Unfortunately, the universe then threw all kinds of hurdles into my path. My mother and one of my authors passed away from cancer, and now the economy is going into a recession. In consequence, By Light Unseen Media has had a slower start than I originally planned. I'm not discouraged. Creative problem solving is my gift. I think the future of publishing will include much more electronic and audio media, and I'm staying right on top of that. I'll be releasing titles in multiple formats, including print editions, e-books and audiobooks. Mortal Touch was among the first batch of books to be available for the Amazon Kindle last year.
My mission is to publish high-quality vampire fiction with strong characters and great stories that avoid camp humor and cliches, and non-fiction works with primary source research and new ideas. I'm accepting queries, and authors are welcome to check the submission guidelines.
How has the vampire evolved through the decades since the writing of Stoker's Dracula?
As Nina Auerbach describes in Our Vampires, Ourselves, every decade gets the vampire fiction that it deserves. Bram Stoker changed everything when he wrote Dracula, to begin with. He freely invented a number of the vampire traits that immediately became fictional canon, including vampires not having reflections, having to be invited into a dwelling before they could enter, and needing special soil or earth to rest in. Those are all inventions by Stoker, they have nothing to do with "legend" or earlier fiction.
In 1922 silent film director F.W. Murnau invented the idea that vampires are destroyed by mere sunlight for his movie, Nosferatu. That original notion, which isn't found in folklore or any earlier fiction, became the most lasting "vampire trait" of the Twentieth Century. At first sun-struck vampires just withered into ashes. Now they explode into flames or even blow up like bombs in some movies. It makes no sense whatsoever, but it looks dramatic onscreen and sets up all kinds of potential story conflicts, so most writers use the incendiary sunlight device.
Many writers describe the "good guy vampire" as a modern innovation. In fact, vampires in folklore always had a strong element of ambiguity to them. These were your friends and family members returning home, and they weren't always unwelcome. I talk more about this in my paper on Greek vrykolakas folklore. When Dracula was first presented on stage, women were fascinated by the Count, regardless of the fact that he was depicted as irredeemably evil. The "bad boy" has always had appeal, and the vampire is too complex an archetype to have only one aspect. The real change since Dracula is the depth and complexity of vampire characters, so they're now more likely to be good with a bad side, or bad with a good side.
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