Someone once asked me why all the vampires in my stories are wealthy.  The quick answer is that not all of them are wealthy, as that would be ridiculous.  However, the average vampire has a lot more money than the average human, and the older the vampire, the greater the gap.  This isn’t because I’m into escapism, vampires aside.   This is just a practical observation about our economic system.

For starters, our economic system is based on the human life span.  Think about the types of the big debts that most humans accrue- mortgages, raising children, medical expenses.  Just when you think you’re getting ahead, something called life comes along and gives you another surprise.  If everyone lived forever, many things would have to change in order to maintain some kind of balance.

Vampires don’t have to worry about everyone living forever.  They only have to worry about vampires living forever.  What to do?  Make long-term investments.  They say it takes money to make money.  That’s probably true.  What does it mean to the vampire just starting in the world?  It means that if they put aside just a small amount of money each day, after a long period, they’ll have a lot more money to invest than even the most frugal person starting with similar means. 

One might argue that the same could be said for people, but people aren’t always the wisest with their money.  This would explain why there might be some poor elder vampires in the world no doubt.  However, people learn from their mistakes, so why can’t vampires?  Perhaps for the first seventy years they might make all kinds of stupid investment choices- like putting all their eggs into one basket.  If a human did the same, they’d be broke.  Nevertheless, the amazing thing about many investments is this – if you want short-term gain, you must take higher risk.  If you want long-term gain, the risk is lower. 

 

A vampire trying to make investments over a two hundred year period could easily make the most conservative choices available and still come out ahead.  Just think about one investment choice- real estate.  It’s true that if you purchased a home in the Bay Area at the wrong time, you could be paying two million for a dinky place and never able to sell it for anywhere near that amount.  However, I don’t know of many places that if you purchased land years ago, where the value of that land would not have grown considerably.  Remember, the Louisiana Purchase was only fifteen million dollars.    Alaska cost around seven million.  I’ve read countless stories where the vampires were around during these purchases.  Perhaps they didn’t have millions to spend at the time, but the point was that no matter how much land they did buy, it’d be worth a fortune later.

The only downside to being a vampire investor is how do you keep your long-term investment in a society that knows nothing about vampires?  This would be a problem that the vampires must have thought about, and they must have developed creative solutions for.  Why?  Because large amounts of money buys answers.  It always has.

 

Now suppose that society knew about vampires.  That would mean vampires wouldn’t have to inherit (and be potentially taxed) on money to themselves anymore.  Plus, if the vampires do live forever, I’m willing to bet some rich guy wouldn’t approach a vampire with the proposition, “I’ll write you a blank check in return for immortality.”  It’d be yet another reason why even the poorest vampire should have some funds.

So, the next time you read a story with a bunch of four hundred year old vampires that are just as broke as Joe Plumber, you might want to stop and wonder why.

I had the wonderful good fortune to tour Australia last summer.  One of the things that stuck out in my mind were the constant reminders of how people had inadvertently altered the local ecology by introducing some invasive animal or plant that wasn’t native like the European bunny rabbit.  These innocent little fuzzballs, without their natural predators, had run wild over the continent, eating and destroying the native habitat.  It all goes to show you, everything in nature must have a balance.

Imagine that you pick up today’s copy of the New York Times, and there on the front cover is the amazing announcement, “Vampires Exist for Real!”  This could be a good thing or a bad thing.  It largely depends on what kind of vampires we’re talking about.  If it’s Stoker’s vampires, then you’d best start sharpening all your stakes.  What really amazes me, however, is how many stories are written where there is no way that vampires wouldn’t immediately destroy the human ecology.

For example, in some stories, vampires are easily created.  Just a few bites from the offending vampire, and you have a new one.  This new one has a sudden craving for blood, and it must bite someone else.  Then they become a vampire.  This process continues, until before you know it, the entire world has fangs.   Of course, realistically, the vampires would first create human farms and sell human blood at such a premium that broke vampires might easily starve to death.

