How to Make the Undead Sexy in 3 Easy Steps (Guest Post by Kelsey Mills)

You! Yes, you! The one writing stories with paranormal hotties!

Or trying to.

The problem is, most of the paranormal hotties of choice are kind of, well, dead.

Vampires, zombies, ghosts…all (technically) dead.

This presents a problem, as most people aren’t attracted to the dead. As a writer of zombie fiction, I find that I have trouble making my lead female’s interest in my lead male (the zombie) not icky. He may be undead, but he’s still technically dead, and grossing people out does not help you sell a romance.

However, after careful observation I noticed a pattern. And this pattern works. I would like to share with you all today how to make your undead boys dead sexy.

1. Make them less dead.

As covered earlier, most people find the dead kind of gross. It might be the decaying internal organs, the blank lifeless eyes or the ashen, sunken skin, but most people do not want to read about someone falling in love with the dead.

Solution? Make your undead boy more “un” than “dead”.

Pale skin is still a must, but describe the skin tone as “moonlight pale” versus “ashen” or “deathly pale”. Defined cheekbones are nice, but not sunken cheeks and really pointy chins. Even ‘drawn’ sounds like someone grabbed the back of your undead boy’s face and just pulled.

Stay away from describing internal processes unless it is absolutely necessary. Especially if you are writing a zombie.

Describing the eyes as “bright” or “sparkling” will negate any uncanny valley effect the reader might experience when imagining your lovely dead boy.

2. Dark hair.

He has to have dark hair.

If you look closely at most leading dead men, they all have dark hair.

“Oh, but Kelsey, I don’t want to play by the rules.” Okay, fine. That’s cool. But look closely at the world of the paranormal and you’ll see that the leading men all have dark hair, and the bad guys are blond.

Look at the one that started the mainstream craze, love it or loathe it- Twilight. Edward has dark hair. Some of the bad guys have dark hair. But all the blond dudes do something evil or douchey.

Look at James from the first movie, or that blond guy Cauis from the Volturi, or Riley Biers, who lies to a bunch of newborn vampires. Even the Cullen’s themselves don’t do too well when it comes to blonds. Carlisle, the patriarch of the family, turns Edward into a vampire, a life that Edward frequently describes as monstrous. Jasper attempts to munch on Bella’s tasty blood.

You can find this trope in other media featuring the undead- I’m just pointing out an accessible example. But hopefully the point is seen, because I’m in the loathe category in regards to Twilight, and I hope to never discuss it again.

3. A little slight

Your hotty should not be too big.

…Okay, some things can be big. But not his body type.

This one makes sense on a practical level as well as the sex appeal- the undead can’t or can barely eat. They’re not going to be huge, unless I’m really underestimating the fat content of blood and brains.

Werewolves can be gigantic beefcakes, but vampires, zombies…no. A little dead/decaying flesh is okay, but too much would start to smell. The slight figure gives off the impression of vulnerability, which adds depth to the sexy, sexy exterior.

This is not to say they can’t be well muscled. But the muscles should be more swimmer or gymnast rather than linebacker.

“Oh Kelsey, you’re so shallow, you forgot personalities.” Nice try, writer, but I’m not telling you how to characterize your undead cream puff. While their actions should have a hint of badassery to them (for stories sake, as well as sexiness), the characters personality should be up to the writer and what they think is appropriate for the story, or even the kind of personality they find themselves attracted to. As nice as it is to have a nice body to complete the package, your undead boy’s personality is what will make the readers fall in love with them.

At least them if a reader isn’t attracted to the way you describe him (and you’ve made him blond, don’t say I didn’t warn you) then at least he has a great personality. 

Join Kelsey Mills starting June 28th for her serial zombie fiction, The Zombvenger! Visit http://dawnoftheundead.wordpress.com/ to read the first installment. 

Kelsey's blog: https://kelseyjaymills.com/

Twitter: https://twitter.com/KelseyJMills

Again With the Vampires! This Time, It's 'The Vampire Diaries: The Awakening'

I’m usually good about reading a book before it’s turned into a movie or TV show. I read Harry Potter and the Sorcerer’s Stone before the first movie came out, Chamber of Secrets shortly before it came out on film, and the rest of the books long before they made it to the big screen. I was a fan of Sookie Stackhouse and had read all but the latest two of Charlaine Harris’s books about her before tuning in to the True Blood TV series. I read Twilight before it was a movie, then read New Moon, Eclipse, and Breaking Dawn in a mad reading binge before I’d seen a single preview of the New Moon film.

When it comes to The Vampire Diaries, though, I dove into watching the TV series while barely aware of L. J. Smith’s books. I knew nothing about Elena Gilbert or the Salvatore brothers before I tuned to for the premiere.

