#vampires — Public Fediverse posts
Live and recent posts from across the Fediverse tagged #vampires, aggregated by home.social.
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#PennedPossibilities 1108: Tell us something you like about your story. (Maybe something you find interesting, entertaining, or amusing.)
For me, this is something interesting and it verges on amusing (for Alistair, though). It also ties perfectly into tomorrow’s prompt and my answer, which you’ll learn. I really liked this snippet.
#WritingCommunity #WritersOfMastodon #WingsOfQuietLonging #ParanormalRomance #Fantasy #Gothic #Victorian #Edwardian #Vampires #Werewolves #Supernatural
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Forever is for the few, the rare, the damned. Do you hear its song? The taste of sour dreams and forgotten memories?
Come home. The night missed you.
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Help me celebrate my 20th Year in Comics!
DUSK A DAY!
dusk #duskcomics #dusk20 #comics #comicbooks #horror #vampires
https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/rsbcomics/dusk-omnibus-20th-anniversary
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#PennedPossibilities 1107: Saturday Word Edition: Share something from your WIP pertaining to the word “anticipation.”
(For @thatwriterellie.)
I’ll share a tiny excerpt.
⬇️
“How long have you thought about this?” asked Fenella, her gaze bravely searching for his own. His thumb slid away her lips and he dragged it along her chin, inhaling sharply as he leant closer. Then his breath ghosted across her skin as he exhaled. It was almost an intimate caress, but she craved more.
“I’ve thought of little else since you left,” Alistair confessed. “It’s been torture.”
“Then show me what you’ve missed,” she begged, a hand falling to the small of his back. The anticipation was enough to swallow her whole. She pulled him into her, guiding him, and he groaned at the pressure, the closeness, and the intimacy behind it. His free hand settled on her hip, where he tightened his hold, and her knees went weak.
“Let’s try again,” she added. “I think we deserve a second chance.”
#WritingCommunity #WritersOfMastodon #WingsOfQuietLonging #ParanormalRomance #Fantasy #Gothic #Victorian #Edwardian #Vampires #Werewolves #Supernatural
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#WordWeavers 8/22: Which character would make the worst roommate?
Oof. Big oof. I can't choose between two of my antagonists, Isma or Duncan. I think Duncan would try to drain me dry and leave me to die on the floor. He would make a game of the hunt. Isma, however, would enthrall me and use me as a slave, maybe turning me into a fellow vampire later on, just to suffer as a life-long, immortal slave for him. I think, given the situation, Isma would be far worse.
#WritingCommunity #WritersOfMastodon #WingsOfQuietLonging #ParanormalRomance #Fantasy #Gothic #Victorian #Edwardian #Vampires #Werewolves #Supernatural
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#ScribesAndMakers 8/21: Link to or summarize yesterday's poll and reveal the answer.
I *do* have a character who's able to read minds. That would be Alistair.
I *also* have a character who sells antiques and art pieces. That would be Caden, and he's quite a businessman.
I don't have a character who was a spellcasting warlord at one time, though. That was a random answer I came up with in the moment.
#WritingCommunity #WritersOfMastodon #WingsOfQuietLonging #ParanormalRomance #Fantasy #Gothic #Victorian #Edwardian #Vampires #Werewolves #Supernatural
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A sexy dark and glittering jewel of a novel featuring Sapphic vampires and crumbling old Victorian estates with a cast of believable and enjoyable characters. #SapphicErotica #vampires #bookstadon #books #bookreview #HistoricFiction #Fiction #Horror
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Forever is for the few, the rare, the damned. Do you hear its song? The taste of sour dreams and forgotten memories?
Come home. The night missed you.
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When the Dead Don’t Stay Dead
There are few things that humanity has been quite so consistently afraid of as a dead person who refuses to behave like one.
Long before Dracula acquired his cape and Rick Grimes rode his horse into Atlanta, people across Europe were burying there dead with precautions. Stones were placed over bodies, heads were removed and limbs were restrained, Corpses were turned face down and objects were placed across throats and stomachs. Graves were reopened and their occupants subjected to considerably more indignity than most of us would consider reasonable after death. Because, apparently, sometimes being dead isn’t enough.
