Brian Patrick McKinley's Blog, page 14
March 30, 2014
Bloodletting: Vampires Shouldn’t Go Thirsty
Originally posted on Thinking Skull:
How much is enough? Is there
ever
enough?
A thirst for blood is arguably THE defining trait of a vampire. They drink it to exist and helpful humans are readily available; what varies from story to story is the actual need.
The first consideration is what the blood is for. In a modern twist, vampires may portrayed as biological, needing blood due to an inability to manufacturer their own or requiring some essential element that only living blood contains. In such cases, the vampire may be susceptible to blood diseases or the effects of substances such as drugs or alcohol. For the more traditional “mystical” type, “the blood is the life,” allowing the vampire to literally take the life force of the living into themselves to empower an animated corpse.
In either case, how much is enough? How long does it last? How often must the vampire feed?
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March 27, 2014
Spotlight On: The Chermasu
Alia Cheveyo, a young Hopi woman, is content with her traditional life high in the mesas of Arizona until the day the old man from her childhood vision arrives at her door. He reveals her kinship to the Chermasu: A near-extinct race of shape-shifters who inspired the witchcraft legends of early North America. This shatters everything she believes about herself and all she treasures about her heritage. Even more disturbing is their mission: To finish their ancient war against the society of vampires who control the modern world.
Alia’s story begins in two short stories, which are both available on Amazon.com. Chermasu shows how she is first introduced to the strange world of the pack while Monsters completes the tale of her first journey with the pack. Both stories are pieces of a novel I started before Ancient Blood, but never completed.
Their story continues to fascinate me, however, and I do plan to return to it in order to finish the tale. Please check them out:
The Chermasu: http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B00AST5A80
Monster: http://www.amazon.com/Monsters-Order-Brian-Patrick-McKinley-ebook/dp/B00APRKO5Y
The Vampire Tarot
Like what you see? Find more at his site: zahir13.webs.com
I loved some of his choices, but by my count (haha) there remain some cards left to complete the set so what would you like to see added? Personally, I’d love to see some of the Lost Boys of the gang from Fright Night make an appearance, perhaps Jessie or Severen from Near Dark.
Make your music heard in the comments, children of the night!
March 23, 2014
Bootlegs and Fan Fiction: Moving beyond the Artist’s Concept of the Artist
Originally posted on Vampire Syndrome Blog:
In my basement, a 1995 hardcover dwells:
A riveting documentation of a world long gone, yet full of prophetic clues as to how the music industry’s
appetite for self-destruction
would lead it straight into the tar-pit quicksand.
Page 372: “Vinyl is more of a craft thing whereas a CD is mass-produced. …now they have CD recording machines so people can always copy someone’s CD and have…something that’s 98 percent of the original.”
“Craft.” The very reason why Hipsters collect vinyl. Pressing a run of actual vinyl records and printing full-color jackets requires dedicated, expensive machinery that is still far beyond the affordability of recreational hobbyists, preserving vinyl records’ ‘collectible artifact’ status to this day.
Computer CD-R drives became affordable by 1998. Overnight, the retail music dynamic was changed forever. College campuses, previously the best neighbors for record stores, suddenly became the worst locations for a record store to be near.…
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STEAL THIS CHARACTER!
One of my favorite starting points for creating new vampire characters is to look around at my favorite characters from other genres and imagine what kind of vampire they might make. I also do this with historical figures, as anyone who’s read Ancient Blood can tell you, but that’s a different article.
My choices here are purely my opinion, based on characters that I enjoy, but I’d love to hear about other possibilities in the comments section. All ideas presented below should be considered fair game (except for the inspiration characters themselves, who belong to their creators), so if something presented tickles your fancy, go ahead and use it! Now, let’s try a few!
Hannibal Lecter
Well, he’s already a cannibal, so drinking blood should be no problem, right? He can mix in a nice Chianti for extra flavor! Literature’s new favorite psychopath can easily make the jump to nocturnal blood drinker. He’s cold, calculating, fiercely intelligent, and without conscience.
How you could use him: Obviously, a vampire with the skill, intellect, and depravity of Hannibal Lecter would prove a challenging antagonist for any hero. His penchant for psychological gamesmanship and playing mentor to like minds both make him ideal for a long-running series villain. When he finds a truly worthy adversary, he would delight in testing and toying with them, putting them through deadly tests that result in some kind of “lesson” or reward. Everyone loves a crafty, sophisticated villain. The other, more daring option is to take this idea and make it your main character! You don’t have to use every aspect, of course, but think about Hannibal the renowned psychiatrist and the possibilities that might open. A vampire who uses his towering intellect and long life experience to treat the neuroses of the ultra-rich and famous, perhaps using his uniquely effective form of hypnosis (and taking a bit of blood in part payment). Perhaps he consults for local police and FBI in his spare time? Now you’ve got a Nero Wolfe or Mycroft Holmes with a savage bite. What happens when his carefully cultivated persona and elegant lifestyle are threatened by an old enemy? You decide.
