Way back in the murky mists of the year 2000 I wrote a story called "Empty Moon" for a fiction writing class at UNH. I believe it was one of the first fiction classes I'd ever taken, and I remember feeling like the one big, fat flounder in the middle of a bowl of cherries. In short: horribly out of place. I was in a class bring taught by a professional writer (Professor Charlotte Bacon had published a novel and a book of short stories by that point), surrounded by writers, at least some of whom were sure to be future professional writers, and all of whom were sure to be more suited to a fiction writing class than me.
As it turns out, my fish out of water feeling was short-lived, and soon I was a big, fat flounder swimming in the ocean amongst the other fishes. I had taken prose writing, and essay writing, and had submitted some very well-written papers for other classes. The big difference here was that I got to make things up. I may not have been as well-read as my classmates. I may not have had the same background as my classmates (having spent the first couple years of my college career pursuing an engineering degree). What I discovered, though, was that I could write as well as any of them.
Fiction writing at UNH was taught from the "literary" perspective, meaning character-driven, non-genre fiction. We weren't to write science fiction. We weren't to write mysteries. We weren't to write horror stories featuring vampires. When I'm feeling even marginally confident of something, telling me I can't do something just makes me want to do it more. I was feeling somewhat confident about writing, so I felt confident I could write a genre story as a character-driven piece of "literary" fiction.
Which brings us to "Empty Moon". I decided that if I treated the vampire as just another character, I could write a story about two people meeting, falling in love, and then discovering the secret one of them was hiding. The word "vampire" never even needed to appear in the story (though it does once). I thought it could work, and I was determined not to listen to advice from my professor that it was better to write the stories as two humans, and plunged on ahead. Believe it or not, at one time, I was kind of cocky.
The other reason I chose to write about a vampire was that the first image that popped into my head, that sparked the story to life, was that of a person crying over a broken vase, and the idea that everything breaks eventually. No matter how careful we are with things, no matter how much we protect them, something will happen. The vase shatters. The car breaks down. The loved one dies. Who better to put voice to that idea than someone who has lived a long long time, and seen a lot of loss. An immortal. A vampire! Who can walk around in the daytime. Yeah, I beat Stephanie Meyer to that bit of...stupidity.
The actual execution of this story was a bit clunky. I resist the urge to cringe upon re-reading (and retyping, since I can't find a digital copy of it), because I know it was one of my early stories, and is a raw first draft. There are words and phrases that I can see immediately should have been axed, and I'm already reconstructing the entire story in my head. The reveal is...well, the reveal kind of craps on my whole initial concept. A family of (not quite) vampires?
What is interesting is that I revised this for my final portfolio for that class. I have the revised story, in which I removed the vampiric element, and changed the story a bit to make it more realistic, and, in my extremely humble opinion, ruined it. Maybe I'll rework that into something completely different.
So, while I don't think "Empty Moon" is anything great, I certainly think it's better than what it turned into. As such, I have decided that revising and rewriting "Empty Moon" will be my next project. I will post the results of said project here. First, though, I will post the original, raw, unedited first draft of "Empty Moon" in 3 parts.
Please feel free to comment on any or all of the parts.
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