No layman walks up to a student in their first year of medical school and asks, “Why haven’t you performed a heart surgery yet?”

No layman tells a commission salesman, after selling their first phone/car/magazine subscription, “You’re not going to be the next Billy Mays or ShamWow guy, so you might as well quit.”

No layman tells an electrician, “Why are you bothering with all that wiring running from the circuit panel? Can’t you just make the lights come on?”

No layman tells a software programmer, “You should write code for another Microsoft Windows. You’d be an instant millionaire.”

That’s it.  If you’re a writer, or anyone else involved in the arts, you know what I’m talking about here.

So much of writing genre fiction is figuring out ways to personalize it and really make it your own.  For example, science fiction by definition will usually take place in the future and involve some sort of advanced technology so it’s important to find a way to create unique characters, cultures and settings, as well as inject your own sense of style into the aesthetics of the world.

A vampire story is no different.  By definition a vampire is a creature that exists at night, drinks blood, usually has a bunch of freaky powers, and has a set of classic weaknesses to sunlight, fire, garlic, crosses, etc.   Those things are in pretty much every vampire story however, so the challenge was to find ways to really make my vampires different than the mainstream.

After long and careful consideration I think I may finally have found a way.  I was debating for a long while whether I should blog about it because the idea is so unique and groundbreaking that I was  afraid that someone would see it, steal it and beat me to the marketplace with it.  On the other hand, I just can’t resist the urge to brag about how clever I am.  Are you ready for it?  Okay, here it is – I’m writing a heterosexual vampire!

Did you get that?  It’s okay, take a moment to reread it if you need to.  I understand new concepts can sometimes be hard to wrap your head around but just think about it a moment and I’m sure you’ll see how much sense it makes.  There really is no better way to put a new spin on the old genre.

Wow, even I’m amazed at my ingenuity.  I can’t believe nobody thought of it first.

People who’ve never read my work can have their doubts about whether I’m any good.  People who have read my work are free to dislike it.  These opinions don’t bother me; they’re relatively infrequent compared to the number of people that support me and really enjoy my stories.

What annoys me are those that think this is a passing phase or that I’m not serious in my quest to have my stories see print.  So here’s a little breakdown of all the time and effort I’ve put in so far, aside from the time it took to actually write and re-write the book itself.

• Dozens of hours researching how to write a query letter.
• A couple hundred hours actually writing and rewriting my query letter.  It is currently in draft seven, which I have spent at least 10 hours on and I have a lot more to go.
• Many dozens of hours researching how to write a synopsis.
• Countless days writing and re-writing the synopsis.  I had to actually create three different versions in order to meet the requirements of individual agencies.  The most common one I use is a two page single spaced but others want only one, and a rare few want a 3-10 page double spaced synopsis.
• Probably 100 hours on agent and publishing house research.  Diligently scouring books and the internet for names of agents that handle my genre, searching them out and doing background checks to be sure they’re reputable, and taking time to read their individual websites in order to target the most appropriate agent and be sure I can meet their submission requirements.  Much of this time was spent looking into agents that turned out not to handle my genre.
• I have no idea how much time I spent on researching the publishing business in general.  Reading agent blogs and agent Q&A’s, how-to’s, sites about common mistakes writers make, researching standard manuscript formats and other generally accepted rules in the publishing world.  This is an ongoing process; I’ll never stop learning.
• Dozens of hours tailoring my completed query letters to meet the requirements of each individual agent.  Sometimes it takes a few minutes, other times it takes an hour or so.
• Dozens upon dozens of hours printing queries, synopsis’s and sample chapters for submission packages, plus stamping and addressing envelopes and putting it all into a professional package to send out the door.
• At least a few hours driving around town, shopping for supplies and standing in line at the post office.
• Well over $600 in envelopes, return stamps, paper and postage.  An envelope containing a query, synopsis and an SASE probably costs me about $3 all together, whereas one with sample chapters will run me about $7-$9, depending on how many chapters were requested.

That should give people a bit more of an understanding of what’s involved.  People can have their expectations (or hopes) that I’m going to fail but nobody can fairly say that I’m not putting in the effort.  I have a hate filled glare all lined up for the next person to do so.

I’ve noticed the posts in my Writing Rants section really aren’t all that ranty.  Maybe I should rename the section to Writing Annoyances or Writing Inconveniences.  Or I should figure out something to be mad about.  So far, nothing writing related has really gotten me too far past mildly irritated, which I suppose is a good thing.  Means I take rejection well.  That’s a good thing too because there’s a lot more of it coming for sure.

Since I’ve started to tell the people I know that I’ve taken up writing again, and let a few people see some of my finished works, I’ve been seeing some interesting reactions.