I’ve finally gotten around to reading the first book in the series, The Awakening. One of my FaceBook friends warned me the books were nothing like the series. I was rather skeptical about that; how different could it really be?, I wondered. My skepticism was misplaced. The book is very different.

On TV, Elena has striking dark hair and brown eyes, as does her historical, vampire counterpart, Katherine. In the book, Elena and Katherine are blondes with lapis lazuli-blue eyes. The setting of the show is Mystic Falls in New England; the book is set in Fell’s Church, in the South*. TV Elena has a teenage brother; book Elena has a four-year-old sister. TV Aunt Judith doesn’t have a boyfriend; book Judith is engaged to a guy named Bob. Bonnie is different: African-American on TV, she’s a small, white girl with curly red hair in the book. The character of Meredith didn’t even make it onto the screen.

The biggest difference, though, has to be in Stefan and Damon Salvatore. On TV, they were born and raised in Mystic Falls and became vampires in the Civil War era. Perhaps this was simply a bit of True Blood rivalry, though. In the books, the Salvatores are from Italy and much, much older. The acquired their supernatural powers during the Renaissance.

I don’t particularly like Elena Gilbert. She’s a silly, shallow, self-centered creature, the sort of stereotypically pretty, popular teenage girl who makes real teenage girls blush with shame. The TV version of Elena is the same way, but the book takes the stereotype a wee bit further by making her a Southern girl. Elena Gilbert is actually the vacuous ice princess Scarlett O’Hara (who was actually quite intelligent, but played dumb to attract boys) was pretending to be. Compared to Elena, Scarlett is a Jimmy Carter-esque humanitarian. Much ado has been made about Bella Swan’s helpless, self-destructive behavior in Stephenie Meyer’s Twilight series, but Elena could wear that crown just as easily.

Nor is L. J. Smith’s writing style a particularly literary one. She can be forgiven for this, perhaps, because she’s writing for a young adult audience. The easy-breezy, fashion-mag tone of the book is ill-suited to its dark subject material. It’s like Elena mistakenly fell off the cover of Teen Vogue and into a pulp horror novel. For readers with more sophisticated tastes, this will hardly do.

http://www.fanpop.com/clubs/nina-dobrev/images/20009160/title/nina-teen-vogue-magazine-scans-april-2011-photo

Still, there’s something intriguing about the storyline that keeps me from wanting to give up on this entire series. Sure, Elena is dumb, and Damon on paper is as detestable as he is on TV. The beating heart of this vampire series, ironically, is Stefan. Like Edward Cullen, he’s a vampire “vegetarian,” preferring to hunt animals rather than people. Unlike Edward, he makes an occasional slip. He has all of Edward’s Byronic, tortured mojo without Edward’s unfortunate, stalker-ish tendencies. He’s the bad boy, but the question here is not whether the girl with a heart of gold can save him, but whether he can save the girl with the heart of nothing.

*In fact, they're both set in Virginia, an error I'd realize when I read the second book in the series. Also, in the TV series, Judith's name is changed to Jenna.

St. Marcus Day: Stephenie Meyer's Myth Vs. Reality

In the film The Twilight Saga: New Moon, Bella arrives in Volterra, Italy just in time to save Edward from revealing himself as a vampire to a throng of mortals at the St. Marcus Day festival on March 19th. Attendees of the festival, clad in red, hooded robes, march in procession bearing a statue of St. Marcus to the church in the center of town. In the Twilight world, “St. Marcus” is celebrated by mortals for having rid the town of vampires, when he was, in fact, a vampire himself. Volterra is the home of the Volturri, the lawgivers of the vampire world. Marcus is one of them. Some Twilight fans wear red on March 19th to mark this holiday.

New Moon author Stephenie Meyer borrowed the fictional St. Marcus Day from the real European celebration of St. Mark’s Day. She changed the date: St. Mark’s Day is April 25th. Because the date coincides with observances of Easter (a moveable feast; the date varies, but it generally occurs in March or April) and a number of other Eurasian spring festivals, it is thought that St. Mark’s Day is a Christianized version of a much older, Pagan observance. Edain McCoy writes, “As was done with many Pagan festivals in Europe, the early church attempted to refocus the symbolism of Ostara [the spring festival for Germanic Pagans] onto the Feast Day of St. Mark. Instead of being a festival of rebirth, the St. Mark’s imagery was concentrated on death and martyrdom, through which Christian rebirth is attained.”

St. Mark is traditionally considered to be the author of the Gospel of Mark in the Christian Bible. He’s believed to be the companion of St. Paul, the great early Christian evangelist, that the Book of Acts of the Apostles refers to as “John Mark.” A disciple of Paul, Mark is thought to have used Paul’s preaching as the basis for the Gospel. He is also remembered as the founder of the Coptic Church. Coptic tradition holds that Mark appears in the Gospels as the young man who carried water to the house where the Last Supper of Jesus and his Apostles took place, as the young man who ran away naked when Jesus was arrested, and to have poured the water Jesus turned into wine at the wedding at Cana.

