WHAT WAS YOUR SIREN CALL?

{Dracula's Google Doodle courtesy of Google  https://www.google.com/}

The ghost of Bram Stoker looked at me across my table at the haunted jazz club, Meilori's.

"Ah, Roland, you ask me how I came to be writing Dracula in the first place.  Now, that is a story to be telling on my 165th birthday."

He looked off into the velvet shadows, "Before writing Dracula, I met Ármin Vámbéry who was a Hungarian writer and traveler.

Sure, but Dracula emerged from Vámbéry's dark stories by Carpathian mountains.

 I could not shake the fingers of those shivering tales so evocatively told in the ghost light of that dark room where Armin and I sat.  

Haunted by those frightful images, I became a driven man I tell you, driven!  I was a man possessed and spent years researching European folklore and mythological stories of vampires.

 Dracula I wanted to be frightening due to its matter-of-fact telling at its inception as were  Vámbéry's words. 

 So no lurid tale is it at the start.  No, it is an epistolary novel, written as a collection of realistic,

but completely fictional, diary entries, telegrams, letters, ship's logs, and newspaper clippings,

all of which added a level of detailed realism to my story, a skill I developed as a newspaper writer.

In that, Roland, Dracula is much like life if you can be believing that thought.  For you see:

What we know of life comes in snatches from here from there,

from sources who either do not know the full story,

hide key elements for their own purposes,

or are mistaken in various degrees."

He studied me a moment. 

"My life was the theater, namely the peerless actor, Henry Irving, and my lovely wife, Florence. 

Ah, life. What a impish lady she is. 

Did you know that the original title to DRACULA was THE UN-DEAD?  I changed it on a whim at the last minute."

He smiled sadly.  "The allure of mysterious and dark tales in the night were my siren's call.  What was yours?"

And so I told him. But that is for another post. 

What was your siren's call to write what you do?