In the advent of the publication of my book Written In BLOOD in January I am offering free downloads of a sample PDF containing 10 chapters from the edited portion. The book is still in final draft and I hope to have it published by as late as January 25. Meanwhile, the PDF will be available until the end of the current year. To order, visit the product page at http://www.antellus.com/book/WrittenInBLOOD.html.

Written In BLOOD is the 8th book in my science fiction vampire series Children of The Dragon, a chronicle of the Xosan, living vampires from the planet Antellus. They are stories of science fiction, fact and fantasy, myth and history, tragedy and triumph, linked together by the theme of the vampire as hero.

It used to be that religious sects, then the Third Reich, tried to ban and burn books deemed “unacceptable.” Now many of them are classics of literature, and Google has seen fit to add them to the global library it wants to digitize. That it wants to digitize every book ever published may seem like a laudable goal, but another unexpected consequence the Googlers overlooked was a lawsuit from uncompensated authors and other copyright owners. The fact is that everyone wants to be compensated for their contributions to society.

When I was much younger, I remember what an impression the concept of the “library computer” from an episode of Star Trek had on me. It seemed like the best way for education to be spread to all users, from the poorest farmer in the meanest plains of Africa to the Esquimaux at the top of the world. At the time, the idea was a twinkle in Gene Roddenberry’s eye, but I know that many computing engineers of the day were already hard at work trying to make it possible. And so I waited for thirty years and then some for the idea to take root and bloom. But my mind was still rooted in the idea that most of the content on the library computer was either in the public domain or out of print, or at the very least the author and publisher was well paid for the privilege of hosting the book. Now it appears that a subscription, or prepaid content, has become the normal way for the creators to receive compensation. Ebooks are just an extension of that concept.

That many readers expect to get their content from the internet for free is much of the problem. And aggregation of content has become a distraction for internet users now conditioned to expect most content to be free no matter where it comes from. Now they are bombarded by spam and flash animation which pops up at the most inconvenient moments, email phishing, social networking sites demanding more and more of one’s time and energy. We read about bloggers who are addicted to blogging for its own sake instead of having something truly meaninful to say, and even about one author whose book was suspended by his publisher because he could not finish the project due to the amount of time he wasted blogging.

But then, what of the future? Can I expect that anyone wanting to read my books will bother to buy them, or must I give up and do something else? Many speak of the value of giving out free samples, but some have learned that once the spigot is open you can’t close it. Once you offer something for free, it becomes the sample everyone uses as a foil if you try to charge for it later. Many small amateur magazines hosted on the internet contain stories by authors willing to give that one story away for free, with the hope that future works will be bought. Instead, the readers avoid buying the books altogether, saying “you gave that one away, why not all of them?” That will spell the doom of writing, and books, and then ebooks, and then a whole industry will collapse and there will be nothing to read. Period. It boggles the mind how shortsighted we have become, thinking that there are enough readers in the world in the first place to suppost an industry of ideas, that they are willing to pay for it, and that they understand what it takes to make a book. Apparently, a lot of them don’t. I compare it to the music industry, and we saw what happened. Even mighty Tower Records, that monolith of the record, casette and CD retail stores, went under because so many of its customers preferred to download the music for free. And they still do. So there is little the media companies can do about it.

Books are a source of learning, of knowledge, of ideas, and of the storage of human history. They are a picture of things as they were, are, and will be. But unless we recapture the value of books and restore their worth, the next human age will be very dark indeed. Authors have to eat, too. But the readers want it all and have no gratitude to spare. They are merciless in their hunger for entertainment. The entire global economy is too interdependent, too bound up in the trading of goods and resources. If one thing stops, everything will stop. This is what many young people do not understand. When commerce stops, the computers will crash, the televisions will stop working, the batteries will go dead, all the machines of industry will fall silent. The cell phones, too. And all because no one wants to pay for it, or learn what makes things work or how much it costs. As that happens, all those who depend on industry for their livelihoods will stop spending altogether. So many gameplayers have never known what it is really like to live in a post apocalyptic world. It won’t be “game over”, and they can start over the next day. It will be a day to day struggle to survive like no game they have ever played before, and they won’t be able to win no matter what they do. That is reality.