Mark is said to have been martyred on April 25th in the year 68 in Alexandria, Egypt. A group of local people resented his trying to turn them away from their traditional gods. They placed a rope around his neck and dragged him through the streets until he was dead. His major shrines are in Egypt and Italy. His Italian shrine is the Basilica de San Marco in Venice, which is traditionally said to be the place where Mark’s remains are buried. So, he really does have a connection to Italy, though not specifically to the town of Volterra.

Perhaps because of his martyrdom, many curious traditions grew up over the centuries about the celebration of St. Mark’s feast day. In seventeenth through nineteenth century England, especially in the north and the west, folklore held that the wraiths of those who would die the following year made a procession, in the order they would die, through the churchyard and into church at midnight on St. Mark’s Eve. Some said the procession would be of coffins, or of headless or rotting corpses. Others said the procession would be of identifiable, ghost-like wraiths, and that one could sit and watch the procession as it went by and thus know who was going to die.

To see these wraiths, folklore claimed, one had to be fasting. Another legend held that one had to be present at the churchyard on St. Mark’s Eve for three years in a row, and only in third year would one see the wraiths. Sometimes, these living watchers saw their own wraiths, and died not long after. Another superstition regarding St. Mark’s Eve is that on this night, witches who had sold their souls to the devil (or written their names in the devil’s book) and wished to keep their unearthly powers had to walk three times around the church backwards, peek through the keyhole, and recite certain words, or their powers would be lost.

Another traditional St. Mark’s Eve activity was stirring the ashes of the hearth. If the ashes formed the shape of a shoe, someone who lived in the household would die during the year.

St. Mark’s Eve was one of three nights of the year associated with the dead. The others are St. John’s Eve and All Hallow’s Eve. According to some legends, on these three nights those who have died can return to the earth as spirits. This belief about All Hallow’s Eve (Halloween) is a Christian appropriation of the Celtic harvest festival of Samhain, the point when the veil between the living and the dead was at its thinnest, and also the halfway point between autumn and winter. Similarly, St. Mark’s Eve marks the halfway point between spring and summer and is associated with the Pagan festival of Ostara. St. John’s Eve, traditionally celebrated on June 23rd, is associated with the Pagan feast of Midsummer, or the summer solstice.

Not all of the legends associated with St. Mark’s Eve are associated with death, though.

The night was also one when young women would try to divine whom their future mates would be. There were a number of ways to accomplish this: by picking twelve leaves of sage at midnight, by walking nine times around a haystack while reciting, “Here’s the sheath, now where’s the knife?” or by baking a dumb-cake, eating a piece of the cake, then walking backwards to bed without saying a word (hence the word “dumb”). If a woman did any of these things, but especially if she prayed to St. Mark while doing them, she would see the shadow of, or catch a fleeting glimpse of, the man she would someday marry. However, if she went to bed without seeing such a shadow and dreamed of a newly-dug grave, that meant she would die unmarried.

These are largely English customs, though. In Italy, if St. Mark’s Day is celebrated at all, it is with feasting, drinking, and/or offering bread to the less fortunate. The custom of wearing red and having a procession seems to be Stephenie Meyer’s invention.

References

“English Folklore: St. Mark’s Eve.” http://www.answers.com/topic/st-mark-s-eve-1

“Mark the Evangelist.” http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mark_the_Evangelist

McCoy, Edain. Ostara: Customs, Spells & Rituals for the Rites of Spring. St. Paul: Llewellyn, 2002.

“St. John’s Eve.” http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/St_John's_Eve

“St. John’s Eve, St. Mark’s Eve.” http://www.infoplease.com/dictionary/brewers/st-johns-eve-st-marks-eve.html

“St. Marcus Day: Fact From Fiction.” http://twilightnovelnovice.com/2009/03/19/st-marcus-day-fact-from-fiction/

“St. Mark’s Eve.“ http://www.childrensnursery.org.uk/british-customs/popular-customs%20-%200299.htm

“The Eve of St. Mark.” http://en.wikisource.org/wiki/The_Eve_of_St._Mark

“Twilight and New Moon fans be sure to wear your red on Thursday for Robert Pattinson and Edward Cullen.” http://www.examiner.com/x-4908-Twilight-Examiner~y2009m3d17-Twilight-and-New-Moon-fans-be-sure-to-wear-your-read-on-Thursday-for-Rob-Pattinson-and-Edward-Cullen

“Volterra, Italy.” http://twilightsaga.wikia.com/wiki/Volterra,_Italy