Dexter Morgan
I know, I know, another serial killer, but think about it: What better job for a vampire than as a blood specialist? Once again, we have a vampire that has no issue with killing to survive, but also one who adheres to a private code of only killing dangerous individuals. Granted, poor Dex would either have to be embraced by a vampire that doesn’t have a problem with sunlight or get the hell out of Miami quick! Maybe Alaska needs a good blood tech?
How to use him: The key to a Dexter-like character is the staple trope of the double life that must be maintained. Imagine a Forever Knight scenario where your vampire is the Medical Examiner rather than a detective, a Quincy with fangs helping his police friends solve murders while maybe helping himself to one or two when the evidence won’t convict them. Law & Order: Special Vampire Unit? Why not! As a vampire, his palate might be able to identify properties in the blood that lab tests would take weeks to confirm. And, of course, when bodies start popping up drained of blood, not only is it his responsibility to cover up the cause of death, but also to stop a killer that the cops can’t. Give him a vampire society to add to his problems if you like and perhaps some human enemies. Naturally, such a character could also make a great complex villain: a serial killer turned vampire with a lust for more than blood whose escalating crimes threaten to expose the existence of vampires.
Black Widow
Natasha Romanov from the Marvel Universe aka Black Widow is such an obvious candidate that I’m surprised I haven’t seen it yet. Take a beautiful former secret agent with intelligence, dedication, linguistic capability, a knack for unorthodox interrogation, and phenomenal martial arts training and then turn her into a vampire? Holy crap! How refreshing would it be to see an Urban Fantasy heroine whose supernatural abilities are merely accessories to an already formidable skill-set?
How to use her: Well, Selene from Underworld springs to mind as a pretty good template. However, the fun here is to really emphasize the espionage and intelligence-gathering aspect, because for a character like this, resorting to combat means that things have already gone wrong. Make the vampirism subtle and use it to add flavor, but keep the focus on the character’s human skills and talent. You could go full-on James Bond here, if you like, but part of the appeal of such a character is her ability to be underestimated by the enemy.
Tyrion Lannister
You think I’m kidding, don’t you? There are plenty of characters in George R.R. Martin’s Song of Ice and Fire (and HBO’s Game of Thrones) that would make excellent vampires. Sure, Daenyrs is great, but she’s already got dragons! What more does the girl need? However, Tyrion is my choice precisely because of the same qualities that make him a fan favorite in Martin’s series. He’s clever, resourceful, charming, witty, cynical, and the odds against him are immense. The son of a wealthy family who largely despise him for his dwarfism, Tyrion has survived more plots against him than almost anyone else in the series. He is a survivor and what is a vampire if not the ultimate survivor?
How to use him: For one thing, the handicapped aren’t well represented in vampire literature. Take the concept seriously, as Martin has done, and imagine a dwarf made into a vampire for some reason. In my fictional universe, the vampire virus causes a complete genetic rewriting of the body’s cells, which could theoretically transform a dwarf into a person of average stature. But suppose it doesn’t work. Or the transformation triggers previously-recessive dwarfism in the genes of a “normal” person. Either way, you have a vampire who is likely a laughingstock among his own people, someone for whom feeding is difficult, someone who is going to have to work twice as hard as everyone else to get ahead. That’s great hero material. On the other hand, you could take inspiration from the original Wild Wild West character of Dr. Loveless and imagine how a character like that could become consumed with bitterness and rage. Combine that with a genius intellect and you have a formidable opponent.
Elle Wood
You want chick-lit paranormal romance? Just imagine Elle Wood from Legally Blonde, but instead of going to law school, her life is interrupted by death at the hands of a vampire. The original story shows us a girl uncovering a surprising talent for the law after she enrolls for all the wrong reasons. Behind that sparkling smile and baby face lurks a surprising intelligence and a fierce determination to get what she wants.
How to use her: A light touch is the key here, so a story with a sense of humor is a must. Imagine the kind of reverse-Buffy story you could get if you took the ditzy, perky socialite and vamped her, then watched her discover resources she never knew she possessed in order to succeed in the vampire world. That’s the most obvious way to use this character, but there are already series out there doing similar premises, so make sure to give it a fresh spin. This type character could also make a wonderful false friend or comedic foil for a strong female protagonist. Think Harmony from Buffy and Angel, but with more brains. As a protagonist, you could have a lot of fun doing a vampire version of Working Girl as we watch her climb the vampire ladder. Or you go in a different direction with a Bridget Vampire’s Diary kind of story. Hell, throw in a little Nancy Drew and you could have a vampire investigator that hides her deductive abilities behind a sweet smile and a harmless bimbo act.