I wrote briefly about population growth models in another blog post, so I won’t repeat it here, but sometimes I wish authors would take just a little time to investigate the mathematics behind their story.  Perhaps my perspective as an aspiring author is unique because I’ve a Ph.D. in Applied Mathematics, but the point is that if you have any population that grows in an unbounded sense in proportion to its number, and to make matters worse is filled with immortals who can die only by accident, the numbers very quickly add up.  How quickly?  Start off with just one vampire.  You can even call him Dracula if you like.  Let’s say that once a year, Dracula meets some interesting human, perhaps named Lucy, and decides to make a new vampire.  Let’s pretend that no one stakes Lucy or Dracula, and they are both pretty happy together, but after another year, each of them gets a craving to create a new mate.  Again, that’s not so much.  I’ve seen stories where the vampire creates three or four vampires in a matter of days.  Let’s keep our vampire population “controlled” though and keep it so that they only get this urge once every year.  Let each vampire create a new vampire, but no more often than that.   Again, this frequency of fledgling vampires is far less than your typical Dracula story.   So, what’s the population after an insignificant blink of an eye in a vampire’s centuries of existence- just twenty-five years?  Thirty-three million.   In less than thirty-five years, they’d have overrun the entire human race.

Naturally, vampires might be reluctant to create new vampires if it puts them in a position where they might starve to death.  This implies that the vampires must have some degree of control, which in my opinion makes for much more interesting fiction anyhow.

Nevertheless, if you imagine that these vampires are reluctant to increase their numbers too fast, what’s stopping the humans from wanting to do the same?  In some stories, the only disadvantages to being a vampire is that the vampire must avoid daylight, and they must drink blood.  In return, they gain immortality and immunity to disease (although in many stories, they gain many more things as well).  Some authors throw a monkey-wrench into the mix, by suggesting that vampires are evil, and so only evil people would aspire to become one.  The problem with such moralistic arguments is that humans have never been known to agree on most theological issues.  While most people agree that killing other people is wrong, if vampires hide any wrong-doing from society (as they would), then what evidence would a human have that they are evil?  If the author doesn’t depict a world where such evil is obvious, then there will always be some portion of the human population that would embrace this new species with open arms and an exposed jugular.   The flip side is that if the author depicts strong incontrovertible evidence that vampires are vicious, evil killers, then the result of such an announcement would be widespread vampire hunting.

Even if you believe that people would be fearful of vampires, and avoid them regardless of how well the vampires tried to adjust, what about the portion of the human population that is terminally ill?  How many terminally ill people would balk at a chance to live forever and be cured of their disease just because the minister at their local church proposed without proof that vampires are evil?  Some brave souls certainly would avoid the vampires.  However, many would not.  There are people that spend billions of dollars on age-hiding medications, surgeries, make-up, etc..  Just how tempting would it be for some rich person not to approach a vampire and say, “Here’s a million dollars if you can make me forever young?”

I know that in some modern stories, vampires have come out of the coffin, so to speak.  For instance, Kim Harrison’s, Charlaine Harris’, or Laurell K. Hamilton's.  One must ask a serious question – what is keeping the vampire/human population of the world fixed?  Wouldn’t the introduction of this new element completely overwhelm the human population?  Or, perhaps, wouldn’t the human population ban together to completely destroy this new element?

This brings me to an important notion- the notion of steady state.  Everything must have balance.  For every new vampire that is created, an older vampire must somewhere be dying.  Why?  Because vampires live longer than humans (in most stories).  The consequence of this is that there must be some reason for the population to be what it is, not just in the beginning of a story, but before the story takes place, and fifty years after the story ends.  Unless, of course, the author wishes to write about the fall of humanity or perhaps the fall of vampires. 

One must keep in mind not just the desires of the vampires, but the desires of the humans.   A steady state vampire population needs to make sense on two levels- in terms of the vampire reproductive/destruction rates, and in terms of the humans that surround them.

I love reading vampire fiction.  I enjoy all vampires.  It may appear from some of my entries that I only prefer types that fit into a certain mold.  That’s not really true.  I’ll take any mold an author wishes to give.  In many respects, I’m probably more tolerant of different vampire types that most people.  The only thing I ask is that the author make some effort to make whatever type of vampire they create consistent with the world in which they create it.  If the vampire is three thousand years old, I don’t want them to act like a co-worker; I want them to show some wisdom.  After three thousand years, they’d better know what they want and I’d be shocked if they didn’t behave in a self-respecting fashion.  Another example is if the vampire must feed frequently, and in large quantities, which results in making many new vampire fledglings, then I expect to the world the vampire lives in to be highly overrun with vampires.

When people find out that one of the techniques I employ as a writer to keep vampire populations to a minimum is fighting between the vampires, they’ll sometimes ask me who are the good vampires and who are the evil vampires (before reading my material naturally).

