Welcome to Biting-Edge, a blog shared by authors and vampire experts, Mario Acevedo and Jeanne Stein. We’ll cover urban fantasy, vampires, pop culture, and all things Joss Whedon. Unlike other fantasy blogs, we don’t insist on body cavity searches (unless you ask politely). Snarkiness is most welcome...though we won't promise not to bite back!
Tuesday, February 28, 2012
Write about monsters and the fantastic. Ask me how!
Mario here:
What is it with writing about vampires and the supernatural?
Undead bloodsuckers have evolved from monster, to empathetic villain, to outright revenant hero. No need to explain the fascination with vampires, just explain the rules. And what are the rules? You decide. Every novel begins with the suspension of disbelief and it’s up to you to build a compelling world that fits your story, be it paranormal, fantasy, or historical. What are the elements of world-building? The physical? People and customs? What about magic? How much detail is needed? We’ll review vampires and other supernatural creatures and use exercise prompts to study how to use the elements of world-building.
How can you make that weird world of yours seem super-cool? How do you create a setting that a reader can recognize but isn't riddled in clichés?
Then sign up for my class with WritersOnlineClasses for special insights into Vampires and World-Building, March 1-31, 2012. Fangs up, everybody!
What is it with writing about vampires and the supernatural?
Undead bloodsuckers have evolved from monster, to empathetic villain, to outright revenant hero. No need to explain the fascination with vampires, just explain the rules. And what are the rules? You decide. Every novel begins with the suspension of disbelief and it’s up to you to build a compelling world that fits your story, be it paranormal, fantasy, or historical. What are the elements of world-building? The physical? People and customs? What about magic? How much detail is needed? We’ll review vampires and other supernatural creatures and use exercise prompts to study how to use the elements of world-building.
How can you make that weird world of yours seem super-cool? How do you create a setting that a reader can recognize but isn't riddled in clichés?
Then sign up for my class with WritersOnlineClasses for special insights into Vampires and World-Building, March 1-31, 2012. Fangs up, everybody!
Labels: Vampires, world-building, writersonlineclasses
¶ posted by Mario Acevedo @ 8:21 PM 0 comments
Monday, August 22, 2011
The secret formula
Mario here:
It's the dream of every novelist. Your debut novel scores a fat advance. And a movie deal. Your publisher pulls out all the stops to market the panties off your book. Buzz for your novel sizzles everywhere.
I'd like to tell you, dream on pal. But it does happen.
In fact, despite the cold shoulder most writers get from publishers, their editors are always on the prowl for The Next Big Thing. Winner to get scads of fame and dump trucks of cash.
You can do it. All you need is this simple formula: young love + fantasy = drama.
After Harry Potter ran its course, New York was out in the hustings, beating the brush for their anointed one. Out of the blue, they discovered Stephenie Meyer, a Mormon suburban housewife whose tale of chaste human and undead lovers was inspired by a dream. So this unlikely source begat the biggest vampire craze ever.
We're aware of the Twilight backlash, and so you're probably familiar with this bit of snark from the Master of the Macabre, Stephen King:
"Harry Potter is about confronting fears, finding inner strength and doing what is right in the face of adversity. Twilight is about how important it is to have a boyfriend."
I'm not going to critique or defend Meyer's books but I will point out that King, for all his smarts, missed the point of the Twilight fables.
(Sidebar: I never read any of the Twilight books, they're not for me. And I seldom read horror, either. Or much fantasy. I lean toward hard-boiled mysteries where sketchy people do dastardly deeds. Vampires? A zombie plaque? Yawn. But a crack head breaking into my house and gutting me for pocket change--that I can relate to.
I'm often complimented on my luck to have written vampire novels during the Twilight meme. About the only thing Twilight has done for my career is remind me how low I exist on the publishing totem pole. All but the smallest dogs can pee on me.)
So the point is, Twilight books are the few I've heard discussed at length at parties, in cafés or bars. Only by women, for sure. Note the key word: women. Sixty percent of fiction readers are women. A lot of critics dismiss Twilight as an adolescent read for naive teenage girls. Yet I've heard worldly, experienced, even skanky-type females gush over Meyer's stories. Not all women, but enough (along with the teenagers and tweens) to have made the Twilight franchise a behemoth that kept the publishing industry from sinking like a dying tuna. During the darkest days of the recent publishing implosion, Meyer's books represented 18 percent of the entire publishing market. So while horror, science-fiction, traditional mystery, and literary fiction lost readers (or more correctly, buyers), novels about love--romance-->finding a boyfriend<--continued to sell big time.
