Guest Zoe Winters (and Contest!)

Why Vampires Just Won't Die

I fell in love with vampires through Buffy… or more specifically… Spike on Buffy. Wait… that sounded wrong. But really, that was a lot of the appeal. I mean they knocked down a building fighting and having sex. That's pretty hot. Sorry, where was I?

Oh yeah. Vampires. Before watching Buffy, I never saw vampires as "sexy". But then, suddenly I did. I got so obsessed with Buffy that I thought, "That's what I really wish I could write, but everyone will think I'm trying to be like Anne Rice. Rice already did it."

In hindsight this is pretty funny. I had no idea the vampire craze, far from being over, was just getting started. I even went out of my way "not" to write vampires at first because I didn't want to be seen as jumping on a bandwagon. The soon-to-be-released second book of my series, Save My Soul, was written first.

It features an incubus that is trapped in a house by a 50-yr-old curse. My reasoning was that an incubus is "kind of" like a vampire but not the exact same thing so it would be different enough that people would just give the story a chance rather than think I was trying to hop on the vampire fad.

Then after I'd written Save My Soul, Larissa Ione came out with "Pleasure Unbound" which was about an incubus. And I was like: CRAP. Dammit! "People will think I'm copying her!"

To my extreme relief, upon reading the book, I found Larissa's incubus stuff is very different from mine. (Though hers totally rock!) But then I watched Gilmore Girls and discovered Save My Soul has a "Buffy meets Gilmore Girls" feel to it. *head desk*

Once I fully understood that there were no new ideas, I settled down on the whole vampire issue. Which is good, because they're probably here to stay.

I had been through a few rounds of edits for Save My Soul when I heard about a contest one of the big romance epublishers was running. They wanted novellas about werecats. This was how Kept, my first novella in Blood Lust (first book in my series) came about. I thought… "Werecats aren't vampires! Yes!"

Though by this time I had chilled on vampires enough to introduce one, Anthony, as a side character in Kept. Anthony is the hero in the second novella and plays a much larger role in my expanding world.

I've finally lost the fear of writing vampires because vampires just won't die. Like Dracula, you think you've killed them. But then they rise up out of the mist again. I think there are a few logical reasons for this.

Vampires are about all the things we desperately crave: immortality with eternal youth and health. Vampires help us confront our darker selves and our primal sexual urges. They help us make sense of an increasingly scary world where it's sometimes nice to think about a silly non-threat like vampires or a zombie apocalypse, instead of all the crazy crap going on in the world today.

Vampires also speak to our need for connection. In most mythologies vampires can not only enthrall their victims and pets, but they can create a link or bond to someone through blood exchange. This connection shines a light on our desire to be protected and cared for. If a vampire has a blood link with you, he can find you anywhere and protect you from the big, bad world.

The vampire mythology is one of the most seductive mythologies around. The extent to which werewolves, demons, and other creatures capture our imagination seems to hinge on how well they meet the same needs vampires do.

So if you think you're tired of vampires, maybe what you're tired of isn't vampires themselves, but the idea that they should still be a novelty or fad, instead of what they are: an enduring myth that some part of our psyche seems to need. Just as we'll never tire of stories about humans, stories about vampires will never stop being written.

Now that I've gotten all blah blah on you, in gearing up for the release of Save My Soul, I'm doing a newsletter drive and contest from my blog.

The rules are simple. Send a blank email to newsletterdrive@gmail.com

You'll be subscribed to my newsletter (which you can later unsub from if my writing isn't right for you or you just don't want the newsletter), get a free digital copy of Kept, and be entered to win 10 paranormal romance books (paperback). The winner gets to choose the books!

You can also enter the secondary contest where I'll be drawing 10 winners to receive a signed print copy of Blood Lust, which is an anthology of my three novellas: Kept, Claimed, and Mated, OR a signed print copy of Save My Soul when it comes out.

For full contest details and rules, please visit my blog: http://zoewinters.wordpress.com (Post stickied to the top)