhaps for the first time, I examine Stoker's published compilation of letters, journals, and recordings as Stoker wished: I employ a gentle fiction here, as I did in The New Annotated Sherlock Holmes, that the events described in Dracula "really took place" and that the work presents the recollections of real persons, whom Stoker has renamed and whose papers (termed the "Harker Papers" in my notes) he has recast, ostensibly to conceal their identities.

As Stoker wished.  What did that entire sentence above actually mean?

I have been reading this book as the Feb - April quarterly selection of a Goodreads-Ireland discussion group.   I saw the Bela Lugosi movie many years ago, and have been more than a little surprised by the popular interest in all things 'vampire' over the past decade--Anne Rice's books, TV series like "Buffy the Vampire Slayer," lots of YA novels, etc.  However, I had not previously been drawn to read anything in the genre.  Once I decided to read this volume, I just glossed over the preface and introduction and waded into Stoker's originally published manuscript.  I liked the writing and the story quite well, and at first I mostly ignored the numerous annotations made by Klinger on almost every page.  The story flowed well and was quite mysterious.  However, as the plot unfolded through the Transylvania region, I began referring to the annotations, many of them quite informative, but kept noticing earnest arguments for and against the veracity of certain events and geography.  It began to seem like Klinger was taking care to point out things that did not match some real, but little known history of the vampire, Dracula.  

As the story progresses, and Dracula makes his way to England, his depredations become more ghoulish.  Klinger's notes begin to compare the attacks of the vampire, and the countering strategies employed by the four men and one woman opposing Dracula, contrasted with previously known folklore, or testaments as to the powers and habits of vampires. The reader begins to be seduced into believing there might be a quasi-historical foundation for vampirism.  However, the 'fictional dream' state necessary to sustain good fiction suffers somewhat whenever the reader's attention is drawn from the flow and suspense of the storyline to check on what Klinger has to say about events.  Sometimes what he has to say has a strong rational skepticism--like when Professor Van Helsing makes on-the-spot transfusions of blood to one of Dracula's victims on three separate mornings, using different volunteer donors each time from among the men.  Klinger remarks how fortunate that these transfusions were all successful:

Truly remarkable doctoring.  Although the science of blood transfusing was still in its infancy, there was some understanding that compatibility of donor and recipient was important.  Having transfused Lucy twice successfully (by blind luck), Van Helsing rolls the dice a third time, risking serious problems, rather than fall back on a tested donor.

 Klinger's point seems valid, but it seems unlikely that the "blind luck" aspect would otherwise have jumped out at the reader enough to disrupt a continuity of the 'fictional dream'.  Other critical annotations might question distances traveled in elapsed time periods, conflicting dates of diary entries, etc., unethical legal behavior of the solicitor, Jonathan Harker, credulousness of Professor Van Helsing, criticisms of Helsing's dialect (I disliked it, too) etc.  However, many such items were not likely to cause the reader too much difficulty in staying with the story. There were only a few items pointing out an inconsistency in the powers available to the vampire which might have given me some pause even without the annotation.

I liked the overall story line and wished I'd read it through completely before looking at any annotations.  However, once I had discovered the annotations referring repeatedly to differences or agreements with the "Harker Papers," which I'd been alerted to in Klinger's preface before starting the story, I felt I needed to stay aware of how they fit into the scheme of things.  At the end, however, I realized the "Harker Papers" were a fictional construct of Klinger.  He wanted to suggest that the events of Dracula really took place, and that this was "as Stoker wished."

The actual documentation left by Stoker for his conceptualization and writing of the Dracula novel are a collection of Notes, prepared circa 1890-1896, and held by the Rosenbach Museum and Library in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, and an interim manuscript prepared sometime prior to the published version of 1897.  The interim manuscript is currently held by a private owner, Mr. Paul G. Allen.  Klinger had reviewed all of these documents for the annotated volume published by Norton.  It appears the "Harker Papers" are only a terminology used by him for interviews we are to presume were made by Stoker with real people, and who were involved in real events described in Dracula.  Klinger suggests that the existing Notes were subsequently prepared from those interviews, after changing names to protect identities of the real people.  An original set of "Harker Papers" predating Stoker's Notes are thus Klinger's "gentle fiction."

The idea of the interviews suggested by Klinger are not so far-fetched, however. The creative process followed by Bram Stoker employs typical elements that some, if not most, writers might consider in developing such a novel.  The concept is the usual first step, followed perhaps by an outline. Not all writers will employ the outline, preferring to give the first draft free rein without any such constraint. However, before starting a first draft, some writers will conduct a written interview, as if it actually happened, with one or more of their main characters.  Such a process can help a writer find a unique 'voice' and personality for a character, and how they might be disposed to act, given the tensions anticipated in playing out the concept of the story.  Thus, the idea proposed by Klinger that a collection of interviews of real people by Stoker actually fits as a conceivable step in the writing of Dracula.

