Guest Post: Jane Lovering - Why Vampires?

Jane Lovering is someone most people try to deny knowing. She has a series of strange and irrational beliefs, one being that Johnny Depp desires her deeply, and lives in North Yorkshire with her floating population of children, cats, dogs and hens. She writes for Choc Lit Publishing, her main output being Romantic Comedies, some of which are Paranormal in nature, and is mainly influenced by marshmallows. Her hobbies are chocolate and shouting.

Lovering was awarded British Romantic Novel of the Year 2012 for Please Don't Stop the Music. You can find her on Twitter, Facebook and follow along on her blog.

All this month at Pagan Writers Community, we're celebrating the release of Falling Apart, the follow-up to Jane's hit novel Vampire State of Mind.

We are starting out with a guest post from Jane, answering the question: Why vampires?

If her blog post inspires questions, either related to vampires or writing, e-mail those questions to: questions@paganwriters.net before the end of Saturday 5th July 2014. We will be putting the best questions to Jane, and demanding answers!

Why Vampires?

Jane Lovering

Why write about vampires? What’s so special about them (apart from being nearly immortal, really really attractive and having a lot of enhanced Buffy-style abilities)? 

Well, I blame Doctor Who. Early Russell T Davies episodes, where Rose fell in love with what is, essentially, an alien guy with abilities she can’t even guess at, who’s older than most buildings on Earth, let alone most men she’s been out with. And watching that relationship made me start thinking – what would a woman do, if her boyfriend was going to outlive her by centuries? Would he hang around to watch her get older and older and more and more like Yoda as the years passed, or would he trade her in every ten years or so for someone who looked a bit more his age? And how does she not feel inferior, when her partner is all superpowered and amazing?

So I set out to explore some of these conundrums, using vampires instead of the good Doctor (who shares more than a few vampire traits, apart from the whole ‘blood’ thing, which he obvious doesn’t, unless Steven Moffat has got one hell of a twist for us next series).

Just imagine that vampires are here. They not only walk among us but shop among us, go to the hairdresser among us and watch TV alongside us on our sofas. They are, after all, humans at heart (well, my particular vampires are, but they harbour a demon, like a parasite, which makes them all fangy and Super and gorgeous). And we all know what humans are like – they can be petty, loveable, crazy, dangerous and obsessed with paperwork. So why should the simple fact of being vamped change their personality? Add to that the fact that living a very long life would give one a LOT of things to feel guilty about, and my vampires are the kings and queens of repressed memories. They have to share a world with creatures that are, essentially, prey animals, but very, very intelligent prey animals, with the power to fight back, even, if things became unbalanced, to destroy the entire planet.

In an attempt to make my vampires more ‘believable’, I’ve taken the traditional view of vampires, merged it with a more ‘Being Human’ take on the creature, and tried to make them more like people we feel we could have living next door. Just with a lot more angst, politics, and filing...