Wake Up Dead

[vampthenewblack]

So I've been writing this thing. It's a vampire thing, surprise surprise, but not in any of my vampire fandoms.

Vampires are what brought me to fandom originally. Well over a decade ago now, when Hubby introduced me to Buffy the Vampire Slayer, and the Internet was (to me) a new and wondrous time waster source of information. I can't even remember if Google was the search engine of choice back then, but I did whatever the equivalent of google was and as you do, found online fandom.

Vampires have always been my thing, ever since Dad handed me a copy of Dracula when I was 12 or 13. A few years later Tom Cruise bit Brad Pitt in a spectacularly homoerotic display, and I was a vampire slash fan (even though I was still at least six years away from knowing it had a name).

No big surprise that in my current fandom, Teen Wolf, that does not have vampires in the canon (which is weird, actually, because there's vampires in the canon of every fandom I've ever written for), nor, apparently, will it ever, I find myself writing vampfic.

It's not my first attempt. I've tried at least 3 times to write vampire!Stiles in the last year, and every time I've stopped, intending to regroup and reoutline and rewrite. Because it's never good enough.

It'll never be good enough, but I wanted so badly to write the perfect Teen Wolf vampfic and I felt like I really only had the one chance. Yes, vampires are my thing, but I don't want to be the author who only writes vamp Au's, either. So. One chance to tell all the different vampire stories. It pretty much ended up in a giant freeze and three abandoned longfics. Sigh.

Then one day I said 'what the hell' and wrote some flash. One Day You're Gonna Wake Up Dead wasn't much more than an angsty vignette with blood drinking and the hint of future Sterek, but I loved it. I thought I could quench my thirst for vampfic and walk away, but no. Vamp!Stiles wouldn't leave me alone.

I started another, slightly longer fic in the same 'verse. It sat unfinished in my dropbox, suffering a slight case of not-perfect-but-it'll-get-done-eventually for months. I finally posted That Name is Striking Fear in Nobody's Heart last week. While it was unfinished I wrote more flash in the 'verse, most to prompts that fit nicely. I also jumped around in the timeline a bit.

And this is pretty much the essence of what I'm structuring as a series. Wake Up Dead is still just parts and pieces online, but in my head (and in the notebook I started filling almost immediately after posting the first part) it's got a lot going on. I don't know how many words it'll eventually have, or if it'll ever be a full and complete story as a whole, but it's My Happy Place, and the whole point is to allow me to write vampfic in the Teen Wolf fandom without too much stress.

Small chunks are always easier to manage, anyway :)

A few people have asked me what mythology I'm using for my vampires. Many assume I've gone with Vampire Diaries for some reason. The truth is I'm not using any specific established mythology. Much of it is based on an original vampire novel I wrote years ago (so my own vampire canon, if you like), but it's already deviated from that and is likely to even more as time goes on. I'm just going with what works for the Teen Wolf universe, and for the fic.

You can find the entire series here: Wake Up Dead

Comments

[thraceadams]

I love reading writerly thoughts :D Thanks for sharing yours!

[vampthenewblack]

Thanks for reading, hun :) I've missed getting this sort of stuff out :)