It is recommended to read the story through at least once without reference to the annotations, to enjoy the full mystery and atmosphere of a compelling story, and then enjoy reading it again with reference to the annotations by Klinger.  Many are rich in content, others perhaps a little carping, but writers will appreciate both Stoker's, and Klinger's, feats of imagination; first in the creation, and secondly in heightening, the mystery of Dracula.

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Title: Millennium Snow Genre: Romance Publisher: Hakusensha (JP), Viz Manga (US) Story/Artist: Bisco Hatori Serialized in: Lala in 2001, Lala DX in 2013 Original Release Date: June 3, 2014 Review copy provided by Viz Media Bisco Hatori’s name may not be well-known in the west but her most famous work, Ouran High School Host Club, still finds new ... Read more

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Imagine that you have a one-time-only chance to become a vampire. With one swift, painless bite, you’ll be permanently transformed into an elegant and fabulous creature of the night. As a member of the Undead, your life will be completely different. You’ll experience a range of intense new sense experiences, you’ll gain immortal strength, speed and power, and you’ll look fantastic in everything you wear. You’ll also need to drink the blood of humanely farmed animals (but not human blood), avoid sunlight, and sleep in a coffin.

Now, suppose that all of your friends, people whose interests, views and lives were similar to yours, have already decided to become vampires. And all of them tell you that they love it. They encourage you to become a vampire too, saying things like: “I’d never go back, even if I could. Life has meaning and a sense of purpose now that it never had when I was human. It’s amazing! But I can’t really explain it to you, a mere human. You’ll have to become a vampire to know what it’s like.”

In this situation, how could you possibly make an informed choice about what to do? For, after all, you cannot know what it is like to become a vampire until you become one. The experience of becoming a vampire is transformative. What I mean by this is that it is an experience that is both radically epistemically new, such that you have to have it in order to know what it will be like for you, and moreover, will change your core personal preferences.

So you can’t rationally choose to become a vampire, but nor can you rationally choose to not become one, if you want to choose based on what you think it would be like to live your life as a vampire. This is because you can’t possibly know what it would be like before you try it. And you can’t possibly know what you’d be missing if you didn’t.

We don’t normally have to consider the choice to become Undead, but the structure of this example generalizes, and this makes trouble for a widely assumed story about how we should make momentous, life-changing choices for ourselves. The story is based on the assumption that, in modern western society, the ideal rational agent is supposed to charge of her own destiny, mapping out the subjective future she hopes to realize by rationally evaluating her options from her authentic, personal point of view. In other words, when we approach major life decisions, we are supposed to introspect on our past experiences and our current desires about what we want our futures to be like in order to guide us in determining our future selves. But if a big life choice is transformative, you can’t know what your future will be like, at least, not in the deeply relevant way that you want to know about it, until you’ve actually undergone the life experience.

Transformative experience cases are special kinds of cases where important ordinary approaches that people try to use to make better decisions, such as making better generalizations based on past experiences, or educating themselves to better evaluate and recognize their true desires or preferences, simply don’t apply. So transformative experience cases are not just cases involving our uncertainty about certain sorts of future experiences. They are special kinds of cases that focus on a distinctive kind of ‘unknowability’—certain important and distinctive values of the lived experiences in our possible futures are fundamentally first-personally unknowable. The problems with knowing what it will be like to undergo life experiences that will transform you can challenge the very coherence of the ordinary way to approach major decisions.

Moreover, the problem with these kinds of choices isn’t just with the unknowability of your future. Transformative experience cases also raise a distinctive kind of decision-theoretic problem for these decisions made for our future selves. Recall the vampire case I started with. The problem here is that, before you change, you are supposed to perform a simulation of how you’d respond to the experience in order to decide whether to change. But the trouble is, who you are changes as you become a vampire.

Think about it: before you become a vampire, you should assess the decision as a human. But you can’t imaginatively put yourself in the shoes of the vampire you will become and imaginatively assess what that future lived experience will be. And, after you have become a vampire, you’ve changed, such that your assessment of your decision now is different from the assessment you made as a human. So the question is, which assessment is the better one? Which view should determine who you become? The view you have when you are human? Or the one you have when you are a vampire.

The questions I’ve been raising here focus on the fictional case of the choice to be come a vampire. But many real-life experiences and the decisions they involve have the very same structure, such as the choice to have one’s first child. In fact, in many ways, the choice to become a parent is just like the choice to become a vampire! (You won’t have to drink any blood, but you will undergo a major transition, and life will never be the same again.)

