The Vampire Craze

An editor once told me one of things she worried about at every writing conference was underestimating the abilities of someone who really didn't look like their notion of a writer. Someone with a bad perm, wearing old sneakers, stained polyester pants and a saggy T-shirt. This happened to her once, and she never forgot it.

Because the lady turned out to be one of the most successful romance writers ever. By dissing her the editor lost a lot of credibility with her publishers. Sending editors to a writers conference isn't cheap. They are supposed to spot rising talent. 

The editor's comment has stayed with me because writer's conference are by nature--well, exhausting. They just are. I can just imagine an editor spending an entire afternoon listening to pitches and having someone show up announcing they have written a book about vampires. Does that sound promising? Probably not. I'll bet the editor's first reaction is that it's been done for goodness sake.

I'll bet more than one editor regrets not paying attention to that pitch. 

One of my favorite books was The Historian by Elizabeth Kostova. Our own Type M'er, Mario Acevedo, has a vampire series. A student of mine at Fort Hays, Morgan Chalfant, wrote a vampire western, Youngbloods. Steven King's Salem's Lot  isn't at all like Anne Rice's The Vampire Chronicles. The Teen series, The Vampire Diaries, was a huge success, in print and on the screen.

 So what is it about vampires that inspires writers to come up with books so different from one another? What is there in the human psyche that connects to such a bizarre creature. I'm not only speaking of writers, but the readers who devour them. No pun intended. I really am not enthusiastic about vampire books, nor am I inclined to believe a word. And yet, and yet. When I first read Salem's Lot I wore a crucifix around my neck for days. I wore it when I slept too.

The Historian is such a terrific book I began to doubt my disbelief.

I searched for vampire books in Amazon Some of the covers were a little too interesting. You want blood? There's blood aplenty. There were over 100 pages of Vampire titles. That has to be a category record.

My first mystery in the Lottie Albright series, Deadly Descent, was originally titled Bound by Blood. I intended to make it the Bound by series. Bound by Murder, Bound by Death, etc. My editor objected. She said that clerks don't have time to read all the books and would stock Bound by Blood in the Vampire section. Then the series would be placed there forever. 

If you are starting out in this business, don't ever let someone tell you that your book won't be published because another writer has already written a book on the same subject.

La Malinche and me

Last month I visited the Denver Art Museum and toured their exhibit of La Malinche. It was an enlightening retrospective about the history and folklore surrounding her with pieces and narratives reflecting the takes by other artists: visual, theatrical, commercial, and literary. I'll admit some sour grapes here because I wasn't invited to contribute, especially since I'm one of the few writers from the US to feature La Malinche in a novel.

So who is La Malinche? She is famous for serving as a translator to the Conquistador general Hernán Cortés and helping him overthrow the Aztec throne. She was an indigenous woman from the land we know today as Mexico, and as a young girl, taken as a slave. Later she was gifted to the Spaniards, where her talents as a translator were valued by Cortés who used her to negotiate with the Aztec emperor Moctezuma and his imperial court. Malinche was not only an expert interpreter but her keen knowledge of local culture and politics allowed Cortés to gain a military advantage over Moctezuma and set into motion the rapid destruction of the Aztec empire.

Because of this, in Mexico "Malinche" is synonymous with "traitor" someone capable of the ultimate betrayal. But over the centuries, and especially more recently, a more complicated appraisal has seeped into popular culture. She is also portrayed as a victim of exploitation and because she bore two children with the Spaniards, a son Martin with Cortés and later, a daughter Maria with her husband Juan Jaramillo (a lieutenant of Cortés), Malinche is regarded by some as the mother of the mestizos, people of mixed Indigenous American and European blood. (If you want to stir the pot, just go to Mexico and ask around what "mestizo" means and you'll get a heated earful about the country's enduring culture of racism. Sound familiar? Colonization on both sides of the border has left one convoluted legacy.) 

Malinche is known by other names such as Malinali, Manitzin, and Doña Marina. In post-colonial Mexico she was again redefined as "La Llorona" (the Crier), the phantom woman who prowls the waterways and lures the unsuspecting to their deaths. Her lamentations seek out her children, whom she drowned in a fit of madness. This myth is that La Llorona is actually Malinche condemned by fate to walk the earth, her children being the Indigenous people she betrayed to the Conquistadors. 

Since the reputation of Malinche is up for grabs, I decided to put my own spin on things. In the second book of my Felix Gomez series, X-Rated Bloodsuckers, we learn that the vampire trickster Coyote was actually her first child. As I was writing that book, I discovered that many Jews expelled from Spain in 1492 by the Edict of Expulsion had joined the Conquistadors to escape the attention of the Inquisition. Acevedo was a popular last name adopted by these Jewish refugees. Drawing on this history, I decided that one of these Spanish Jews had a secret tryst with Malinche, who subsequently gave the baby away, to be raised by a guajiro, turned into a vampire, taught the deepest secrets of the supernatural world, and given the name "Coyote" to serve the undead as an enigmatic and mischievous shaman.

