There. Was that so hard?

I am amused to see on Duotrope that as of today, Apex started sending out responses to writers who've been waiting even longer than I have. I like to think that Cat Valente (is she still editor for Apex?) happened upon my yesterday's post, was consumed with guilt for leaving poor me hanging so long--or perhaps was filled with fury that I called her out publicly--and went into her files to reject me. Ha! You still didn't get mine! Mine's the one with vampires in it, which is why I knew full well going in that it would be rejected, and now a year later I'm still waaaaiting.

But I kid Ms. Valente.

I am happy to report that I have FINISHED THE DAMN WEREDEER EDITS. I sent the file off to my editor, who is way more patient with me than I am with, oh, you know, magazine editors who don't respond as soon as I think they should. I hereby swear most solemnly that I will never again be late with edits.

I guess I should get to work on those edits for Blood and Ashes, huh?

Those darn vampires

Suddenly...I understand the vampire-hate. I'm reading The Sweet Scent of Blood by Suzanne McLeod. I'm 125 pages in and I loathe it. The main character is a wimp, and every single other character is either a super-powerful sexy vampire man or a woman who hates the main character for no reason. I keep reading it and hating it, although now that I've explained how much I despise this kind of main character (why is she even the main character? she's a wimp and frankly kind of stupid) maybe I can convince myself to put it down and read something good.

But in the 125 pages I've read so far, I've come to understand all the vampire hate out there. Lord knows I've whined that a lot of markets post in their guidelines that they're not interested in vampires, and I've never understood why when there's so much a good writer can still do with them. Well, this book is why. Or maybe not this book specifically, but it's just a carbon-copy of all those other sexy-superpowerful-vampire books.

I'm sick of them. And YES, thank goodness, I just felt my brain drop its hold on this book. Now I can put it down and never ever pick up another book where the vampires are obviously loathsome but the reader's supposed to find them attractive.

Back to writing Bloodhound, where Cam is going to kill as many vampires as I can manage without it seeming silly.

WIP Wednesday: monkey edition

Yesterday evening I had a rejection waiting for me when I checked my email right before leaving work. On the drive home, I ranted mentally about the State of Publishing, as one does. I ended up wondering what the hell I could write that would actually get published.

My thinking went like this: "I'll write a YA book. YA is hot. Vampires are out, zombies are peaking right now so there's no point in writing a new zombie book. What'll be the next big thing? I know, monkeys. I'll write a YA book about a boy who finds a monkey and they go on adventures. It'll be rollicking fun and also a tender coming-of-age story. And the monkey can shoot laser beams out of its eyes."

After that I calmed down and spent the evening avoiding working on my boring, boring romance novel.

At 5:30 this morning, a storm moved in and the thunder woke me up. I listened to the rain for a while with my mind drifting, and this line popped up in my traitorous brain (traitorous because it should have been thinking up plot points for the romance): "Chris found Ojo sitting under a forsythia bush one drizzly Friday afternoon."

Who is Chris? He's a thirteen-year-old boy who lives with a foster family and wants a dog. Who is Ojo? Ojo is a monkey who can shoot laser beams from his eyes. I have written 3,300 words about Chris and Ojo and I AM HAVING A FUCKLOAD OF FUN.

No love for the vampires

Would editors please stop hating on the vampires? There's plenty of life (so to speak) in a good vampire story. If people didn't want to read about vampires, there wouldn't be 10 million UF/paranormal romance books out there with sexy emo vampires in them. So why do I keep seeing the equivalent of "no vampires allowed" in magazine guidelines lately?

Obviously, it's hard to write a good vampire story, but then it's hard to write a good anything story. I don't see editors tagging their guidelines with "No aliens!" or "No precocious children!" It's just the vampires that get the special treatment. No wonder they're so emo.

Why yes, I do have a vampire story I can't place. Why do you ask?

(Note: I used the word 'vampire' nine times in this post. Ten if you count the title.)

Introducing the Vampirometer

I've been reading a lot of urban fantasy lately, and they all contain vampires. It seems to be a basic requirement of the subgenre. I'm going to start rating urban fantasies with the Vampirometer. Here's how it works:

Choose one of the following:
Anne Rice-esque vampires: sexy, decadent, and well-dressed. (1 point)
Dracula-esque vampires: powerful, horrific, and fascinating. (1 point)
Nosferatu-esque vampires: grotesque, scary, and non-sexy. (1 point)
Pratchett-esque vampires: driven, unhappy, and really just regular guys despite the blood-drinking thing. (1 point)

Additional points gained or lost from the following list:

• Vampires are undead (no pulse or breathing) and act undead (no food, no sex, may smell kinda bad, etc.). (+1 point)
• Vampires are undead (no pulse or breathing) but act more like goth kids who are pretending to be vampires. (-1 point)
• Vampires are not undead (they have a disease that renders them vampiric, are a separate species, are aliens/ghosts/from another dimension, etc.). (+1 point)
• Vampires are considered alive rather than undead, but they gain all their nourishment from blood and do not eat. (-1 point)
• All vampires are evil except the one the heroine/hero interacts with most. (-1 point)
• Vampires have a complex and hidden hierarchical society with elaborate rules, frequent gatherings of powerful members, and members who are businessmen or nobles, but somehow no one except the heroine/hero has ever figured out that vampires exist. (-1 point)
• Vampires can transform into bats, wolves, rats etc. at will. (+1 point)
• Individual vampires may have different talents. (+1 point)
• Vampires consider humans as prey animals barely worthy of any compassion, even though vampires are former humans. (-1 point)
• Vampires consider humans as prey animals barely worthy of any compassion, but a vampire falls in love with the heroine/hero, who is human. (-1 point)
• The viewpoint character is a vampire and is cool with that. (+1 point)
• The viewpoint character is a vampire and angsts about it all the time. (-1 point)
• Vampires are immortal and nigh-invulnerable except for a secret vulnerability the main characters learn over the course of the story; this secret is not known to anyone else. (-1 point)
• Vampires are immortal and nigh-invulnerable, but ways to destroy them are common knowledge, or at least not secret. (+1 point)
• Vampires are magical beings that cannot be harmed physically under ordinary circumstances. (+1 point)
• Vampires are magical beings that cannot be harmed physically, but they still have sex with physical beings. (-1 point)
• Vampires absorb energy instead of drinking blood. (+1 point)
• Vampires are all about the blood. (+1 point)
• Vampires seem to be vampires in name only, without any apparent need for blood/life force/etc. (-1 point)
• The heroine/hero falls for the vampire even though he/she is a real dick/has no personality/is portrayed as repugnant or evil, etc., and this seems out of character for the heroine/hero. (-1 point)

So, using this scale, Dracula scores a 6. However, the Vampirometer does not imply whether the book in question is any good, just whether the author did a good job with the vampires. For instance, the vampires in Charlaine Harris's first book, Dead Until Dark, score a 4 (I haven't read the other books in that series). The vampires in Patricia Briggs's Mercy Thompson series (which I love) score a 1. I don't think it's a coincidence that Charlaine Harris's books focus on the vampires, while Patricia Briggs's books focus on the werewolves. (But I'm not doing a Werewolfometer. That would just be silly.)

Here are Vampirometer ratings for the two urban fantasies I read last week:
Maria Lima's Matters of the Blood Vampirometer rating: 2
Kat Richardson's Greywalker Vampirometer rating: 1

So what did I miss? How can I improve the Vampirometer?

Vampires and Sharks

I just finished reading Dead Until Dark by Charlaine Harris. It was okay. It's a nice change to read an urban fantasy that doesn't have a main character who owns lots of guns or can beat up bad guys with her bare hands, but I still found Sookie an annoying character to have to relate to. The characterization was good, but dammit, woman, quit being so damn needy.

It didn't help that the vampires in the book--like the vampires in practically every urban fantasy I've ever read--are ferociously strong, nigh-invulnerable, cold-blooded killers who are unaccountably fascinated by the main character. In fact, that may be the core of every vampire story ever, which makes me think that as a whole, women who like vampire fiction--and yes, that includes me--are pretty fucked up, actually; but that's a topic for someone else to tackle.

My problem with ferociously strong, nigh-invulnerable, cold-blooded killer vampires is that they naturally become the driving force of the story. The main character is left to react to the vampires' actions until the very end, when she exploits The Weakness she has discovered over the course of the story to destroy the bad vampire. (Dead Until Dark didn't actually do any vampire-destroying, but I bet it happens in the sequel, which I am not going to read.)

Making your main character react instead of act is a bad thing. Making your vampires so strong that the main character has no chance of acting against them without Special Knowledge or help from another vampire is even worse. And funnily enough, while I can accept, in any given fantasy world, that vampires can exist, I cannot accept that vampires can exist without humans having evolved a way to destroy them that doesn't involve learning a Closely Guarded Secret and heading out at dawn with a stake. Because when a shark evolves a new way to swim faster, all the slow fish die and the fast fish survive and reproduce, and then the shark's speed is no longer that much of an issue anymore. That applies to undead sharks too.

I hope you all had a great Christmas or whatever you celebrate!