In many ways, large and small, as we live our lives, we find ourselves confronted with a brute fact about how little we can know about our futures, just when it is most important to us that we do know. If that’s right, then for many big life choices, we only learn what we need to know after we’ve done it, and we change ourselves in the process of doing it. In the end, it may be that the most rational response to this situation is to change the way we frame these big decisions: instead of choosing based on what we think our futures will be like, we should choose based on whether we want to discover who we’ll become.

The post Vampires and life decisions appeared first on OUPblog.

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It’s been a while since I updated! Time to do so, and I’ll begin with a Halloween piece I worked on recently. The main piece and closeups are below. I can always add and tweak, but there is a time to call an illustration “Done!” Happy Halloween, everyone!

 

 

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Raven's Eve - 2005

RAVEN'S EVE was painted in 2005. It is one of the last pieces in my 'dark' period, where I painted many vampires, gothic heroes, and my palette consisted of many reds, blacks, blues, and more blacks.

Grab this Special Edition print on my Etsy shop: https://www.etsy.com/listing/204576124/halloween-wolf-art-print-full-moon

She will be available until my birthday on November 19, 2014.

RAVEN is a character I designed in high school, who followed me all the way out of college. She was created after viewing the movie "The Crow", and was my way to express the depression and loneliness I was feeling at the time. Most teens do. Since her beginning she has come a long way.

Raven lost everything very young, including her soul. She spent years searching for purpose, looking for a way to fill the void within her heart, but finds no relief. She is immortal, but not fully vampire. She was human, but now there isn't a word for what she is. Raven has been a hired assassin...as her void and depression allow her to null out the emotions, and she has fought for justice as well. She is neither good or evil. 

This character is no longer needed in my life. I found the missing piece I was searching for, and it was and is Jesus. Love. When I painted this piece I was starting to transition from a practicing witch to a practicing follower of Christ. Surprisingly, it wasn't that big of a leap for me, as my story led perfectly into His.

The piece RAVEN'S EVE symbolizes her strength and confidence in who she is at the time she was painted. The wolves symbolizing gentleness, wisdom, and maybe some purity. The daggers...well....we all sin every day and they represent that. But also death, death to the old self...the self that has already been dead for so long.

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We are proud to unveil Varney the Vampire: A Literary Remix, a free digital book featuring the work of GalleyCat readers.

We used Smashwords to publish the final product, and you can download a free copy in all major eBook formats. If you participated in our Literary Vampire Remix Writing Contest but can’t find your work in the digital book, email GalleyCat and we will update the digital book.

Here’s more about the book: “A crew of dedicated GalleyCat readers remixed a single page from Varney the Vampire-a bestselling vampire novel from the 19th Century filled with enough star-crossed romance, vampire action and purple prose to inspire another Twilight trilogy.”

continued…

New Career Opportunities Daily: The best jobs in media.

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V is for Housework!

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Susan at a Halloween party a few decades ago.

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Guest Expert: C Kay Brooks

Regardless of whether you are ‘only’ a reader, a budding author ‘wantabee’ or a published author, you should consider owning a website and posting blogs.

As a reader, you can challenge yourself personally as to how much you read and document what you read while making new friends along the way.

In sharing what you read, you help other readers to find interesting and informative reading material. If you find a new author that you enjoy, become a benefactor by encouraging and assisting the author — be a cheerleader to bolster flagging spirits of a discouraged author. Being an author can be a lonely, isolated occupation. Many beginning authors give up in frustration, not being able to continue for lack of an audience. Your blog with friends and followers could feature budding authors that you have found. The author would have a refreshing moment in your spotlight. You could be the catalyst or helping hand for that author to find a road to success.

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As an author, you can use a blog to fill in details about a location, occupation or a character’s history (back story) to enhance the reading experience of your books. Once you have a following, you can engage them as partners with brainstorming for endings or new story ideas. Engaging in the creative process gives a sense of ownership, creates a vested interest in the outcome. Your finished novel, the outcome, will have a waiting audience eager to read what you did with their suggestions.

Your blog can be shared on your platform and re-shared by followers, fans, friends and those who stumble across you post. Think of your blog as the starting place of your streaming link to the world. It can be a platform or foundation where you can share yourself and your creations to build a fan base. Your blog can be the vehicle enabling you to reach out and touch the world.

So what do you blog about? Not what you had for breakfast, unless you are a gourmet cook giving instructions, a diet consultant or a “biggest loser” offering ideas on becoming healthy and slimmer.