My answer is that there are no good vampires and evil vampires.  From a human perspective, I suppose almost every vampire in most stories might be considered evil on some level.  Sure, many stories purport “good vampires” that may appear to contradict this claim.  Notice, however, that I said from a human perspective.  Joe Vampire, who is supposedly good, has a difficult time not killing someone when he bites them.  Please don’t tell me that’s good.  I’ll accept that they are wrestling with their darker side, and that they have a conscience, perhaps.  Or, how about Betsy Vampire who only kills rapists, child molesters and murderers.  I’m sorry, but these aren’t good creatures.  I remember one novel (which I won’t name) where the protagonist, a vampire we’ll call Gina (I’m changing the name), only kills someone who threatens her, and attacks, but leaves living, dozens of others.   By the end of the novel, I was repulsed, not sympathetic, with Gina.  And it wasn’t because I didn’t like Gina.  I didn’t like how the humans in her life blindly accepted her as “good”.

However, this is all from the human perspective, which is irrelevant to the vampire.  From their perspective, it should never be about good and evil.  I make this claim because I don’t often meet people that think about doing something because it is good or evil.  For some reason, some people think villains should.  In truth, people think about what they want and what they’re willing to do to get it.  I may want money, but I’m not willing to steal to get it.  It all boils down to character motivation.  Why should a vampire character be any different?  Each vampire must have some history, and some desire, and create some plan that they believe will help them accomplish their desires. 

In one of my projects, I’ve some vampires that have conflicting desires than the human protagonist does.  Does that mean that they are evil?  Well, if you asked the protagonist, the answer would be a resounding “yes!”  I’m certain, however, from their perspective, they’re not evil.  They’ve nothing against the protagonist.  Why should they?  Villains, who automatically hate the “good guys”, create disbelief.  Similarly, if all the “good guys” think the protagonist is wonderful, this also creates disbelief.  Real life doesn’t work like that, so why should vampire fiction?

 

Vampires among us?  Why not?  I suppose some might hope for such a thing, especially given the tremendous amount of fictional attention vampires receive. 

In many traditional stories, vampirism is secret.  That is, only a select group of humans knows about vampires.  Most of society would scoff at such a thing.  Characters have said things like, “We can’t get help!  No one would believe that Count Evil is a vampire!”  This always assumes me.  First of all, the premise that you cannot get help by telling the truth doesn’t account for stretching the truth.   Would the police come if you had evidence that Count Evil *thought* he was a vampire and was about to drink some innocent’s blood?  Of course they would. 

But what makes a secret a secret?   The primary thing that keeps a secret is to keep the number of people who know it at a minimum. 

 

And so, many stories use the premise that the minute Count Evil realizes that you’re on to him, he tries to kill you.  That way, his secret remains safe.  Such a concept isn’t realistic since there’s always someone willing to investigate a mysterious death.   Perhaps not every mysterious death, but if Count Evil makes a habit of killing people who witness him killing people, eventually that’s going to work against him (remember that Count Evil has been doing this vampire thing for centuries).  Then again, it is a story about vampires, so perhaps people are willing to take some leaps of faith. 

This is the premise behind your typical Dracula story.  Count Evil has made the mistake of messing with our protagonist, who investigated a mysterious death more closely than others did.  Count Evil now has to kill the protagonist in order to keep the secret, but something goes wrong, and Count Evil, despite being a thousand years old, forgets when the sun comes up, and gets burned to a crisp. 

Whether you as a reader are willing to swallow all this is your choice.  The thing that often leaves me wondering, however, is not why there aren’t more protagonists out there realizing that Count Evil is a vampire, but what are all the other vampires in the world doing?   I’ve come across a few stories that propose that Count Evil is the first and only vampire.  I’m happy to accept this.  After all, the author can make whatever they want with the vampire legend as long as they are consistent.  The consistency, however, breaks when during the course of the story, Count Evil manages to create two new vampires.  It leaves me doing a little mathematics.  If Count Evil is a thousand years old, and Count Evil creates two vampires in a story that takes place over a week period, then it is possible that Count Evil may have personally created over a hundred thousand vampires.  Of course, it gets worse.  Now suppose each of these vampires also create vampires at the same frequency of Count Evil.  How long would it take for the entire world to get populated by vampires?  Less than half a year.  That’s right, the guy’s a thousand years old and we witness him doing something that would overturn the entire human population in less than half a year.  Naturally, at some point prior to the human race becoming extinct, the secret would have gotten out.

