Michael Andre McPherson

Beyond the Slushpile

Tag archive: Romance

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Zombies are from Mars, Vampires are from Venus

It was standing room only, the audience excited and eager to to ask questions.  I actually just described two events at the Polaris convention.

The first was the Charlaine Harris lecture.  She’s done fantastically well with her vampire novels, which were adapted into a series called True Blood.  The second was the panel I moderated: The Nature of the Modern Zombie.

But here’s the big difference: Charlaine’s vampire-oriented panel had far more women in the audience than men.  Our zombie panel crowd was more men than women, and some of them were very young men.  In fact, I’d say the median age of the attendees was probably close to twenty-years old if you cut out about three or four convention veterans from the data set.

This reflects a fundamental trend in the two genres.  Since Dracula, there’s been a lot of romance in vampire novels, and Meyer’s Twilight put the pedal to the metal on the vampire-human romance.  There are a lot of knock-offs that went with this theme.  It’s about undying (literally) love.

But zombies are about war.  Whether it’s a first person shooter game, or the Walking Dead, zombies are getting mowed down with machine guns, beaten with clubs and shot with arrows.  There is absolutely nothing romantic about the fight.

The good zombie movies and shows do spend a lot of time studying human social interaction under extreme pressure, but their subjects are making battlefield decisions.  Should they kill the loved one who got bit?  Should they make a run down that street or through that warehouse?  Who should they select as the alpha male to lead them to safety?

The message I take here is that Vampire Road is really more for the zombie crowd than the vampire crowd.  While there are romances between humans, there are no vampire-human romances.  Vampire Road is a novel of war, of humans under extreme pressure.  It is the story of a desperate fight to save family and home, to somehow survive an overwhelming siege.

So Vampire Road won’t be for the Twilight crowd or even the Amanda Hocking crowd.  I’d love to write for them because they’re a lucrative market, but it just isn’t me, and I suspect that those avid readers would sense my insincerity and the novel would sell poorly.

I’d rather write something I truly enjoy reading myself and sell to a smaller, enthusiastic audience.

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Are Male Readers from Mars and Female Readers from Venus?

My novel, In a Country Burning, is about redemption, about accepting fate and even a little romance, but mostly it’s about war.

It’s about the Soviet Union’s invasion of Afghanistan and highlights two of the ten years of bloodshed and genocide that took place during that occupation.  Let’s not even get into the disaster the Soviets left behind for the rest of the world to clean up.

So I have to ask myself: will women read this book if I manage to squeeze in a little romance?  I’ve been told women read a lot more than men.  Any expert in the publishing industry will tell you that women are an important audience if you want to sell.

But Fogel says, “there are too many shoulders in this novel.”  She means that I’ve got too many characters, all vying for attention and all fighting to make it into the final scene.  So as I rewrite, it occurs to me that I could ditch the love interest and her family and go straight for the war story.

But will women read a war story?  How many girls snuggled up on the couch with their guys to watch Band of Brothers?  I’m guessing not many.  There will still be one woman in the book and even a heavy bit of amorous action, but for the most part it becomes a novel about men at war.

Which is what it always was about.  I made a desperate and painstaking stab at making it more like The English Patient, but I’m afraid it’s actually closer to The Hunt for Red October, but without all the cool technology.

So sales be damned.  This novel needs to be shorter, sharper and more focused.  Will it sell better?  Well, if I don’t rein it in it won’t even make it to market.

So to all the female readers: I’m sorry.  I don’t think it was going to work for you anyway.  To all the men: put down the remote or the game controller and start reading again for heaven’s sake!  I’m writing for you here.

By the way: if anyone feels slighted because they don’t like being squashed into a stereotype, well then read my book when it comes out.  It’ll be available to both Martians and Venusians.