Which brings us to The Next Big Thing, The Night Circus, by Erin Morgenstern. The story premise? Young love and fantasy--in this case, magic. (Where have we seen that formula before?) Which garnered six hundred large as an advance from Doubleday. Summit Entertainment bought the world rights and is shopping for a television deal. Morgenstern's path to success hasn't been a gilded ride--she's had her share of setbacks and stumbles--but the Gods of Fortune smiled on her. We'll see if the hype pans out. It doesn't hurt that considering her audience, Morgenstern's publicity photo looks like this:
As opposed to the picture of this scribe-to-a-vampire:
There you have it, the secret formula for literary success. Young love plus fantasy. You have no excuse not to be a filthy-rich author.
Mario here:
It's the dream of every novelist. Your debut novel scores a fat advance. And a movie deal. Your publisher pulls out all the stops to market the panties off your book. Buzz for your novel sizzles everywhere.
I'd like to tell you, dream on pal. But it does happen.
In fact, despite the cold shoulder most writers get from publishers, their editors are always on the prowl for The Next Big Thing. Winner to get scads of fame and dump trucks of cash.
You can do it. All you need is this simple formula: young love + fantasy = drama.
After Harry Potter ran its course, New York was out in the hustings, beating the brush for their anointed one. Out of the blue, they discovered Stephenie Meyer, a Mormon suburban housewife whose tale of chaste human and undead lovers was inspired by a dream. So this unlikely source begat the biggest vampire craze ever.
We're aware of the Twilight backlash, and so you're probably familiar with this bit of snark from the Master of the Macabre, Stephen King:
"Harry Potter is about confronting fears, finding inner strength and doing what is right in the face of adversity. Twilight is about how important it is to have a boyfriend."
I'm not going to critique or defend Meyer's books but I will point out that King, for all his smarts, missed the point of the Twilight fables.
(Sidebar: I never read any of the Twilight books, they're not for me. And I seldom read horror, either. Or much fantasy. I lean toward hard-boiled mysteries where sketchy people do dastardly deeds. Vampires? A zombie plaque? Yawn. But a crack head breaking into my house and gutting me for pocket change--that I can relate to.
I'm often complimented on my luck to have written vampire novels during the Twilight meme. About the only thing Twilight has done for my career is remind me how low I exist on the publishing totem pole. All but the smallest dogs can pee on me.)
So the point is, Twilight books are the few I've heard discussed at length at parties, in cafés or bars. Only by women, for sure. Note the key word: women. Sixty percent of fiction readers are women. A lot of critics dismiss Twilight as an adolescent read for naive teenage girls. Yet I've heard worldly, experienced, even skanky-type females gush over Meyer's stories. Not all women, but enough (along with the teenagers and tweens) to have made the Twilight franchise a behemoth that kept the publishing industry from sinking like a dying tuna. During the darkest days of the recent publishing implosion, Meyer's books represented 18 percent of the entire publishing market. So while horror, science-fiction, traditional mystery, and literary fiction lost readers (or more correctly, buyers), novels about love--romance-->finding a boyfriend<--continued to sell big time.
Which brings us to The Next Big Thing, The Night Circus, by Erin Morgenstern. The story premise? Young love and fantasy--in this case, magic. (Where have we seen that formula before?) Which garnered six hundred large as an advance from Doubleday. Summit Entertainment bought the world rights and is shopping for a television deal. Morgenstern's path to success hasn't been a gilded ride--she's had her share of setbacks and stumbles--but the Gods of Fortune smiled on her. We'll see if the hype pans out. It doesn't hurt that considering her audience, Morgenstern's publicity photo looks like this:
As opposed to the picture of this scribe-to-a-vampire:
There you have it, the secret formula for literary success. Young love plus fantasy. You have no excuse not to be a filthy-rich author.
Labels: discount furniture, Erin Morgenstern, paranormal orgies, Stephen King, undead sex, Vampires
¶ posted by Mario Acevedo @ 4:55 PM 10 comments
Sunday, October 10, 2010
What scares you?
Mario here:
Mario here:
It's October, the month for ghosts, ghouls, and frightful tales. With that in mind, I'm teaching a workshop at the Denver Public Library, as part of their Fresh City Life programs, Boo! Scary Stories That Really Scare.
I recently saw Let Me In, the Hollywood remake of the Swedish vampire flick, Let The Right One In. Both movies are entertaining and spooky homages to undead lore and the 12 yo vampire is one of the most vicious and creepy bloodsuckers on screen.
Interestingly, the American version kept the original's bleak and low-rent atmosphere. Though having been in Los Alamos, I remember it as an upscale burg peopled with PhDs and brainy folks employed at the nearby nuclear weapons labs.
Interestingly, the American version kept the original's bleak and low-rent atmosphere. Though having been in Los Alamos, I remember it as an upscale burg peopled with PhDs and brainy folks employed at the nearby nuclear weapons labs.