The modern vampire is a glamorous creature. Pale, beautiful, immortal and, generally speaking, blessed with excellent cheekbones, it bears little resemblance to it’s folkloric ancestors. The older revenant was something far less appealing. In fact, it was a corpse – and most of the time, not a particularly pleasant one.
Medieval accounts contain stories of dead people returning to their communities, wandering at night, attacking the living, spreading disease or simply making such a nuisance of themselves that somebody eventually dug them up and did something drastic about it.
Britain had it’s own troublesome dead. The twelfth century chronicler, William of Newburgh recorded several stories of corpses apparently leaving their graves. In one, a wicked man in Buckinghamshire was said to return after burial and terrorise his wife and neighbours.
Eventually, his grave was opened and the body, according to William’s account, had not decayed as expected. The solution for this weird turn of events was not subtle. His heart was removed and burned.
We have to remember that William was not writing a vampire novel. He was writing history. To him and his contemporeries, tales of the restless dead existed within a world in which supernatural explanations for misfortunes were entirely plausible.
Disease made the phenomenon considerably more frightening. When people began dying after the death of a particular individual, suspicion could often fall on the corpse itself. Without knowledge of bacteria, viruses or the mechanisms of infection, the sequence could appear horribly straightforward – someone dies, they are buried, then their family begins dying too. Something must be coming back from the grave. And if opening that grave revealed a corpse that didn’t look sufficiently decomposed, the evidence might have seen overwhelming.
Unfortunately, decomposition is complicated. Bodies do not decay to a convenient timetable. Temperature, moisture, soil chemistry, depth of burial, clothing, coffin construction, body composition and countless other factors affect what happens after death. A corpse exhumed weeks or months later might look very different from what frightened villagers expected. Natural post mortem changes could make matters worse. Skin can retract making hair and nails appear to have continued growing. Gases produced during decomposition can swell the abdomen. Fluids may emerge from the nose and mouth. Internal pressure can produce sounds. Then there was the blood. A body opened after burial might have contained dark fluids mistaken for fresh blood, then suddenly the community had proof. The dead man had been feeding. To someone already convinced the dead had been wandering around at night, none of this can have been particularly reassuring.
During outbreaks of disease in parts of Eastern and Central Europe, suspected vampires were exhumed and examined. Reports describing apparently undecayed bodies, blood around mouths and other supposedly unnatural signs circulated far beyond the villages where the events occurred, until by the eighteenth century, vampire panics had become sufficiently troublesome to attract the attention of physicians, officials and scholars.
Across Europe, people developed a variety of methods intended – or later interpreted – to prevent troublesome corpses from returning. Some were decapitated, some were buried face down, some had heavy stones placed on them. Yet others were pinned, restrained or otherwise treated in ways archaeologists now describe cautiously as unusual, atypical or deviant burials.
Finding a skeleton with a stone rammed into it’s moth does not necessarily indicate that somebody believed they had buried Count Dracula. Burial practices can have many explanations. Punishment, social exclusion, execution, religious belief, disease precautions, fear of grave disturbance and local funerary customs can all leave strange archaeological signatures. Those things don’t make good headlines though. ‘Vampire Burial Discovery’ though? That’ll get the views.
One particularly interesting discovery came from Drawsko in Poland, where several seventeenth and eighteenth century burials included iron sickles placed across the bodies among other unusual measures found in the cemetery. The discoveries obviously became known as ‘vampire burials’, but the reality is actually more interesting than the headline.
Researchers have explored whether these individuals were outsiders, victims of disease, people regarded as dangerous after death or simply participants in a funerary tradition whose precise meaning has been lost. Do the researcher consider the occupants of the sickle graves to have been believed to be vampires? I’d say they were uncertain of why they were interred in this manner.
The history of the restless dead isn’t really a history of monsters, it’s a history of frightened people trying to understand death. Imagine living in a village where disease has begun moving from house to house. There are no microscopes, no germ theory, no antibiotics, no understanding of contagion remotely resembling ours.
What you DO know is that old Thomas died first, then his wife became ill, then his children, then the neighbours…
And someone remembers seeing old Thomas near the road after dark. Perhaps it was another man. Perhaps it was a shadow. Perhaps nobody saw anything at all until the story started circulating.
Soon, somebody suggests opening Thomas’s grave, and when they do, his body isn’t as decayed as everyone expected. Now the village has an answer – it’s the wrong one, but it is an answer.
