Last night I pulled out two things from my shelf – my copy of the Hammer movie Vampire Circus (1971) and my copy of J. Gordon Melton’s The Vampire Book, a massive encyclopedia of the undead that is part of my somewhat extensive collection of non-fiction books on the subject. I was quite surprised when I discovered The Vampire Book was published in 1994 – is it really been that long?
This led me to reflect on the reason for my general dislike for vampires in the last few years – the Vampire roleplaying game, that first came out in 1992. Suddenly vampires where hot in the ’90s, and as it usually happens, the surge of recent converts to the new faith caused me to look somewhere else for my thrills.

Me, I was a Ravenloft sort of guy, or even better a Warhammer Fantasy RPG sort of guy, when it came to roleplaying vampires.
Even better – a Chill sort of guy.

As for stories…

The reason why I watched again that old movie (that I’ll review for the weekend) and started browsing again that book is because – having seen the BBC Dracula and concluded that I could do better – I’d really like to try my hand at a vampire story, or two.

For the Italian market (where I am progressively phasing out my efforts because… reasons), I’d like to do a classic Hammer/Karnstein Trilogy sort of “traditional” vampire story, possibly featuring a carnival or travelling show in a somewhat East European/Austro-Hungarian post-Renaissance setting. Plenty of gruesome deeds, young women with big boobs and flimsy nighties (because we gotta give the people what they want) running through the darkened corridors of Gothic castles or mist-shrouded forbidding forests.
Or something.
It’s the sort I could write blindfolded, and that I could publish under an alias.

But then I’d like to try and do something different, as a second project – and admittedly it is hard to do something new with something that’s been done to death like vampires.
But today I saw a beautiful photograph, while I was browsing the web looking for something completely different, and now I might have an idea of five. Also, now I have a new desktop wallpaper.
And it could well be something pretty different, this second project.
Maybe not absolutely 100-proof original and unheard of, but promising.
Watch this space for news.

All I need, of course, is a little more time or a little less sleep.
I’ll work on it.