Also, New Mexico winters are much like Denver winters; we don't get days of unrelenting gloom like in the movie. It might stay cold as hell for weeks on end, but the sun does come out to torment us with hopes of warmth.
Because I write vampire novels, readers assume that I was always an aficionado of monsters and all things undead. Actually, I wasn't. Vampires and zombies never creeped me out, and I thought monster movies were silly.
But there were a couple of things that terrified me. Deeply.
La Llorona.
In the Southwest we have the tale of La Llorona, the wailing woman who haunts rivers and lakes. According to legend, before she became La Llorona, a woman went mad and drowned her children. She now stalks the waters and lures the unsuspecting to their doom, hoping to assuage her torment and replace the souls of her damned children with those of her victims. As kids we were constantly reminded of La Llorona with stories of actual eye-witness accounts. Would our aunts and their boyfriends lie to us? Even as late as junior high, if my friends and I had to return home at night, we took the long way rather than shortcuts using the ditch banks crisscrossing my home town. We picked up sticks and rocks to defend ourselves in case we ran into La Llorona.
And the other thing that terrified me to fits was the threat of nuclear war.
Duck and cover drills had been forgotten by the time I was in elementary school, or else nobody thought the Commies would waste a nuke on Las Cruces. But I knew about the possibility of nuclear attack from the Civil Defense pamphlets my dad brought from the army reserves. The television would also broadcast the occasional CD public announcement, frighteningly surreal with their bizarre use of cartoons and marionettes to blunt the horror of atomic annihilation.
I read a lot of airplane and history books and so even as a little kid I was familiar with modern bombers, ballistic missiles, and Hiroshima. Movies like The Time Machine showed the consequences of atomic war and made the prospect of a nuclear Apocalypse ever more real.
Then...one October night, the Civil Defense alarm mounted on the local fire house went off. I recognized the constant tone wail. Red Alert! Imminent attack. Fifteen minutes to Armageddon! We were doomed. I broke into a sweat and started bawling. I expected to hear shrieks of terror burst throughout the neighborhood. At any moment a blinding light would burn through my window and the glass would shatter before the inferno consumed us all.
And then... nothing. No panicked mobs in the streets. No flashes of light. No big boom.
Nada.
Only that damn alarm that kept wailing and wailing. As I lay there blotting my tears, I first felt foolish. Then disappointed. No nuclear war. I later found out the alarm was to roust the volunteer firemen. What a gyp.
The Fates had fun with me. Boo!
Labels: Halloween, Let Me In, nuclear war, Vampires
¶ posted by Mario Acevedo @ 4:39 PM 9 comments
Sunday, September 19, 2010
Easy as 1,2,3...Vampires, Booze, and Sex
Mario here:
1. There's often talk that vampires have run their course. We scoff at such heresy. At the Biting-Edge, it's always:
Mario here:
1. There's often talk that vampires have run their course. We scoff at such heresy. At the Biting-Edge, it's always:
Friday and Saturday, Sept 24-25, Jeanne and I will spread the undead gospel at the Mountain & Plains Independent Booksellers Trade Show at the Marriott Denver Tech Center.
The Biting-Edge can never get enough vampires, and we especially dig the old school, creepy pre-sparkly kind such as Frank Langella, the urbane and dashing Dracula. "No drugs! It will pollute her blood." Spoken like a true gentleman in a 70s do.
We even appreciate Frank Langella's thespian license when he steals the show as Skeletor in Masters of the Universe.
We even appreciate Frank Langella's thespian license when he steals the show as Skeletor in Masters of the Universe.
(watching this movie helps if you have a thing for Meg Foster as Evil-Lyn.)
On the subject of goofy, sci-fi/fantasy-related videos, check this out:
2. We're riffing here, so follow the drops of Saurian brandy to this classic piece on Space Trek Sousing in Modern Drunkard. Spoiler alert, the author despised the politically correct Star Trek TNG.
3. And there's this great news from Publishers Lunch:
Lorelei James's next two BLACKTOP COWBOY novels, involving a sports therapist and her hard-riding cowboy patients, to Kerry Donovan at NAL, by Scott Miller at Trident Media Group.
If you want to learn more about what makes Lorelei James such a smoking hot author of erotica, sneak a read of Book 5 of the Rough Riders series: Rough, Raw, and Ready. Warning: This book contains unbelievably explicit sex, including multiple cowboy/cowgirl/cowboy ménage scenes, juicy, hot, male on male action, a bucketful of politically incorrect situations and true Western ideology.
And the San Francisco Bay Area thinks it has a lip lock on such pervitude. Yee-ha to South Dakota!
Labels: Dracula, Modern Drunkard, Sex, Star Trek, Vampires
¶ posted by Mario Acevedo @ 5:28 PM 1 comments