It is as La Llorona that Doña Marina herself appears in my novel, Rescue From Planet Pleasure. To rescue another vampire from the aliens, Felix travels to the sacred ground of Chaco Canyon in northern New Mexico, where he reunites with Coyote, who's tormented by his mother Doña Marina. Turns out, she's somewhat of a party girl with a friend-with-benefits relationship with El Cucuy, the Mexican bogeyman. And we get to hear her side of the whole "you betrayed Mexico" narrative. 

A Debt Paid

 The Christmas Season is a time for celebration and recollection. I have much to be grateful for, to include the opportunity on Type M to share anecdotes and observations. This post I'll take the occasion to reflect on a debt paid to the acclaimed Denver Chicano artist, Stevon Lucero, who recently passed away from health complications (not Covid).  An imaginative painter, more of a shaman who used paint as his way to share his visions, he was known for his fusion of Mexican and Indigenous folklore, the metaphysical, and American pop culture. He was also a scholarly fan of science-fiction, from the cerebral to the cheesy. 

Photo: Stevon Lucero Metastudios

I'd stop by his studio at the CHAC Gallery and we'd chat about art and writing. He could make connections between 2001: A Space Odyssey and Batman and Carlos Castaneda. How this worked in my favor was that in my Felix Gomez series, I had written myself into a corner. I'd penned each book as a stand alone and never gave much thought to a series arc. Then I got stuck. What had happened was that in my third book, The Undead Kama Sutra, I decided to throw a curve ball to the readers. Carmen Arellano, vampire femme fatale extraordinaire, had been captured by alien gangsters. The reader expected Felix to rescue Carmen but he failed. At the end of the book, she was a captive of aliens in deep space and I had no idea how to rescue her. Felix's dilemma weighed on his mind and mine.

At one First Friday Art Walk, I was chatting with Stevon when he said, "Mario, that was brilliant." Though I had no idea what he was talking about, I agreed with him. 

"What you did, vato. The psychic plane. In every book you build more about accessing the psychic plane. That's how you're going to rescue Carmen, using the psychic plane." He proceeded to explain about the supernatural vortexes at Chaco Canyon in New Mexico. Reflecting on what he'd said, Stevon was right. Only I as the author didn't see it but to Stevon, the path across the galaxy using paranormal portals was obvious. And so, his insights unfolded into Rescue From Planet Pleasure. After I wrote the book I sat with Stevon to share my thoughts. With his usual self-effacing manner, he told me that he'd moved on to other things. But at least I had the chance to thank him. 

While Stevon's memorial service was Roman Catholic, more or less, his funeral drew upon Mayan and Aztec traditions. 

A Darth Vader censer violated no rules in Stevon Lucero's universe.

Aztec dancers lead the procession back to the chapel.

Merry Christmas. Best Wishes and Happy Writing to you all.

Respect Your Minions

I'm close to priming the BSP pump and start spraying news about my forthcoming Felix Gomez detective-vampire book, Rescue From Planet Pleasure. Early in that story I had a battle between the good vampires and the enemy bloodsuckers. My heroes were cutting down the bad guys by the dozens. Then during the writing of that manuscript I saw the James Bond thriller, Skyfall, and that made me reconsider the body count. Near the climax of the movie, a horde of bad guys close upon Bond and company trapped in the mansion. Our intrepid champions cut through the ranks of the evil doers who kept attacking and attacking like mindless zombies. Then it hit me.

Why are minions so willingly expendable? Why are the bad guy pawns so relentless in their attack despite being slaughtered? These guys are criminals, which means they have only two possible motives. Either they are cultish slaves or they're in the business of murder and mayhem for profit. Even if they are devoted slaves to the master criminal, wouldn't they--as they're being mowed down--ask the boss to reconsider their strategy? What's the point of them dying like vermin? And if they're in it for the money, I think that after one or two bite the dust, the rest would pull back and regroup. Money is only good if you can spend it, something that's hard to do from the grave.

In Skyfall the bad guys arrive in a gigantic helicopter, worth tens of millions of dollars. Flying that machine ain't easy, so it would have to be piloted by an experienced and rather level-headed crew, and despite their competency, the copter is easily destroyed. At what point would the crew hit "minion-override" and decide to quit acting stupid? A band of murderous criminals is like a pack of wolves, and like wolves, once the alpha threatens the pack, then they turn on him.

That realization made me reconsider the slaughter of the minions in my story, and I cut back on the body count. I even had some of the minions rebel against the villain because of their useless loss. As we writers like to say, everyone is the hero of their own story, so it would make sense for the minions to act in their own self-interest. Which actually makes for a more layered and deeper story. Lesson learned.