It is happening even now. As the predatory lenders tighten their grip and jack up interest rates on credit, many consumers are not using their cards already, hoping to head off the inevitable rate hikes on the horizon. They have already switched to cash as a means to pay for everything, and are trying to pay off their balances to zero, or declare bankruptcy to get out from under their mountains of debt. As they do so, the credit lenders will find themselves unable to pick up new victims to shore up their capital. When that happens, many of them will go under, or go to the government for a subsidy, like AIG or Goldman Sachs. But the government is already taking steps to stop their forward march past the line. We are in a deep recession, so giving things away for free is very like letting go of the farm altogether. Most of those advocating for free items want to preserve their way of life without doing what it takes to get it. They will lose.

By synergies, I mean the odd coincidence of similarities among different writers of vampire fiction. I think that the only difference was expressed in the strange name Anne Rice picked for her quintessential vampire “Lestat”, and Chelsea Yarbro’s “St. Germain”. But apart from those I have been frequently amazed at the sameness of both names and situations. It is not unusual for the vampire to be thematically paired with a fair damsel and a jealous lover. The eternal triangle must be preserved. But after a while the sameness of it all has been compared with the thousands of romance novels of years past where boy meets girl or girl meets boy, there is some resistance to their joining in marital bliss, and then they overcome the difficulty together and live happily ever after. In a vampire romance we are presented with something of a dramatic dilemma. One of the basic elements is that our vampire is  handicapped by the fact of his/her undeadness, alterior motivations, or just plain moral corruption. The pairing is doomed to fail from the outset, and we are dragged along for the ride as eyewitnesses to the inevitable stake through the heart or the lover’s sudden abandonment or sacrifice to the overriding thirst of the monster. There was a sameness to the plots that was formulaic.    

Apart from that there were also the serious horror writers, Brian Lumley (Necroscope); and Fred Saberhagen, who penned the classic “Holmes/Dracula File” and the “Dracula” series that made the undead count into a cult hero and inspired me to write vampires as heros.  There was also a delightful series of children’s books like “Bunnicula”, and “The Celery Stalks At Midnight”, about a family cat and his adventures with a tiny lupus with red eyes, a sharp overbite and a black mark on his back resembling a cape. I was especially charmed by the idea that the rabbit would sneak up on unsuspecting carrots and drain them dry during the night. So cute. But I digress.     

Many writers of different stripes tend to brand their vampires with elegant names: Louis, Lucien, Marcus, Michael, Victor, Carmilla, Amelia, and from “Buffy the Vampire Slayer”, Angel, Drusilla and Spike. “Vlad” is a frequent favorite, and we have all at one time or another toyed with “Dracula” in one way or another. What really annoys me is the fact that when I was writing my own vampire short stories twenty years ago, I picked names for my characters which I thought no one else thought of using. I used Antonia, and Lucien, and Michael, and Victor, and Julian, then Arden and Gabriel, and established my vampires as aliens from another planet.  The Children of The Dragon series was based on my original series “Blood Songs”, which was comprised of short stories I wrote for a fanzine.  When I undertook the project, I wanted to tell my stories whole cloth as original pieces, with no ties to any other vampire series, stories or novels. I wanted to be original, and I wanted to break out of the mold of telling moldy vampire stories, with the usual endings and the usual formulaic devices ad nauseum. I wanted to introduce new concepts, like more realistic ideas about what vampires did and why they did it, what factors made them that way, all couched in rational science and without the religious overtones. 

Little did I realize at the time that other writers were thinking about the same thing.    

