In honor of both events, I'll be giving away some cool stuff. Like, two autographed copies of my book, and some neat (weird) blood drop bookmarks. Maybe some other stuff if I pick it up in the next month.
Just tell me about your first vampire experience. After my birthday, I'll randomly pick the winners. So you have plenty of time to tell your friends, and spread the news, and everyone can tell me about their first vampire.
***
My first vampire experience is technically the Bunnicula series. He is a vampire rabbit. It counts.
But not really.
Truly, my first vampire experience was the movie, Bram Stoker's Dracula. I was twelve or thirteen, with some rough shit going on in my life, and I saw it with my mom and brother. I hadn't really been into vampires before then; I'd grown up reading sci-fi, and animal stories, and was just getting to fantasy. I might have read Salem's Lot by that point, but I don't think so.
So here was precocious me, not yet knowing I had a dark side, watching Gary Oldman in awesome costumes being awesome. I loved it, and felt sorry for Dracula, and didn't understand why love would kill him in the end. I thought if she'd really loved him, she would have nursed him back to life so they could live together. I still think that.
After that, I started getting more into vampires. It was Interview with the Vampire and The Vampire Lestat that really brought me over. Lestat, especially. He was dark, and cruel, and callous, and not human. There was something great about him in his book, something very lovable hiding beneath the stone exterior. I felt I could understand him, and his reveling in the power he'd been granted. I felt he just wanted to be loved, and needed someone strong enough to keep up with him.
And that's how I started my love affair with vampires.
