And she really does have the authority, doesn't she? When one stops to think about it, after she single-handedly provided the modern vampire fiction blueprint with the 1976 publication of Interview with the Vampire, it's almost unheard of to know that she's gotten little to no credit in the wake of the not-so-recent-anymore vampire craze that finally may be showing signs of stopping. Rice, in fact, has been quite vocal when it came to Stephanie Meyer's Twilight series, criticizing among other things the idea that Meyer's immortals inexplicably felt that it was necessary to attend ... high school. It's the stuff that's made Rice fans like myself furious in a way that one gets when they watch someone take credit they didn't deserve, especially when the real credit may go to a friend or a family member, or in our case, an author that you think of almost as family! It's like hearing someone claim to invent a brand when in all actuality, the brand exists because it's being targeted to a market that had no prior knowledge that the brand already existed! Vampires have become afterschool specials and we're all sick of it, and apparently, so is Anne Rice. It's no wonder that she's given up on the genre for the time being and has instead moved on to werewolves with the February 2012 release of The Wolf Gift, a book that I guarantee will redefine the mythology. And I haven't even read it yet. I don't have to. That's just what she does. She turns legends inside out and fills in the holes that have existed for centuries. She did this reworking with vampires, witches, mummies, an ensemble of ghosts (most all of whom were from New Orleans, by the way), oh, and a marginal literary character by the name of Jesus Christ. And guess what? Anne Rice is about to do it again, readers, and no one has earned the authority to do so more than she has. I've also seen recently that Anne Rice's Christ the Lord: Out of Egypt is being adapted into a film to be directed by Chris Columbus, and I may have this wrong, but it looks as though she may have some casting pull this time around. This, as some of you may remember, is a far cry from when Tom Cruise was cast as Lestat in the film version of Interview, a complaint that she later retracted, but one that I suspect kept her out of the creative meetings that resulted in the horrendous 2002 film adaptation of Queen of the Damned. I certainly hope that this is the case, which would give Anne Rice the "author"-ity that she has deserved from Hollywood for well over thirty years now, taking her place as the reason why vampires are still around to make sparkly and send to proms. Greetings from Key West, Florida. Been here for three days now, performing nightly with my band at Sloppy Joe's Bar, the alleged place where Ernest Hemingway tied quite a few on in his day. But if you eavesdrop on one of the tour trams that pass every now and again, you learn that the original Sloppy Joe's, and Hemingway's liver, have remnants further down the block in an entirely different location. But I digress. Key West has gone off my radar as far as rants go. It is what it is, and I'm here first on business, and second, to get lost in my imagination for a solid week. Which brings me to this post, which was inspired by a Twitter feed in which a fellow writer blogged about their influences. I'd never thought to do that myself, usually reserving that information for when I was a drinker and would talk many an ear off about literature and writing and the best of both. But those days are gone, and with it went the bravado of a loud drunk. Nonetheless, I'd like to take this time to mention the latest book I've read (pictured above), which I found very inspiring for reasons I'll explain, and then say a little something about what influences me as a writer. First and foremost, I have to mention the Queen of the Damned herself, Anne Rice, my surrogate mother of letters and inspiration to this day. Her contemporary fiction is what put me on the path of the novel as my primary means of storytelling, and I admit it without shame that she has been most all I've read in that field to date. I can't remember the last book I've read (fiction, mind you) that she hasn't written, with the exception of one (again, pictured above). I just recently saw a YouTube video of her in her little office in the California desert, and it made me think about perseverance. Anne used to live quite the extravagant lifestyle in New Orleans, but apparently lost all of it due to bad investments and a crashing real estate market. That information came from a separate interview I read recently, but when I put it all together, it made me think, "I can and will write everywhere." Anne used to write in a Garden District mansion, and now, by the looks of it, she writes in a small room in a suburban California condo. Now, before I go further off track here, let me mention The Gargoyle by Andrew Davidson (that's right, pictured above), a wonderfully written and structured book that inspires me in its simplicity. I'm sure Mr. Davidson himself would not be so kind with my calling his work "simple," mainly because according to the background information on him, the novel took seven years to write. But the book is simple only in the fact that it manages to carry two story threads framed in a plot-space that is really uneventful. Without reviewing the book, I just want to make the point that it showed me how less can absolutely be more, and Davidson is very much akin to my approach. It's vivid, beautiful, and internalized in the Romantic tradition. Back to what inspires me, I have to mention the very same Romantic tradition, more specifically, the English Romantics of the eighteenth and nineteenth century. Even more specific would be the second generation led by Byron, Keats, and Shelley. It would be downright weird for me to claim that as a novelist I was influenced by them stylistically, being that they were poets. But their philosophies are what molded me, and the study of their time and work is what gave me the Promethean flame that I write so much about. That flame, in my opinion, was carried centuries later as the writers of the Beat Generation -- another great influence on my work -- internalized their passions and made the written word like new, post-World War II monuments of expressive achievement. William S. Burroughs, Jack Kerouac, and Allen Ginsberg truly believed they were changing the world, like the English Romantics before them, and in a way they did. Only it was the world inside. Yes. The world inside. Writers can't move into any other words unless they're satisfied with the one inside. That is what inspires me. What inspires you? |
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