There was a long series of films, all beginning to show Dracula or other vampires as humorous or foils for humorous plots, as heros, and even as maligned victims of public sentiment. Films like “Old Dracula” (David Niven) “Once Bitten” (John Carey) and “My Best Friend is A Vampire”, “Transylvania 6-5000″, and even the badly directed “Dracula in Love” (George Hamilton) and another badly directed film “Dead and Loving It” (Leslie Nielsen), whose vampires were both villanous and heroic. Talk about grey. At the time I took them all as a phase that Hollywood would soon grow out of. And it did, with Eddie Murphy’s stellar performance in “Vampire In Brooklyn” and Wesley Snipes in “Blade” I, II, and III. I give some credit to Francis Ford Coppola’s “Dracula”, though I did not like the costume designs, and the music gave me a headache. There were several other films at that time which did redeem the vampire’s image and which would take me too long to list and discuss; and that is perhaps a topic for a separate blog.   

BOOM. Suddenly, I was up against television. I shelved an old writing project called “Blood Will Out” which was a vampire detective story, because “Forever Knight” appeared on the scene. Then there came “Moonlight” and “Blood Ties”, and those basically sealed the coffin closed and put it in the ground forever. I kid you not. I developed a vampire private detective who enlists the aid of a priest to help him put the bad guys away, partly for revenge against the one who turned him against his will, and partly out of a need to rehabilitate himself. Sounds familiar? I wrote the first few chapters in 1980, inspired by the resurgence of interest in vampire fiction after Frank Langella starred in another Dracula film. I was then sidelined by time and real life, which made writing a hobby for a while. And while I was on the bench “Buffy The Vampire Slayer” made her debut and I watched the show religiously. After all, at the time there was nothing else to do. But while I watched I also thought it was time to bring out my old stories as a new series, and my first project was begun in 2003. A dodecahedron of vampire fiction books based on the old series. Eventually I named the series Children of The Dragon, and made my vampires aliens from another planet called them the Xosan (Show-sa’n). Over the course of their history, many made it to Earth and made it their home, with sometimes disastrous consequences.

But as I wrote, a new problem appeared.    

“Stargate: Atlantis” introduced alien vampires called “the wraith”. The first one I saw was a tall, thin creature with long white hair, grey eyes and wore a black leather duster, just like my Xosan fullblood Lucien. He had long pearlescent fingernails (I wrote them that way for years) and the only difference between the wraith and my own Xosan were that they sucked the lifeforce directly from the heart, while mine still bit and sucked faithfully from the neck, arm, or other parts. The wraith were vicious by nature, whereas mine seem gentle but there is a ravenous predator always lurking beneath a veneer of charm and self-discipline. Over time I saw that the wraith were up against some monstrous obstacles to their existence, among which are their overarching indifference for the plight of their victims, and their constant feuding among themselves for dominance. The problem was that I wrote about that, too, so many years ago. I felt that I was robbed of the right to be original. Someone wrote these screenplays based on short stories or “treatments” by other writers, perhaps even mine, published in the fanzine (I have no doubt they were circulated among the industry people). If I had written a screenplay instead of short stories, would that have made a difference? No, I don’t think so.    

Then along came “Underworld”, and I was up against lykans and vampires as dueling predators, with names like Lucien and Victor, and Marcus wrapped up all tidy in his coffin in the cellar. That Lucien was a lycanthrope made no difference; I felt that I was robbed of the right to be original. Even if I liked the film and all that it represented, I did not like the fact that Kate Beckinsale was playing the essential Antonia, but from a different angle. Selene was Antonia, right down to her independent streak and sense of fair play, but I introduced Antonia as a lone hunter on a secret mission which would be revealed through the course of my first book, Destiny’s Forge, cobbled together from chapters in the original series. Yet, the fact that her sire was named Victor, and she meets a fullblood Xosan named Lucien, may now be perceived as merely part of the jumble of derivative vampire fiction coming out only in the last couple of years.    

Now I am up against “Twilight” and “The Vampire Diaries” (I owned the full set  of books until I sold them on eBay). Each new set of stories is touted by publicists as “new” and “breaking out of the mold”, and there are thousands of fans everywhere clamoring for the books. But for a serious writer such as myself, who labored long to be original, there is nothing original left to try anymore. Will vampire fans read MY books? Only time will tell. Maybe all they want IS formula, but I don’t know for certain. All I can do is continue to write in my own idiom and hope that nobody else steals all my ideas.

To see my books visit the web site: http://www.antellus.com/.