Thread: Vampire Research

Thanks everyone!! You all have been such great help!

Porphyria's been done. If you run a search on this site, you might come up with my story Stains Under the Orange Tree, which is about a young boy with a kind of porphyria commonly called 'vampirism' (his case was Old City Syndrome, which is all of the nasty effects of this kind of porphyria coupled with the effects of a prolonged lightless environment--rickets, scurvy, slow metabolism, etc). It's a very different kind of vampire story becasue not only is the vampire a child, but the vampires have no special powers.

***Edit***
After searching for it myself, I'll just post the link becasue even searching for the title, it comes up after four pages of results
http://www.writingforums.com/showthr...-Story)-Part-1

I write about vamps in a fantasy setting. I think you would do well to grab a copy of The Vampire Slayers Field Guide to the Undead by Shane MacDougall. It's the most extensive collection of international vampire lore I have ever encountered.

So, I didn't read all the post and this may have been said already, but what about the physic vamps and cults. I read a lot (really way to many, it is ridiculous and a shame to my BA in lit) of vamp novels and series and the one thing they all have in common is that the vamps are out of the coffin. The most awesome, interesting, and original thing I read was not a vamp novel at all but a mystery with a physco who thought they were vamp mixed in. It was Lisa Jackson's Lost Souls.It is an older novel too, so you can probably get it pretty cheap. I think something that had a cult of physic vamps who were not out in the open with their vampirism would be interesting and not what every other vamp novel is about. It has been done, but not overdone. If you go this route, please send me excerpts. I love to read it, but I can't write it. I just can't create that much illusion or making my own world yet. Good luck!!!

To those who think that vampires are 'overdone' - wake up.

There's a reason. People can't get enough of them. Can anyone remember a time throughout their lives when vampires weren't popular? To suggest that Meyer has somehow broken the genre by making it popular with kids suggests you don't really have much of a clue about how things work. It's kinda like saying that Twilight books will never sell because Ann Rice was too successful.

Hell with those vamps. Let's get back to pirates and mummies

Or mummy pirates?

mummy pirates! hahaha. you create them and i will read it!

A man who wrote a screen play for a vampire movie, someone complained to him because his hero was blowing away the vampires using ordinary weapons "They don't die without silver bullets". His reply; they are a fiction, they die whatever way I want them to die, and anyway I know the man who invented the silver bullet thing, know how he came by it? he was watching an episode of "The Lone Ranger" and thought 'that's a cool idea'.
Don't simply go trawling for legends about vampires, they have been researched already, look for other folk tales and myths, maybe modern urban myths for example, and then fit them round vampires for something original.

nearly all cultures have evolved some form of blood-drinking creatures. The possibilities are endless. I derived my vamps from the myths about the lamiae (children of the lamia)