There’s five suggestions for you. I hope you found them entertaining at least, but maybe they gave you an idea for your own vampire masterpiece. Hurry up, though, because if you don’t use these, I will!
March 21, 2014
Buffy the Vampire Slayer/Angle & Faith Season 10
Originally posted on Radio of Horror Blog:
Buffy returns to comics with Season 10 this time with the team of Rebecca Isacks and Christopher Gage who worked on Angel and Faith S9 (for anyone unfamiliar with the books there was no S6-8 of Angel it was called that to show where in the time line it takes place with the Buffy Comic, all mini series and one shots carry the SEASON subtitle). The entire S8 and 9 are in tpb thru Dark Horse comics so make sure you go read it. Buffy and the gang are still dealing with the Zompires and now have the threat of Vampires with all new powers, shape shift into bats, wolfs, mist and can with stand sun light. It also takes more than just a poke of Mr.Pointy to stop them. Spike it right by Buffy side in this book, Billy the Vampire Slayer and his bf/watcher also returns as well.…
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March 18, 2014
This Blog Sucks
I’m going to be brutally honest here: I don’t really get blogs.
I’m only doing this because I want to sell you books. According to popular wisdom, blogs create a platform, which supposedly translates into sales. I’m not quite sure I buy that. Most of my friends and family who really know me and care about me don’t buy my books, so why should I expect you to just because I wrote some snappy article and posted it on a blog?
Blogs are supposed to let readers get to know you and feel a connection, but that doesn’t always make sense to me either. I read Stephen King, Jim Butcher, P.N. Elrod and others because I love their stories and characters. I don’t give a shit what Stephen King bought at the grocery store today or any of the other random garbage that pops up in blogs. I’ve never understood the appeal of blogs, especially back when they started. Some emo exhibitionist feels the need to publish their diary on the internet so everyone else can read it? So what? I’ve got plenty going on in my life, I don’t care that much about yours that I want to follow your exploits on a daily basis.
My observation is that blogs are a form of entertainment like any other. The posts have to be interesting, funny, controversial, or informative. You’re not going to get lots of intimate personal details from me, because I don’t know you. I don’t post sensitive personal stuff up online because you never know who might read it and when it might come back to bite you on the ass.
If you’re reading my blog, thank you. I’ll try to make it worth your time. I’m not going to post my vacation photos or talk about my trip to the dentist here. I’m going to talk about vampires and occasionally other things that interest me because I want you to repost my stuff and make me more famous. Like I said, brutally honest. In return, I will try to be as entertaining as I can while constantly self-promoting because that’s what blogs are nowadays, make no mistake.
Guess who just figured out how to put gifs in his blog post?
I’m Brian Patrick McKinley, and I approve this message.
P.S. Buy my book!
Kindle: http://www.amazon.com/Ancient-Blood-Novel-Hegemony-ebook/dp/B00DWKVPH2
Paperback: http://www.amazon.com/Ancient-Blood-N...
March 17, 2014
The Wine Cellar
————-FROM THE UNTITLED MANUSCRIPT BY AVERY DOYLE—————
I woke up on a cold flagstone floor, less groggy than I would have expected given how I’d been put down. Caroline says that the few toxins and tranquilizers that work on Vampyrs tend to move through our systems faster. The first thing I remember is the stench. The air was thick with the smell of piss, shit, mildew and that old socks odor of unwashed bodies.
“Avery?” It was Caroline, just behind me. I opened my eyes and sat up, regretting my haste as a wave of dizziness crashed over me.
As my sight cleared, I saw that the muffled hums and creaks I’d been hearing came from people lying in stacks and stacks of cages. They were naked, bound, mouths taped shut and sustained by I.V. drips hanging on the doors of their cages. I’m not talking full-size cages, either, there was just enough room for the person inside to lie on their stomach and maybe raise their head a little. There were men, women and children of all ethnicities and ages with colored, laminated tags on the front of each cage. Some of them cried while most just lay there while the bodily waste from the cages above them dropped down onto their backs and legs. There had to be close to a hundred cages, stacked four high and running nearly the length of one wall. The lowest cages were at knee height, raised up above drainage grates in the stone floor.
“Jesus Christ.”
