Thread: Jane Austen: Vampire.

Being a good little aspiring novelist I traveled down to the local library yesterday; which is an hour journey from my friend’s house where I stayed the night before. We were just roaming around the shelves together, picking out books from mythology to debt management when I looked at a sign that I’ll forget. Apparently some whack made a novel on Jane Austen as a rather arrogant vampire with a title like ‘Jane Bites Back‘.


Really?


This whole vampire thing is amazingly overrated in my opinion, plus hardly anyone has the chops to make them interesting. They practically make them human before they can do anything with them. I myself am vampire addict in most respects, but I hardly ever read or write anything to do with them on the note that its just not any good. Call it a cliché that I prefer not being part of, since we all know that every novel has basically been written before.


We got a good, long chuckle out of the entire thing. What do the masses think about such a ridiculous idea?

Aha! So Jane Austen was a vampire. That explains a lot. Mostly it explains my personal feelings about Jane Austen's novels.

The first draft of Pride and Prejudice was titled Pride and Extreme Prejudice, where Mr Darcy made plain his ideas on Blacks and Jews. That was written out in subsequent versions.

Sounds to me like the question of vampires has been overused on this forum. Can't we just forget about them for a few years - bestselling authors included - and then when we come back to them, they'll actually seem a little new for about three months?

I don't think vampires will ever be new, ever. People are generally reviled, I don't blame them.

The Simpsons just insulted Twilight. It made me laugh.

This whole Twilight fad is really killing me, mainly because I'll walk into a bookstore and see an entire display of not only the Twilight books, but also classics like "Pride and Prejudice" and "Wuthering Heights" with Twilight-esque covers: the black, the red, the whole she-bang. People have to be tricked into reading books with actual merit. That depressed me, but what depressed me more was the book sitting next to it, which was written to help high schoolers score well on the verbal section of the SAT by teaching vocabulary used in the Twilight series. Really? What vocabulary? Sparkles? Chiseled abs? UGH.

lol, mandax. I know what you mean. Another trend I'd like to see less of is the vampires+werewolves thing. Underworld, Twilight, New Blood—they've all got both. Why don't they add an original fantasy race for once, like elves? For that matter, I don't think wizards have been done for some time. Maybe even throw some tree-people in there. And while we're at it, why don't we add a dwarf with a big bushy beard? But not like a midget dwarf, but we'll also have midget dwarfs! We'll just call them something else. Nothing prominent with little people comes to mind. . .

And why don't we add a magical ring that makes the wearer invisible? Pretty sure that's never been done before. Maybe even throw some grim-reaper looking horse riders in there. We'll also need a comic relief character with an original, quirky name that no one's ever, ever heard before. Like Peregrin Took. But we'll shorten it to something short and catchy. Yeah. Now we've got the recipe for something original.

Caelum, that's brilliant! We can make it a trilogy. I'm sure it'll amass a huge following, and then we can work on movie deals! Yes, that's one unique idea we can definitely profit from.

I'm in, as long as there's a wizard involved, and none of this Harry Potter teenaged-wizard crap. He has to have a beard and a staff.

I don't mind these silly books that are out right now. In fact I love things like Pride and Prejudice and Zombies. I can just ignore the vampires in Jane Austen. At least it might be getting some young people realising who Jane actually is.