Behind the Times

I’ve always been behind on my pulp culture. Maybe it’s because we rarely watched TV growing up. I’ve (almost) always preferred books to TV and felt like I was born in the wrong time period. I’m constantly time traveling in my mind to earlier centuries.

Eventually I catch up and there are benefits – getting to watch back-to-back episodes of Friends without grueling waiting periods between seasons.

This year I watched Buffy the Vampire Slayer convinced it would be the cheesiest series I’d ever clapped eyes on, but unwittingly I found myself sucked in and out of my mind when the show ended.

Which is how my Aurora Sky vampire series was born. I needed more Buffy. More snarky dialogue, dark humor and steamy byplay between a slayer and the vampire she’s incapable of killing. I wanted a girl who could kick ass, no need for a bad boy to save the day. The only saving she required was on the emotional level.

But vampires in 2011? That is so overdone and passé, right?

I wasn’t too concerned. Less than a year ago I was rolling my eyes at the vampire craze. I attended the Emerald City Romance Writer’s Conference last October where top agents and editors from New York declared that this was no passing phase.

Vampires are here to stay.

While I take industry experts on their word – the undead won’t die – I’m also aware of the shift towards werewolves and shape shifters. (Not to mention dystopian, apocalyptic and post-apocalyptic.) When I think of a werewolf, I think ‘hairy’ not ‘hot’. (Except, of course, for Scott Speedman in Underworld.)

As the temptation to begin uttering, “I just don’t get it” nags on my tongue, I have to remind myself of the vampire.

I’ll get it eventually. It’ll just take me a few years longer than everyone else.