How My Writer’s Library Helps My Writing and Research

Fantasy and science fiction readers are naturally open to the unexpected, and they like new takes on old stories. The trick is to bend expectations enough while keeping things believable. My in-house writing library helps me maintain authenticity while pushing the boundaries of my characters to make them fresh and interesting to contemporary audiences. ( Avoid Common Research Pitfalls in Historical Fiction .) As a writer, it probably won’t shock anyone to know that I grew up loving to read. But there are a few details people may not know about me that inform my writing today. When we were children, my sister and I had a beautiful set of encyclopedias in our house. The leather-bound reference books proved to be a never-ending source of wonder as I perused the pages, eager to read their seemingly inexhaustible contents. The other detail is that as a child, I would ride my bike to the Los Angeles Public Library branch near my home and sit on the floor for hours, pulling books off the shelves. Many years later, I became a newspaper reporter, eager to glean the facts of my stories before putting them down on paper. This brings me quite obviously to vampires. Traditionally, vampires only come out at night. In Dracula , the inky blackness of the midnight hour is terror-filled as the vampire stalks poor, unsuspecting Mina while she sleeps. Her dreams are full of longing for a beast she cannot name, only to awaken with small puncture marks upon her neck in the morning. For decades, in most vampire novels or movies, everything terrible happens after the sun goes down. Lights are turned on, fires are stoked, but no one, it seems, is immune to the ruthless hunters as they stalk their prey. Thanks to Dracula and countless similar stories, we learned that the only way to kill a vampire is to drive a stake through its heart, cut off its head, or expose it to direct sunlight. But what if you want your vampires to walk in the daylight and drink whisky? The answer, of course, […]

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