Why?

 

Why not? Dracula is a brilliant book that too often goes unread because of its Victorian style and because people feel they already know the story from Hollywood’s various butcherings. Hopefully Real-Time Dracula will pique some people’s interest while keeping them aware of how much this, and any, adaptation loses in the translation.

 

How did this come about?

 

I first had the idea as a response to a Blog for a Beer prompt on Fantasy Friday, but didn’t think to do anything with it. Once I’d gotten more involved with Twitter I discovered that others had already started using Twitter for their own fictional characters. As I’m working on my first novel I had been thinking of ways to set myself apart when I start to query agents. I needed to show that I wasn’t averse to doing a lot of my own publicity and that I could be creative about it. That’s when Real-Time Dracula was born.

 

Note: Once I’d started putting the idea together I discovered a few sites which blog post the novel entries on their corresponding days. Here are the three doing it this year:

http://dracula-feed.blogspot.com/ and http://twitter.com/blogdracula
http://infocult.typepad.com/dracula/
http://dracula-feed.blogspot.com/

While the text’s the same, each one brings something else to the table. BlogDracula can be followed on Twitter and has a mix of deep insights and humorous POVs in the comments section, while Dracula Blogged has a lot of background information as well as some comments by Dracula experts Leslie Klinger and Elizabeth Miller. The Dracula feed has by far had the best publicity, if you twitter-search Dracula you’ll get every other entry promoting it. I’m particularly fond of the comments feed, which allows me to see on my homepage what others have to say.