Another day, another vampire - Three rules for writing paranormal fiction

The other day we saw the release of Bites - Ten Tales of Vampires. I wrote one of the ten tales, a short story called "Tangled Dreams". You might wonder why I'm still playing with vampires. Good question. They're just so darned useful, with all their history and baggage and good & evil stuff. I just can't seem to get over them.

You might also wonder HOW I write about vampires. Like, what are the rules? Well, like most things in writing, the rules are pretty flexible. In my mind, it comes down to three main points. 

Decide what the world rules are and stick to them.  Whether you're going to have vampires or werewolves or fae characters, you need to decide a couple things up front.  More than just what the magical powers each character is going to have, you need to know the framework they're functioning in. Do the non-magical characters know that paranormal characters exist, like the vamps and werewolves in the Anita Blake books, or do they operate in secret, keeping the Muggles in the dark?
 Make sure there's a good reason for the extra skills the paranormal characters have. Right now I hear Hell is hot. ;) I mean, angels and devils are popular characters.  It may be tempting (evil often is), but if your work doesn't naturally go there, I wouldn't try to force it. You need to do the same goal/motivation/conflict work to develop a paranormal being as you do for any other characters.
Don't let your characters discover a new magical ability right at the end that saves the day and resolves the final conflict. This is one of my pet peeves as a reader. Like, your kick-ass martial-arts expert heroine has some kind of magical psychic break ten minutes before the final showdown and discovers the ability to bend metal so she can wrap the evil Fae prince in iron chains? Really? That's cheating. You want your characters to learn new things about themselves, and some of those things might be magical, but it has to be congruent with their development within the story line. This is my take, and if you're interested in learning more about how to create alternate worlds and use vampires and other paranormals, check out this blog post from Kris Neri. And have fun writing things that go bump in the night.


 (PS - If you've been following this blog, my daughter got accepted to both high schools that she applied for. Yesterday was a very happy day! Thanks for all the support and positive energy you sent up for us. You can read more here about where we started from.)Peace,Liv
luigi diamanti / FreeDigitalPhotos.net (Nightmare eyes photo)

(Millions of Bats photo) Sura Nualpradid / FreeDigitalPhotos.net