If you are a non-fiction author, posted articles with hints that didn’t make your book, or small portions of your book working as teasers would be good. Posting success stories of how your book information was implemented could be interesting and very strong selling points for your book.

If you are a memoir author you can post more detailed information about places, people or experiences featured or mentioned briefly in your book.

A fiction author is often more challenged but should look for a non-fiction hook that people might be interested in and be searching for. You can use your story research, gathered before or during the actual writing of your novel. It might be history of vampires, theories, myths and famous vampire characters that refuse to die throughout years of literature. What about a review of vampires portrayed in the movies?

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Oh, you don’t write about vampires? In the above paragraph substitute you character’s profession, personality or problem for the word ‘vampire’. Let’s

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In which I try, very hard, to stay off my soapbox. First off, I’ll tell you how I ended up with my Border Collie. I grew up with Setters and had always intended on getting one myself one day. They are a great breed, fun, smart enough, high energy and beautiful. I fell in love with Border Collies several years ago when my dog’s full brother came to live with me for a few months. His person is a good friend of mine, and she was going to be overseas on an internship for months so I agreed to keep him. What a life changing experience. He was amazing. Smart, easily trained (he was four or five at the time I believe), loving, a great companion. Naturally when I was finally ready for my own dog I decided I wanted a BC too.

Kira, my BC, is a year and eight months old, and she is the delight of my life, but she’s a ton of work. I did a lot of research because I knew Border Collies were a whole different style of dog than the Setters I had grown up with. Honestly, even my experience with Liam (my friend’s dog), and my research, didn’t truly prepare me for life with a female BC puppy. Let me tell you, the guys are much more mellow (read as less intense, not hyper) than the girls in this breed. And OMG are they smart. (This is the beauty and the curse of the breed.)

This is what my typical day is like. During my workweek (I work four, ten-hour days, and I work nights) I get up, let Kira out, do some writing work, play with my dog for as long as I can, get ready and go to work. In the summer I also come home and play fetch with her with her glow in the dark Chuck-It ball. Best Invention Ever!

During the weekend I get up, go to the barn for a few hours with my dog, do writing work, broken up with fetch and other training, play with my dog of various sorts, more writing work, more playing with my dog, etc. On Sundays when weather permits we have flyball practice, on Mondays we have herding lessons. Sometimes we have clinics and trials and tournaments to go to. Is this starting to sound like having a kid? Yep… from what I can tell from parents, this is exactly like having a kid except that I am legally allowed to leave her for long periods of time. You’ll also notice I don’t mention hang out time with friends here… Pretty much, if it doesn’t involve my dog, I’m not likely to do it. I make exceptions, but she needs a lot of exercise to stay sane during the workweek when I am gone.

(Here’s my soapbox. I’ll keep it short.) I mentioned above that their intelligence was the curse and beauty of the breed. The reason is this. People get Border Collies because they are cute, smart and great companions. What they often don’t realize is how smart BC’s are and that they were bred to work. It is so ingrained in them, that if they don’t have a job, they’ll make one up. A lot of times they become destructive in their quest for a job. The human doesn’t know what to do with the dog and then the dog ends up in a shelter… Border Collies should only be in active households. They need exercise, lots of it, every day, and a job to keep their minds active. However, you can teach your BC to clean up the kids toys, clean up the laundry, help dig flower beds, probably even dust, if you take the time to work with your dog. They are amazing and the possibilities are endless. There are other cautions with this breed, for example their herding instinct is so strong, that, while they are amazing with kids, sometimes they can try to herd them too. They know they need to keep the kids safe, but if the ki

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Any suggestions for a caption?

I'm also open to suggestions for the titles on the books being read.

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For a free download of Vinnie the Vampire click HERE

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What a freekin' week!! I was actually starting to feel good for once, so I stopped by Starbucks one morning to get myself a Frappachin-O-Positive (my fav -- way better than the Moch-A-Negative). I didn't have time to drink it before school, so I had to smuggle it into class, and the first second my teacher turned her back to write on the board, I downed it.  HUGE FREEKIN' MISTAKE! First I

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Just wanted to share my new cover for Not An Angel. Why is there a new cover you ask? And what happened to the other one?

Well, I couldn't use the same one the publisher had used, and because I got the rights back, I needed a new design for when I self-publish. I'm so excited leaping into the self-publishing world with Trace & Kira's story. I see this as an adventure. And I'm curious to know what you think of the new Trace too.

I'm hoping to have Not An Angel uploaded to Amazon & B&N before the end of the month.

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Trying to conserve water, reduce evaporation, all that sort of thing, I spread bark mulch underneath my shrubs. It looks nicer than bare earth too. Great idea, right?