This leaves one with an inevitable conclusion, which is slightly counter-intuitive.  Most authors explain why humans don’t know about vampires.  That’s interesting, but the truth is that the puzzle has nothing to do with the humans.  It’s the vampires themselves that may present the contradiction, and it all falls out of a little mathematics. 

Many authors get around this by proposing vampires that don’t have an appetite for creating new vampires.  Truthfully, that is the only possible explanation for this apparent contradiction.  In these stories, vampires only turn those who are most “deserving” of the dark gift.  One might argue that the problem of secrecy is now solved, however this brings us back to our original premise.

In my humble opinion, one of the most interesting things about vampires is that they have personalities.  Unlike other “monsters”, the vampire doesn’t just have a human form, but can think like a human and respond like a human.   While making them far more interesting as a potential villain (or protagonist depending on the story), this has a consequence.  What motivates each human is different and depends on the human, and if vampires share this individuality with us, then the same can be said for vampires.   The consequence then is this- some crazy vampire would fail to grasp the importance of the secret and let it out.

Vampires, if they really want to keep the secret, could form their own set of “laws” regarding the secrecy.   If a vampire posed a threat to the secrecy, the vampire society would kill this rogue vampire.  That would work up to a point.  Eventually, you’d find a self-destructive vampire that didn’t care.  This vampire would expose the secret, and die in the process, but once the secret is exposed, it is exposed.   This is a probabilistic argument- the greater the population of vampires, the more likely someone would breach the secret.

Unless, of course, the world’s population of vampires is extremely small.  I’ve seen this work in a few stories, and as long as no new vampires are created, unless the circumstances are extraordinary in some fashion, I think this is a wonderful solution to the Secrecy Paradox.

There are other solutions to the Secrecy Paradox- including not making it a secret to begin with.  That works for me, but if the premise of the story is that vampirism is known to the world in year 2009, but it wasn’t known in 2000, or 1950, I’m still left wondering how could the Secrecy Paradox apply back then? 

I present a solution in one of my recent novels in progress.  It may not be perfect, but it is unique at least.

I don’t know how many times I’ve read some criticism of a vampire story where the critic claims, “That author got vampires wrong.”  They inevitably follow this up with some comparison to their favorite author.  Perhaps they say, “Real vampires sparkle!”  I’m not sure where they get such ideas.  I mean, I’m familiar with Stephenie Meyer’s works, but what inspires the concept that vampires must follow a specific formula, or else they’re “wrong”?  What makes a person so certain that one formula is perfect and another formula is broken?  Sometimes I think it’s because the reader recalls the first vampire story they fell in love with, and after that they make subconscious comparisons.

Here’s the one rule about vampires: there are no rules.  And, as a writer of vampire fiction myself, I thank the heavens for this.  After all, if an author, other than Stephenie Meyer, created another Edward Cullen, it would be plagiarism.

Vampires have changed throughout the years.  Dracula, as told by Bram Stoker, was certainly a monster, and had little humanity.  If Dracula showed up at your birthday party, you’d be a fool to invite him in.  Many modern vampires, however, fit better into modern society.

I once conducted a survey with several hundred fans of vampire fiction, asking them a simple question- if you were visited by a vampire, and they offered to make you one, would you agree, even if you didn’t know exactly what type of vampire they were?  I was shocked at how many people said “yes”.   Is vampirism so desirable regardless of the type of vampirism?   Either my respondents hadn’t read enough vampire fiction to realize just how widely varying the vampire fiction world is, or they have a wildly forgiving love for the fanged beasts.

So, when creating a new vampire, what characteristics are important?   Should mirrors reflect them?  Should silver hurt them?  Should a crucifix repel them?  Must they sleep with some of the soil that they were buried in?  Should the sunlight burn them?  Should they be stronger than humans?  Should they be faster?  Should they be able to change form- like into a bat, or a mist?  Should they have powers of hypnosis?  Should they have retractable fangs?  Should their bites be pleasurable or painful?  Should they have a soul?  Should they be ageless?  Should the sight of blood drive them crazy?  Should they hate garlic?  Should holy water hurt them?  Should staking them with wood in the heart turn them into dust?  Should they need permission to enter your home?  Should they have a beating heart?  Should they become “dead” during the daylight?