Doubtful – In the beginning, long before anyone ever saw a single word of my writing in print, I would notice that in situations where I’m passionately discussing my work a lot of people were biting their tongue.  I could tell from the look on their face that they were skeptical of my ability and had serious doubts that anything I write will ever see print.  It’s obvious they don’t want to hurt my feelings by stating their opinion openly but they also don’t want me to set myself up for an embarrassing failure either so are not very forthcoming with words of encouragement.  I can at least appreciate that they have what they think are my best interests at heart.

Supportive – I expected almost everyone I knew to be happy that I’d rediscovered my passion and be encouraging of my efforts to pursue it.  I was shocked at how few did.  I can literally count on one hand the number of people who have shown me any support at all and most of those were converted over from the doubters only after reading a few samples of my work.  That makes me a little sad.  I would have thought more people would at least be happy I found something I enjoy doing if not stand behind me in my efforts to get published.  I do have one friend though that’s been behind me from day one and what makes his support so much better is the fact that he backs me even though he doesn’t like what I write.  He’s not a fiction reader, instead concentrating a lot on non-fiction and the news, and he isn’t that much of a vampire fan.  He does however understand my passion for it and backs me 100%.  That’s the best kind of support I could ever ask for.

Wiggy – Yeah, it’s a weird term but it’s for a weird reaction.  I had a few people just plain go strange on me.  It’s a weird book full of weird situations and those that know me personally are looking for parallels between the fictional characters and my own life.  Sure there are a few, it can’t be helped, but because there’s one or two similarities they assume the characters are carbon copies of me or that I’ve poured my deepest, darkest secrets and desires onto the page.  So when they read about one character that’s an undead bloodthirsty sadist, another who’s a street girl that has a history of abuse at the hands of her parents and about a couple situations that are sexually intimate in kind of a bizarre way, it puts them off because they think I’ve experienced it or am into that kind of thing.  I’ve got one former buddy who was so weirded out that he won’t talk to me anymore.  He’s probably under some strange misunderstandings but because he’s in avoidance mode I’ll never get the chance to tell him different.  That’s the nice thing about strangers reading my work; they’re not using it as an excuse to psychoanalyze me because they have no pre-drawn conclusions to jump to.

Discouraging – This is the one that pisses me off.  Far too many people have begun the process of attempting to subtly undermine my confidence, as if the very fact that I am attempting to create and achieve something is a threat to them.  It’s never anything direct like telling me to my face that they think I’ll fail but I’ve sure noticed they’ve begun to pepper conversations with discouragement and negativity.  All I hear out of them is how difficult it is to get published, how I couldn’t have picked a more difficult genre to write, how the vast majority of new writers fail, etc.  Even when I was half way through my second draft, long before the idea of getting published even entered my mind, I had people trying to talk me out of it.

So what to do about all this?  The only real strategy is to just continue to do what I’m doing.  I will ignore the doubters and cut loose the actively discouraging.  I’m going to write as much as I can, as well as I can, and just try my best to achieve my goals.  Things are coming together and I’m not going to let the negative reactions stand in my way of success.

I’m really beginning to hate sending submissions by e-mail.  Sure it’s cheaper, better for the environment and more convenient for the recipient but no matter how careful I am, there’s this ten percent chance that something gets screwed up in the transmission.  Here’s some examples:

As per submission requirements to one agency, I set my subject line to say:   “Query – Horror Novel.”  After checking my sent items it said:  “‏Query – Horrojavascript:;r Novel‏”  I have no idea why it threw the word javascript right in the middle of my subject line.  The weird thing is that I typed the subject line in manually; no cut and paste.

Other times I type out my message in a specific font then after the message has been sent, half the fonts in the message have been randomized.  This paragraph is Courier New 10, the next is Times New Roman 12, and the paragraph after that is a mixture of Veranda and Calibri.

The strangest one was for a short story submission.  It added a bunch of HTML formatting into the body of the e-mail.

<!--
 /* Font Definitions */
 @font-face
	{font-family:"Cambria Math";
	panose-1:2 4 5 3 5 4 6 3 2 4;
	mso-font-charset:0;
	mso-generic-font-family:roman;
	mso-font-pitch:variable;
	mso-font-signature:-1610611985 1107304683 0 0 159 0;}
@font-face
	{font-family:Calibri;
	panose-1:2 15 5 2 2 2 4 3 2 4;
	mso-font-charset:0;
	mso-generic-font-family:swiss;
	mso-font-pitch:variable;
	mso-font-signature:-1610611985 1073750139 0 0 159 0;}

Why it did this, I have no idea.  There’s about forty lines of it at the beginning of the message followed by the main body of my e-mail, then another thirty or so lines of html ending with my signature and contact information.

So it may cost me a few bucks as well as the senseless, brutal, painful and undoubtedly terrifying deaths of a few trees (take that, hippies!) but I’m really starting to prefer snail mail submissions.   I know many agents have a preference for electronic submissions but if given a choice, I think I like the method where I can guarantee my submissions appear the way I want them to.