“This is the reality of The Order,” Caroline said. Her voice echoed in the dungeon-like chamber. She was sitting against the wall opposite the cages, arms resting on her knees, eyes on the floor. “All the bureaucracy, all the politics, all the power and wealth and grand history: this is the foundation it rests on. You couldn’t understand before why I didn’t see the humor in those movies and television programs you showed me…”
“What … what is this?”
“This is the wine cellar.”
That’s what I was afraid she was gonna say.
A few of the caged people stared at me, pleading with their eyes.
“C’mon,” I said, getting to my feet. “Help me get them out of these cages before somebody comes.”
“The guards will just put them back and hurt them for causing trouble.” She hadn’t moved, except to glance up at me.
“Don’t think like that! There’s almost a hundred people here. We could overpower the guards and make a break for it!”
Caroline shook her head. “If they’re all free, the guards will just shoot them. It’s happened before. Even if we got through the guards, the stairways are monitored. The cellar will be sealed off, gassed—”
“But—”
“And if we got out before that happened, we’d still have to get through the house and more guards. Then a private island patrolled by a hundred or so experienced soldiers armed with machine guns, flamethrowers and attack dogs.”
I’d fallen back into my old role-player, problem-solving mode. It helped thinking of this as a fictional scenario designed to test my resourcefulness, rather than the bleak reality it was. “Well, every guard we take out gives us weapons and equipment to help even the odds. We use one of the flamethrowers or something to torch the mansion, create a little distraction.”
Caroline said, “Every wall of the mansion is a firewall, all the exposed beams are steel made to resemble wood and all the flammable decorations are treated with flame retardant chemicals every few years. But for the sake of argument, let’s say we managed to make it to one of the boats. There are attack boats patrolling the waters in every direction and they’ll sink anything that’s not authorized. Supposing further that we managed to land on Long Island or Connecticut- do you really think you, me and a hundred naked humans could just disappear? They’d hunt us down just like they did tonight and they’d catch us.”
I paced, trying not to look at the faces of the caged people. “Well, what the hell do you want from me? We can’t just give up!”
“Avery,” she said. “I’m not trying to be a defeatist but you have to realize that Ash has been in charge of Sebastian’s security for over fifty years now. He led successful high risk missions in both World Wars and personally redesigned every aspect of this island’s security plan. I doubt there’s anything you can think of that he hasn’t already planned against.”
“Well, you managed to get away.”
She nodded. “At the time, I was Sebastian’s Adjutor and advisor—though in name only by then. I used my connections to make preparations for two years. Then I waited until Sebastian was away at a Gathering. I left the island on official business and disappeared.”
Okay, granted, that approach wasn’t gonna work for us in this situation…but then I thought, Kill Sebastian. If we could grab him as a hostage, we could force safe passage for us and the captives back to civilization. A hundred naked people telling anyone who’d listen about a terrible vampire island should prove a nice distraction.
I’d never killed anyone before but I thought I could make an exception for him. With Sebastian dead, Caroline and I would be a low priority for whoever took his place.
Before I could start outlining my brilliant scheme to Caroline, I paced far enough to catch sight of an archway across from one of the stairways. The archway held a prison-bar door, beyond which lay a dark passageway. “Check this out! There’s a tunnel or something here. Maybe you can MacGuyver it open.”
“The passage only leads out into the maze.”
“Maze? You’re not saying he—”
“Had an actual maze constructed,” she confirmed. They say that’s a sign of a great relationship, when you finish each other’s sentences like that. “Back in Nineteen Seventy-Seven or Seventy-Eight. Stone and barbed wire and even some glass sections for people desperate enough to jump through…”
“Yeah and deadly booby traps, too.” I walked back to where she sat. “C’mon, Caroline, a maze? I mean, that’s fucking retarded! What is he, the Man With The Golden Gun?”
“No, he’s a Feral.” She said, hiding behind her clinical tone. “It’s a condition some Vampyrs contract in which their more primitive, predatory instincts overwhelm their human thought processes. It’s often accompanied by structural changes in the eyes, fingers and other aspects of the victim’s physiology. He built the maze to sharpen his tracking skills. He has his people capture the fittest, most dangerous humans they can find—soldiers, athletes, mercenaries, convicts—and put them in the maze. I think he Creates some of them first, even though that’s illegal. There are no traps, just Sebastian, nude and unarmed. All they have to do is get out of the maze and they win their freedom. As far as I know, no one ever has.”
I was getting a little sick of Sebastian’s increasingly mythic status. I stopped myself from replying as my nifty new vamp hearing detected the sound of someone approaching from the passageway. I snuck over to the other side of the archway and squeezed myself into the darkness of the corner as well as I could.
I went completely still as the prison door buzzed and slid open. A second passed … then another … and then a large figure entered.
I leapt—
