on writing about vampires

I think what a lot of popular vampire stories have in common are unhealthy relationships. Whether it's between two vampires, or a vampire and a human the relationships that develop, especially on the romantic level are often emotionally abusive on some level if not physically. As I work on editing my own stories involving vampires I can only hope that I break out of the trend. I admit a lack of respect for Stephanie Myers keeps my from reading the twilight series but I've noticed the same with Anne Rice, Charlene Harris, Michael Romkey and many others.

However it's a difficult task to tackle. In most authors own lore there is a hierarchy amongst vampires, the older the individual the more powerful they are is pretty standard. Even in my own lore there are varying factions of vampires, with different strengths and weaknesses. When you're putting these creatures together it becomes difficult to verbalize equality however amongst rivals or platonic character interaction this isn't a huge focus.

When you come to writing relationships there's a lot to consider. Especially between vampires and humans. You're dealing with a creature who is physically superior and generally incredibly older. A lot of authors like to let their vampires personalities be dated by when they were human. In my opinion this is were a lot of the issues of healthy relationships come into play. While I agree that the period in which a person became a vampire would influence the vampires values I think it's too much of a stretch that they would be that attached to the time itself. However this also varies depending on the lore an author works with and how reclusive the vampire in question is.

Suffice to say some vampires may hang on to their past, my own villain is a vampire like this. In fact while doing edits on my own novel I noticed that I was hopefully breaking this trend. A lot of my book center's around my main vampire realizing that she is in an emotionally abusive relationship with her maker. While not my original intent when I started writing this book many years ago, it was a present realization.

What happens in a lot of stories is you have a vampire protecting a human, when you throw a relationship into a situation it's hard not to have an overbearing white knight. Two things can happen, either this vampire is so protective that they refuse to change the human, thus leaving themselves as the literal superior life-form in the relationship (we're talking physically here) often times using their human lover as a walking vending machine. The other option is that the vampire fails in some way and is faced with the death of his/her human love or having to change them.

Ultimately when you write about humanized vampires you're going to get compared with the popular authors I mentioned above. For a long time I was afraid to keep writing, as I wanted to stand out and not be compared but I've realized that it's unavoidable, and not necessarily a bad thing. If I get compared to a popular author, especially a popular author who no longer writes vampire themed novels that can open up my reader base, and hopefully it will be these people who see the difference.