I’m getting annoyed with the increasing frequency that silver is being used as a weakness in vampire fiction.   Silver is for werewolves.  I know there are references to using it against ghosts and fey creatures as well but I think that’s stupid too.  A line of salt keeps ghosts out and you have to kill a fey creature with a cold iron sword.  Everybody knows that.

Smallville writer: “Hey, I’ve got an idea.  Let’s take the most legendary villain that Superman has ever faced and really wussy it up.  We can make him smaller and less imposing to start with.  I figure about one third scale should suffice.  Next we should round out all those nasty bone spikes to give him the soft, cuddly appearance our audiences expect of today’s super-villains.  After that we should stick him in the body of a regular human who spends half the season crying about how evil he is, crying over someone else’s girl (that he barely knows) and crying over produce.  Once he’s Emo’d his way through fifteen episodes in the desperate search for a way to end the pain, he can give one final dramatic farewell then take his own life in a Kryptonite bath.  Of course we’ll have him walk back in two scenes later like nothing happened because he’s so bad-ass.”

Obviously I wasn’t in the room when this trainwreck of a decision was made, so I don’t know for sure how it went down, but I’m pretty sure it was something like that.  I probably shouldn’t complain after seven seasons of pure awesomeness.  I’m just surprised that after doing everything else so well, Doomsday was done so poorly.

I am not my characters.  This is a disclaimer I’ve had to give voice to in the gaming community for years.  I roll up a character for a particular tabletop or LARP game, one who is perhaps a little weird, or kind of an asshole or just out and out evil, then I jump in and play the part to the best of my ability.  What often happens is those who haven’t spent any time speaking to me outside of the game assume that this identity is my own and treat me accordingly.  People that would possibly have ended up as good friends if they had met me in different circumstances would do their best to avoid me both in game and out.

This form of typecasting is an annoyance for a lot of gamers, especially for the better role players who do appreciate the variety of character options available to them, and often results in some degree of interpersonal conflict.  Any gamer who plays a conflict oriented character usually does so for the enjoyment of the in game social and political interactions that those character types get involved in.  It is (usually) not some twisted desire to be the villain in real life.  It’s simply a matter of providing good storytelling opportunities.  Often times it’s the evil bastards that get the most involved in the plot while the nice guy characters usually end up sitting on the sidelines.

Since showing my first work to a few people I’ve found that I have to again make the same disclaimer.  The vampires in my book are evil bastards of one kind or another and predators in every sense of the word.  Is it because I have some secret desire to be one of those bastards in real life, to treat people like toys to be used and discarded when I’m through with them?  Not at all.  It’s all about the storytelling potential those evil bastards represent.  If every character in a particular story was a fluffy nice guy that got along with everybody in every social situation that wouldn’t make for very interesting fiction.  Nobody wants to read a 300 page story of everybody playing nice.  They’d be bored to death.  The rude, heartless, evil, sadistic bastards are there because it’s good for the story and that’s all there is to it.

What else I’ve noticed from a few of my readers is an occurrence of this misunderstanding in a slightly different way.  The main male character of The Games of Master Rule is a quiet, keep out of trouble kind of guy; honest, polite, chivalrous and a complete pushover.  There are also a couple instances of secondary characters who exhibit similar behavior.  They’re shy, lacking in confidence or outright whipped into obedience.  I’m finding myself having to make the same old protests about these characters as I used to about my evil gaming characters.  These guys aren’t me any more than any other character I write or act out in a game are.  Sure there may be little pieces of me within them, that’s really unavoidable with any character I write, but it’s a fairly small fragment of their personality as a whole.  These characters are the way they are not because I couldn’t resist putting myself into the story to act out some fantasy but because, for a couple different reasons, it made the most sense for the plot.

The first is that these are the kinds of people that vampires would most likely pick on.  Think of any other predator and how they hunt.  A wolf doesn’t chase down the biggest and fastest deer, the one that he has the least hope of catching.  He goes for the stray at the back; the smallest, the slowest or the most injured one.  The wolf hunts whatever prey will provide the easiest meal and I see no reason why vampires should be any different.  Why take a risk on a dangerous meal when the safer choice is just as delicious?

The other reason why these people are the way they are is because of the influence of the vampires themselves.  Vampires are traditionally very powerful and manipulative creatures, able to play with people’s thoughts and emotions, and they use this power to break people down.  What once might have been an average person will under the control of a vampire become obedient, submissive, loyal, weak and probably head over heels in supernaturally induced love.  Basically they turn people into pets that will serve their interests in the same manner that we have guard dogs or hunting falcons serve ours.

Perhaps after I’ve written a few more works, with a greater variety of characters, then I won’t have to deal with this kind of typecasting anymore.  In the meantime, I suppose it’s an annoyance I’ll just have to live with.