Kim > Status Update

Poor Kim. I have heard that after reading that book completely, cover to cover, you feel as bloodless as though you had really been visited by a vampire.

Well, I've been thinking about why I continue down the long, dark path with Varney. There's so much to learn from him, like what not to do if you don't want people to think you are a vampire. If this guy isn't a vampire you wouldn't know it by the silly way he acts when he is around people. He seems to enjoy making everyone think he is a vampire until they start burning down the houses he lives in, or they think he lives in, and chase him around trying to put stakes through his heart. I feel kind of sorry for the guy, and if everyone who knows some secret about what is going on, why it is going on, and who is doing what, the book could be done by now. Well, except for these random stories one of the characters decides to throw in there for no reason once in a while.

Mostly though, I think I am still reading is because it requires little thought to read it. All my deep thinking is being taken right now getting ready for a wedding I'm playing at next weekend. If anyone thinks of any more music they want played or sung at this wedding they are running out of time to get it to me, it takes most of my day now just to get through what I have to play. I don't remember there being 15 songs played when I got married, but they are now apparently. At some time during all this I am supposed to be playing for the "sand pouring" part, and I have no idea what that is or how much music this is going to take, so right now all my deep thinking is tied up with music and Varney is an easy read since nothing ever seems to happen other than chase him around and tell silly stories.

I honestly like your take on your motives for reading this book, Kim! I have always heard it described as a gruelling and mind-numbing reading experience ;-) Maybe the stories are thrown in for the purpose of making this book longer and longer and enabling the author to earn more money by it. As to tips on how to avoid being unmasked as a vampire, I'll start collecting them when I am a vampire Until then ...

Do you really think this book is so long because he is getting paid the longer the book is? I didn't read any background to this thing but I keep getting the feeling that he was getting paid by the word. Not the chapter, but each little word is another few coins in his pocket. Every time one of these people who are holding one very important part of the story closed up in their little minds decide they will finally tell their secret (Yea!), they get about half way through it, then have to stop because they are so tired emotionally, and will have to wait until the next day to finish the story. By the next day they are locked in a dungeon or something similar and we need another twenty or so chapters to get them out again.

Oh, if you do happen to become a vampire it may be helpful to know that if something happens and your life is about to end (finally) you must get outside at night and lay down where the moon beams hit you and you will be fine after a few minutes. And stay away from people with stakes. Some of these townspeople became so alarmed that the recently dead people may become vampires they dig the graves up to put stakes through their hearts leaving me wondering how these dead people were supposed to get out of the coffins and through the dirt before they could get around to terrifying the people and then go back in their graves again the day. No one has answered that question yet, of course I have hundreds of pages to go, so who knows, I may in the end know all I need to know to become a great vampire. :-)

I think that the book was published in instalments, and that therefore, the longer the book the more instalments, and this would keep the author at work. I read a similarly long-winded and melodramatic book once, Kim, and I am not talking about TOCS - because that's not really long-winded - but of Eugene Sue's The Mysteries of Paris. There I also had the impression that he was paid by the word - I as a reader should definitely have been paid by the word.

Lying outside in the moonlight would probably end up in my neighbours' thinking I was making fun of them because many of them lie in the sun, and I have a reputation for doing things differently just for its own sake. Now that you mention the difficulty of escaping from a coffin that is buried two metres below surface, yes that never occurred to me! It is quite impossible, even for a vampire to do, but then Dracula and his social equals were probably buried in vaults, and that made escape quite easy for them.