Good Sunday morning and welcome to my front porch for Sunday Morning Tea!

For the uninitiated, Sunday Morning Tea is my virtual writing salon, where we talk about our writing goals and projects while sipping on a hot cuppa tea!

The sun is bright, I have my tea, and the French Open Men’s Singles Final between Carlos Alcaraz and Alexander Zverev is underway. It feels like spring, doesn’t it?

Fortunately, I’m in the mood for spooky season. Let me explain…

Last time we met for tea, I told you about the limitless story ideas living inside my head, one of them being a mystery thriller inspired by a classic monster.

Well, it didn’t take long for the classic monster’s identity to be revealed, as shortly after, I was feeling super inspired during the early days of the StoryADay May challenge and began teasing that particular WIP in my posts.

Yep, it’s official! I’m writing a Dracula story, and I’ll be publishing it on Kindle Vella.

I am also a nervous wreck about it!

This may surprise you, but despite my 31 Days of Halloween Hooligans series, my Lost in the Twilight Zone Marathon series, and the fact that I had a short story published just last year in a speculative/horror anthology, horror is not a genre I feel most comfortable or confident writing in.

But I love horror movies, I’ve always had a fondness for the classic monsters (particularly mummies and vampires—something about ancient undead lifeforce suckers…gets my heart racing for all the wrong reasons), and I had an idea that just wouldn’t let me sleep (you could say it’s turned me into a creature of the night). So it was either continue daydreaming and risk losing my grip on reality or write it down and hope that maybe someone else thinks it’s as entertaining and mind-bending as I believe it to be.

Obviously, I decided to take a chance on the latter. I can’t spend my entire writing career afraid of what people might think of my weird story ideas, no matter how unhinged. That being said, I must be out of my freaking mind to choose the most famous monster in fiction to write about!

You see, as a writer, it’s awfully intimidating to adapt/retell a story that’s been adapted and retold thousands of times. I mean the source material is over 100 years old! You want it to sound familiar to those who are fans of the original work, but at the same time, you want your story to be unique, something totally different and unexpected that no one’s ever done before, because if you don’t have anything new to add to the collective literature, then what’s the point of writing it at all?

Despite being inspired by many famous vampire titles, such as Dracula (the novel as well as the 1931 film starring Béla Lugosi as the titular character), The Vampire Diaries, The Originals, and Interview with the Vampire (NOT Twilight), I’d like to think that my story is still a new, fresh retelling of a classic.

However, it shares some similarities with another classic monster movie that I never saw coming. Again, I feel the need to explain…

What do Lisa Frankenstein and Diana Dracula have in common?

Lisa Frankenstein, one of Universal’s most recent attempts to reanimate (pun intended) its Classic Monsters IP since the dead-on-arrival Dark Universe, is a fun, campy horror comedy romance starring Kathryn Newton as Lisa Swallows, a misunderstood teenager who, after the brutal axe murder of her mother two years earlier, now prefers the company of the dead.

Her chipper, “popular girl” stepsister encourages her to socialize more and make “living” friends by inviting her to a house party, where she is unfortunately drugged by one classmate and sexually assaulted by another. Distressed and disoriented, she wanders into the old, abandoned cemetery and to the grave she frequently dotes on and professes her desire to be with the man buried there (meaning she wishes she were dead). 

However, in a twist of fate during a freak electric storm, lightning strikes the grave, bringing the dead man back to life, and he breaks into her house a mute, muddy zombie looking for love.

While watching this film, I noticed some eerie similarities between Lisa Swallows and the main character of my upcoming Universal Classic Monsters–inspired serial, Diana Bennett.

Both are lonely young women who have a peculiar fondness for the macabre—Lisa choosing to spend her free time in a cemetery writing love letters to the dead and Diana frequenting the local theater to watch horror movies, particularly those starring the master of horror, Béla Lugosi.

Both lost their mothers young and have fathers who are present but who don’t necessarily pay attention to what’s going on in their daughters’ lives. 

Both have unpacked trauma that makes it difficult for them to connect with other people and that also causes them to make some not-so-wise decisions, especially when it comes to falling in love.

Both desire to be with a “monster” but don’t entirely understand the horrors (murder, dismemberment, their imminent death) that come along with that association. Because of this, they find themselves in compromising situations where they have to choose between staying with the monster or returning to a life they hate.

But is living with a monster truly better?

As someone who’s “lived” with a monster in her head for months now, I would say it is absolute torture, but it does make for a great story!

Diana Dracula, once the favorite bride of The Sinister Count, vows to hunt down and stake the vampire who kept her prisoner in his Transylvanian castle for nearly a century. Her quest leads her to 22nd-century New Orleans, a city now teeming with vampires under the rule of the charismatic and seductive Armand Dulac. Assuming Dracula to be nothing more than fiction, Armand quickly becomes suspicious of Diana’s motives in New Orleans and is determined to learn her secret.

“Episode 1: Prologue: Dracula Is Dead” is now live on Kindle Vella. This prologue is a teaser of the grander story still to come, but it is a necessary introduction to our main character before we see her again nearly 200 years in the future. What’s happened to her since then? You’ll have to stay tuned to find out!

So if you love vampire fiction; if you prefer your vampires to be unhinged, blood-thirsty monsters who combust under direct sunlight rather than sparkle; if you love a good mystery; if you love slow-burn romance, then I hope you’ll give this is the story a taste! 😉

The first 10 episodes are always free.

Diana Dracula: The Immortal Bride

Read on Kindle Vella

Also, subscribe to my newsletter for exclusive insights into my writing process and to get sneak peeks of upcoming episodes. As Kindle Vella is still only available in the US, international readers can also subscribe to my newsletter for alternative options for how to read.

—Nortina