I’ve long said I’d go back to school for my graduate degree only when I found a program I was passionate about.

I’ve found it.

University of Hertfordshire in the UK will be offering an MA in Vampire Literature, beginning this fall. I’m not quite sure where Hertfordshire is, what the entrance requirements are, or how much it would cost, but I’m checking student visa requirements now.

On top of that, from April 16-17, the University of Hertforshire will host a two day conference entitled “Open Graves, Open Minds: Vampires and the Undead in Modern Culture”. Apparently some of the awesome papers presented at the conference sessions will be used in the graduate program:

• Gothic Charm School, or How Vampires Learned to Sparkle

• “Vegetarian” Vampires: Morality of the Anti-Villain in Selected Vampire Novels
• Fundamentalism, Hybridity and the Vampire body: Postmodern Vampirism and the Presidency of George W. Bush

If you were attending the conference, what paper would you want to concoct and present?

Via i09, the blog I wish I wrote.

Today we have a guest post by my youngest and snarkiest, Zach. He says:

I have come to this realization…

Many years ago Hitler was on the verge of defeat. Rather than accepting death, he created Twitter. It was only an idea to be carried through the generations, but ideas are strong. This particular idea was the embodiment of Hitler’s malevolence. And so every tweet feeds the Hitler-y apocalypse. Be strong, be focused, do not tweet.

And to fight this dread evil…FACEBOOK QUIZZES. You see, Facebook quizzes were made to summon forth Anduril, Flame of the West, the blade reforged from the shards of Narsil, Sauron’s bane. And so, with every Facebook quiz taken, we are one step closer to having the weapon to finally defeat Hitler.

So I ask of you, take Facebook quizzes so that I may wield Anduril, Flame of the West.

Also, it is a dang sexy blade.

My NaNoWriMo magnum opus is done. Thank god. Well, the story is not done, but I’ve reached 50,892 words and I’m stopping. I call it Burn Before Reading. That’s not it’s real title – working name is Flood System, actually. It’s more a statement of its dubious quality.

First sentence:

Paul Fernandez held his breath and signed the papers, once, twice, a dozen times.

Last sentence:

Somewhere, perhaps, he heard her. She sat in silence with his body, but there was no longer anyone there.

I feel a tremendous sense of relief; this was a really tough slog this year. I’m looking forward to really relaxing, reading, playing and enjoying the holidays with friends and family.

This is the third year I’ve participated in the writing madness that is NaNoWriMo, producing a 50,000 word novel in the month of November.

The first year, 2007, was easy, and I was relatively proud of my story, Strange Things. I wrapped it up at around 60,000 words at the end of the month.

The second year, I challenged myself, shooting for a longer book, and wrote my unfinished 86,000 word volcano novel during November. I wrote myself into a plot structure I disliked, and couldn’t finish it, but far surpassed the minimum required word count so it counted as a ‘win’ for NaNoWriMo purposes.

I am embarrassed to admit that I did not go back and rework either novel. The first is very salvageable, and the second is a good core idea but needs lots of work.

This year, I hesitated to commit to NaNoWriMo. Since losing Bryan I’ve been plagued with a nasty case of ADD, an inability to focus for any length of time or at any depth. Still, I miss writing, and miss expending creative energy, so I chose to take the plunge.

It has been a painful exercise. Writing has been like pulling teeth, the book just hasn’t caught fire for me. Combined with that, it’s been an incredibly busy month with business travel and weekend commitments, and I’ve been exhausted enough I’ve skipped a few days and just gone to bed early.

I’m still here, still writing away. I’m about 5,000 words behind my target word count but catching up slowly; Thanksgiving weekend should be a really productive time. I’m battling my internal perfectionist, hard, as well as a continued lack of real engagement with my characters and my story.

I’ve had incredible encouragement and great support from friends – you know who you are. Thank you, from the bottom of my heart. And I’ve gotten great advice about relaxing and making the writing process fun.

So, I’m killing characters. Writing sex scenes. Inserting random flashbacks. Adding gratuitous action. The story’s getting a bit fragmented, but the writing process is becoming more fun.

This year, so far, has been a real learning process about overcommitment and the creative process. I think, at the end of the month, the hard-won victory will be that much more meaningful.

November 1st marks the beginning of NaNoWriMo, a 30-day novel writing marathon. This is my 3rd year of participating! Because I’m focusing on fiction writing, a minimum of 1,667 words a day, blogging will be sporadic and infrequent. I’ve added a word count widget to the right, where I’ll track my progress against plan.

The story I’m planning to write is this, however, I reserve the right to change it if my characters take on a life of their own – or if I write myself into a corner.
_____________________

Working title:
Flood System

Casey Campbell is hired to save a failing, controversial floating city project in post-flood America. This paranoid new world is shaped by unmanageable numbers of displaced citizens and refugees, lack of availability of food and fresh water, and all of it controlled by a draconian post-democratic military government.

Upon arrival, she finds that the project sponsor has directed the team use a highly experimental & risky resource management system. It interfaces directly with the project team members’ neural systems and has the ability to actually speed up or slow down their subjective experience of time and ability to function in time, as the project requires.

Casey is painfully knowledgeable about direct neural system links, as she was part of the first generation of uplinkers, one of the few that survived the modification. She lives with the consequences every day – the induced autism, the spooky near-clairvoyance, the hard-wired preference for systems and data over people and the risk of brain burn.

The resource management system is administered by an IT team with parameters set by the project sponsor, a government military official with a fanatical drive to rebuild America.

As Casey digs further, she discovers that the project is staffed primarily by immigrants and refugees and they are being assigned to the highest risk teams. These project team members are being burned out, brain damaged and killed by the system, either from a glitch or because of the parameters required by the sponsors.

The controversial project is also the target of an organized opposition and pattern of attacks, both internal and external, from eco-extremists who believe the flood to be the earth’s revenge, and our just punishment is to live humbly with the consequences.

Casey must hold off the opposition, track down and resolve the system problem that’s killing her people and finish building the city. Failure is not an option in this paranoid drowned world; there are far worse consequences than late penalties at stake.