Dracula, Egyptian Mythology, and How Being A Morbid Weird Girl Influenced My Writing
You can either cue up "Creep" by Radiohead or "Weirdo" by K.Flay, your choice!
God help me, I accidentally rewrote Dracula.
As you may or may not know, I’m currently spiraling down the editing abyss of my long-winded-entitled novel, The Eyes of the Gyre Are Red Like Blood. Aside from being cursed by pop-punk syndrome, it’s 169k words in length—now a trim 167k through with 3/4 of the editing completed. Take that, redundancies!
I’m burying the lede a bit—no, as you may have guessed, I have NOT finished my initial, too-in-depth round of edits for my sapphic horror novel, The Eyes of the blah blah blah you’ve read the title once, I won’t put you through that again. Point is, no, it’s not done yet, and once again I must feed you scraps disguised as an online diary.
What’s my name? Quickly. Do you remember it? Have you read my name below the titles? Have you looked at my writing portfolio (misnomer) yet?
No? Well, welcome to the newsletter, I guess. Get ready to read a lot of self psycho-analyzations through the medium of text.
Right, so what is it today?
As I am wont to do, I’ve spent a lot of time during this edit drawing accidental comparisons to media I’ve loved or research I used to do on various computer lab desktops. I was, for all intents and purposes, a Weird Kid—as defined by friends, peers, and an obsession with tumblr dot com.
But then there were books, glorious books. Books filled with splendorous descriptions of beautiful dying women, hearts being shoved beneath floorboards, and eyes that haunt and perplex. I’m a big fan of Poe, if you couldn’t tell—I love depicting a character falling into a deep, depressive state of madness and doing questionable things.
And I love describing eyes. Ligeia, my beloved.
I’m a classic-lit bitch, and before I went to college, came out, and subscribed to the very true, still-unfortunately-extremely-relevant school of thought that “WOW, why are all the classics by white men??”
I could go on about media preservation and speculate what literary treasures we’ve lost because colonialization sucks (Free Palestine, contact your representatives and demand a ceasefire), but that’s not what this piece is about. This piece is about me being a weird-ass white girl.
Classic Lit Inspo
As I comb through Eyes of the Gyre, finding descriptions of crypts, red-eyed beasts with telepathic capabilities, and the general impetus of a beautiful woman being spirited away by something in the woods that irrevocably changes them rings familiar with Bram Stoker’s seminal work—you know him, you love him—Dracula.
Although I am hesitant to label it as such, Eyes of the Gyre is vampire lit—kind of, sort of. It certainly has the flavors of a classic spooky vampire story, and the same pathos of the tragedy of Lucy Westenra.
Gray Alice—one of two protagonists in Eyes of the Gyre—is a bit of an amalgamation of Mina Harker and Lucy Westenra, with the courage and intelligence of the former and the desirability (Everybody Loves Gray) and loss of innocence of the latter.
Hey, remember how Dracula could turn himself in a fog? That was sick, wasn’t it?
I was always one of those kids that was a bit arrogant about enjoying classic lit, even when said classic lit was occasionally ridiculous. That’s pure compensation, by the way: you feel weird and kind of unconventional, so you take an abnormal amount of pride in enjoying your interests, as if we’re not all simply enjoying our interests.
You know, I’m really more of a Frankenstein girl, but I already wrote my Frankenstein-flavored novel all the way back at age sixteen. Shoutout to my bastard child, Evaristus! Maybe one day I’ll reinvent you with more LGBTQ+ characters.
Egyptologist Dreams
And as someone with relatively unrestricted internet access (sorry, Mom, I know you tried; I was just too savvy), I was exposed to a lot of weird stuff. And I liked it!
Between spending time on delightfully cheesy Web 1.0 sites dedicated to Legit Witch Spells and reading the Wikipedia page for Lesbian, I discovered ancient Egyptian culture through my evening web surfs on the family computer.
I was enamored by the process of mummification, of the symbolism of burying one with their earthly possessions, of the thought of curses and reanimations and stiff-legged guys stumbling around—
Oops, there’s the Frankenstein girl rearing her head again.
Egyptian mythology—focusing in particular on Anubis, the jackal-headed guide to the afterlife—had me in such a chokehold I was convinced for a short period of time that I would become an Egyptologist—hell, maybe even an archaeologist, if it’d get me there!
The Haunted Tomb level of Spyro: Year of the Dragon may have played a role in this.
Obviously, I became a storyteller instead; one topic can only occupy me for so long, and I needed the legroom.
So, about that arrogance comment…
Earlier, I mentioned being an arrogant (but shy, so wouldn’t catch me saying anything out loud about it) kid due to my weird and weird-adjacent interests.
I was uppity about having watched Le Voyage dans la Lune and Jean Cocteau’s La Belle et la Bête on Youtube. Look! I’m doing it now! There was no need for me to use the French titles of A Trip to the Moon and Beauty and the Beast (1946) here, I just thought it made me seem cool.
But, you know, I think we all should be as self-serious as we were as kids. Something-something-let-your-freak-flag-fly and all of that.
I was free! Sure, I was trapped in the mind prison of mostly my own making and a partially religious upbringing by way of my grandparents, but other than that, I was free, damn it, to absorb Egyptian mythology from the ‘net and play dress-up games and permanently etch the phrase “Denim Donna” onto my cerebrum, to pirate old French films and listen to Skye Sweetnam’s Noise from the Basement from terrible limewire CD rips, and to read Edgar Allan Poe and watch my cousin play Psychonauts because being perceived as being bad at a game made me nervous (still does).
I am a horrific amalgamation of the things I love and my precious, earnest feelings about them.
And somehow, I always end up writing about some gay bitch losing their mind in fun (and flirty!) ways.
Quick note about next week: I’m taking a break! Probably! I plan on devoting my emotional energy to finishing this edit. Chapter 32 haunts and vexes me from another tab.
I’ll be back soon with…something! You never know what you’ll get from my cabinet of curiosities.
