165 years old today! Although he died in 1912, his name lives on as the creator of Dracula, a figure that, like Frankenstein's monster, has become entrenched in our cultural memory.
I read the book as a young teenager and scared myself witless for a few weeks afterwards. Every tap at my window was a vampire intent on drinking my blood (of course it was actually a moth drawn by the glow of my nightlight). That shadowy figure staggering down an alleyway in the city where I lived was surely another blood-sucking villain (no, just a drunk on a mid-day binge).
What many people do not realise is how prolific a writer Bram Stoker was, the author of many other novels (The Jewel of Seven Stars, The Lair of the White Worm, to name but a couple), short stories and non fiction.
We see the mark of his classic vampire character in so many of our novels and films. The current trend for young adult vampire romance owes a great deal to this Irish writer.
I only recently came across the term 'blog hop'. Am I the only one who hadn't heard of this before? In essence, it's an online event where a group of bloggers drop in on each other's blogs and leave comments. It's a way to create new connections, boost the number of visitors to your site and generally have a bit of a party. Today I signed up to take part in my first blog hop for members of the She Writes Books and Writing group. I always enjoy finding new interesting blogs and forging fresh alliances so I'd like to welcome all my fellow She Writes blog hoppers to my blog. I hope you enjoy reading my posts. I'll be dropping in on as many of you as I can. I've even created a blog button (scroll down the right hand column to find it) for any of you who are collecting them. My blogging tip is to keep a plan of future blog posts so you can look ahead to what you're going to be writing and collect necessary links, articles, images etc that you mig...
I've discussed the idea of monsters previously in my article, Loving the Monster , and the recent Hallowe'en season has got me thinking about it all over again. It seems to me that most of the fictional monsters and villains we meet through books, films and TV these days are generally created in a way that we can understand their crimes or brutal approach. For instance, in the novel, The Warm Bodies (and subsequent film) by Isaac Marion, we find a zombie who grows tired of his life of noshing human flesh and seeks something more, well, human. He wants to fall in love and have experiences beyond his condition. In Dexter , the character of the title is a serial killer who appears to take delight in his gruesome murders but only slaughters criminals who have escaped justice. Time and again, the actions of fictional monsters and villains can be explained away but what happened to having a baddie who was just bad? I miss that. We need more thoroughly evil characters like...
Now that my first novel Shadowbinder is doing the literary agent rounds, I thought I would use the Camp NanoWrimo experience to kickstart my next novel. My first go at the April writefest was this time last year when I managed just under 25,000 words during that month. This time round, I'm setting the target at 30,000 words. Surely I can manage 1,000 words a day. I'll post my progress on my Facebook page each day, and Twitter too. Wish me luck.
Great book. I didn't read it until i was an adult, but I still have a hardcover copy on my bookshelf.
ReplyDeleteDidn't realize it was his birthday. I loved "Dracula" and so many of the incarnations, especially the Gary Oldman version. Fantastic!
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