Except for one thing. My neighbor has chickens and they dig in it. So every time that I sweep it off the brick walkway and back under my shrubs, the chickens invade and scratch it all back onto my patio.

That's me above. Only I don't get the eggs!

When I lived in Oklahoma, we had problems with a neighbor who had cows. He believed since he sold the land to folks on the ridge and the rest of the land around us was his cattle grazing land, he shouldn't have to fence them in. That we had to fence his cattle out. Didn't work. The calves got beyond my split rail fence, the cows reached their heads underneath the lower posts and yanked out all of my newly planted shrubs, killing them. After all that work of planting around 30 shrubs, I was pretty angry.

Now, I like animals. And I have to admit those doe-eyed cows and calves tugged at my heart, but the farmer only cared about eating them. And he didn't care anything about what they did to the properties that he'd sold to others.

Free range went out a couple of centuries ago! Free range meant he could graze his cattle anywhere. Then barbed wire fencing came into fashion. Instead of barbed wire though...I just got a lawyer's letter explaining we weren't living in "that" world any longer and he had to fence his cows to keep them contained off our property. He moved his cows, knowing he couldn't put fences up here, and there, and everywhere. Too many homesteads. The property all cut up. Talk about wanting your beef and eating it too!

I still love living out with the "wild" animals.

Only, I wish they'd quit messing with my garden! The good thing about the chickens is they do eat bugs. Have at it! I've got plenty of those!

Ever have problems with neighbor's pets???

Terry
"Giving new meaning to the term alpha male."
www.terryspear.com

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See the little path and the slight rise in the hill and then the hole in the rock? That's an entrance to the castle.

I just loved it. I could envision guarding that entrance from enemies, or hoping that if I entered through there, I would be thought of as friend, not foe.

The castle sat high above cliffs so not easily accessible.

I envisioned the lairds who ruled over the castle and lands--whether they be the usual sort, a little wolfish, or even part of the fae world. :)

So if you visited here in the distant past, who would you have encountered?

Terry
"Giving new meaning to the term alpha male."
www.terryspear.com

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Some thought that the blurred photo I used in The Dark Fae book trailer was photo shop magic.

But it's really true fae magic.

Okay, here's the secret: We were driving through a really cool tunnel of trees. I was sitting in the back seat, trying to take pictures of everything and anything, and I wanted desperately to take a picture of this mystical area after leaving the B&B. We drove through it several times, seeing a deer in the thick forest the one time as we had to find a place to eat dinner, and we ventured onto one of the islands the next day and returned to the B&B that night.

So I took the photo from the back seat, trying to get a picture through the windshield. We were really going slow as it was pretty much a one-car road and it wound around so you couldn't see head-on traffic coming up. Actually, if I had been driving, we would have been going slower. Which would have meant we probably wouldn't have seen half as much of Scotland as we did! :)

Luckily, we only encountered another car coming from the opposite direction once. And the other good part was that it didn't matter which side of the road we drove on. There weren't two sides. :)

Clever, the Scots, eh?

The only thing I photo shopped out was the rear view mirror, that had the nerve to be in the picture, and a little bit of one of the head rests, same story. :)

And that's the story...how we fae transported in Scotland. :)

Terry
"Giving new meaning to the term alpha male."
www.terryspear.com

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Who needs sleep? Well, I do.

But when the story is keeping me awake, I have to write it or I'll keep thinking about it over and over, trying to "remember" it for when I wake. Which can have disastrous consequences. In other words, I don't recall anything I thought of once I wake. Or, I don't ever sleep, and still can't remember what I was thinking of.

So what happens when the story hits in the middle of the night?



I see full scenes.

Sometimes it just happens. Last night, I woke from a nightmare and couldn't quit thinking about work and whatnot, and couldn't get back to sleep. So I forced myself to think about a scene in The Winged Fae I needed to write.

And that's when it happened.

I can stare at my computer screen every minute I have free from work and not get anything written. So sometimes I just have to get away from the computer and brainstorm, and then if it comes to me, I begin to write it down by long hand.

Which is why I'm up really early typing my notes up now.

Well, actually, I never got back to sleep.

It's really a major scene, the turning point in the story. I need to write more that leads up to it. And flesh it out more, but I actually wrote the whole scene--9 pages long, 3,000 words. :)

Less than 9,000 words to go and The Winged Fae will be done!

Did it come to me in a dream? Absolutely not. I was fully awake, sort of. Now I'm even less so.

:)


I told you the fae are mischievous!

Terry
"Giving new meaning to the term alpha male."
www.terryspear.com

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