In the end, writers should pick characteristics of their vampires that best move the story forward.  I believe this so strongly that I’ll often create in my view “imperfect” vampires, because it propels the story better. 

In creating a vampire, one should pay close attention to the vampire myths that exist.  Should the vampire exhibit characteristics that don’t fit the rest of the fictional world?  My favorite example of a strange vampire myth is the one regarding mirrors.  The notion that a vampire shouldn’t reflect in a mirror is an interesting one, and I wouldn’t discourage an author from using it.  I would, however, encourage such an author to think about it carefully.  Why shouldn’t vampires reflect in mirrors?  Mirrors, of course, just reflect what is around us.  If a vampire doesn’t appear in a mirror, it means that the vampire isn’t physically there.  That means that this vampire only appears visible because he or she is influencing your mind somehow, altering your perception of vision to see something that isn’t really there.  And if they can do that, then why can’t they alter what you see when you look into a mirror?  I also wonder exactly how the vampire alters people’s perceptions.  Is it magic?  I hope it is magic, because science holds no good explanation.  If the vampire isn’t really there, and they are altering your thoughts, that means that someone could be standing next to you and possibly not see the vampire you see.  It means that your dog Fido wouldn’t start barking hysterically when the vampire walks by.  It also implies that the vampire, warping the minds of one individual at a time, wouldn’t care to go to big party. 

Another vampire myth that amazes me is sunlight.  How many times did we see Christopher Lee as Dracula burn because he simply lost track of time and get caught in a ray of sunshine?  But if sunlight can burn a vampire, why not moonlight?  I could also ask about starlight?  Is there really a difference?  Scientifically, it is only a question of intensity, although the sun can be almost a million times brighter than the moon.  Does that mean that moonlight is just mildly annoying to the vampire?  Perhaps that might explain the common knowledge that vampires and werewolves don’t get along.

Another interesting vampire myth is the biting.  Most writers portray the bite as horrendous.  I applaud Kim Harrison, who added her own myth that vampire saliva confused pain and pleasure centers in the brain- and thus what should be painful gets remapped as intensely pleasurable.  In many of my stories, I’ve often equated vampire saliva as having anesthetizing characteristics.  This would be a reasonable evolutionary development in the vampire species, but it would also mean that the initial piercing of the skin would not be pleasant.  Unless the vampire is altering its victim’s notion of pleasure and pain, any bite should be extremely painful.  Any person who’s ever been bitten by a wild animal could tell you that.

I hesitate to mention the crucifix.   There are deep religious undertones to having a vampire that is afraid of such things.

A common myth is that vampires should be “dead” during the daylight.  This has always been a puzzle to me, however.  After all, what is it in the vampire that gives them such a good internal clock?  You’d think that Dracula would never forget the time with such a wonderful internal clock.  Of course, what is the difference between daylight and nighttime, other than some positioning of our planet versus the sun?  It’s always daylight somewhere on the planet.  I’ve often had to make a trip from Asia west-ward to the States, and seen days that last way too long.  I’d hate to think about a vampire flying in a plane where one moment the sun is out and the next it isn’t and the next it is, etc. (such a thing is possible if you plan it right.)  And what precisely defines daylight, anyhow?  Is it the sun rising over the horizon?  That appears like the reasonable answer- but what about someone would lives west of a mountain range that prolongs morning?  Does that mean that the vampires living there get some extra time?  If it is overcast, does that mean that the vampire can slip their slumber?  During a solar eclipse, do they wake up briefly? I confess that although this particular myth is distasteful to me, I’ve used it in stories myself, because it became an integral part of the story for what happens to the vampire’s consciousness during this daylight period.

With all these “facts” up in the air, when I pick up a new vampire novel or story, I make sure I forget all the other rules that existed in previous stories.  If the author proposes that vampires can’t even turn other humans (that they are their own unique species), I’ll go with it.  If the author says that vampires sparkle in the sunlight, I’ll accept their word for it.  If the author shows the greatest form of ecstasy is a vampire sucking on one’s neck, I may wonder, but I’ll accept it.  If the author proposes that a crucifix will repel the vampires, I’ll believe them.  Can anyone really know what a vampire is with all the wildly varying fiction that exists?  My claim is that there is only one group that can be certain- and they are the vampires themselves.