And that’s an important thing about supernatural belief – It gives shape to chaos. Disease becomes a vampire. Bad luck becomes a curse. A strange noise becomes a ghost. The terrifying randomness of death becomes something with a name, a cause and – most importantly – a possible solution. Dig up the corpse, remove the head, burn the heart, put something heavy over the grave.
Do ‘Something’.
The rituals surrounding dangerous dead people may look macabre to our modern eyes, but undeath them lies something very familiar – Fear, grief and the desperate human need to believe that catastrophe can be controlled.
Even Britain, supposedly safe from the great vampire panics of Eastern Europe, had it’s fair share of stories about people who refused to stay peacefully buried. Medieval chroniclers described walking corpses. Later centuries brought fears of grave robbery, disturbed remains and the ‘Resurrection Men’.
The Victorians developed an entirely different anxiety around the grave: what if the person inside it wasn’t actually dead? They dealt with the anxiety as they normally did – cleverly. Safety coffins, mortuaries where bodies could be observed for signs of life, bells and signalling devices were patented so that the unfortunate prematurely interred might theoretically announce that their funeral had been somewhat premature.
Meanwhile, mortsafes – heavy iron cages placed over graves, particularly in Scotland, from a much more real threat. The Resurrection Men.
These days, photographs of mortsafes appear regularly online labelled as ‘Vampire Cages’, installed to keep the dead from climbing out. They weren’t. They were intended to stop the living from getting in, which, frankly, is somehow even more grim.
And then there are the bodies that just seem to refuse to do what we expect. Saints whose remains are declared incorrupt. Bodies naturally preserved dry air, cold, peat bogs or unusual burial conditions. Corpses transformed into adipocere, a waxy substance produced under certain conditions. Mummies created deliberately. Mummies created by accident. Every generation encounters the same unsettling truth. Death does not always look the way we expect it to. The way we think it should look. And for most of human history, that uncertainty has left plenty of room for the supernatural.
This week, Mysterious Times is opening the grave.
(Not literally. We have standards. Mostly.)
We’ll be meeting Britain’s medieval revenants, examining so-called vampire graves, looking at the genuine terror of premature burial, investigating the iron cages sometimes incorrectly claimed to imprison vampires and exploring the extraordinary cases in which the dead appeared to resist death itself.
Some of the stories will be folklore, some will be archaeology, some will be misunderstandings. And occasionally the truth will turn out to be considerably stranger than the supernatural explanation. Because humanity has spent thousands of years worrying about what happens after we die, but every now and again, we’ve been even more worried about what happens if we come back.
Welcome to The Dead Don’t Rest Week.
Please keep your hands inside the graveyard at all times.
#Archaeology #bodySnatchers #BritishFolklore #BurialCustoms #DarkHistory #DeathFolklore #Decomposition #DeviantBurials #Folklore #IncorruptBodies #MedievalFolklore #MedievalRevenants #Mortsafes #MysteriousTimes #Paranormal #PrematureBurial #RestlessDead #Revenants #SafetyCoffins #Superstitions #TheDeadDonTRest #Undead #VampireBurials #VampireFolklore #vampires #WalkingDead #weirdHistory #WilliamOfNewburgh -
Help me celebrate my 20th Year in Comics!
DUSK A DAY!
dusk #duskcomics #dusk20 #comics #comicbooks #horror #vampires
https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/rsbcomics/dusk-omnibus-20th-anniversary
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Finished Deadspeak, book 4 of the initial 5-book Necroscope series. This one was fantastic - intense, fast-paced, energetic all the way through. Really enjoyed this one, and will now move right on to the finale of this initial arc, Deadspawn. #horror #vampires #necroscope
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Small minds seem to have forgotten the sequence: After the victims are hung, then next are hung the perpetrators.
This is how history works. One can read about it. There are films. It is a very reliable mechanism for ensuring that history never ends.
We cannot stop history from happening, but we can notice that what might seem like the end of a story is really preparation for the next chapter.
The murderers, the genociders, they have no faith. It is quite obvious. Anyone can see it in their behavior. As proponents of the ancient law, they are utter failures. And they don't even see it coming.
All things come to those who are patient.
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#PennedPossibilities 1106: SC POV: When was a time where you had to make an impossible choice?
I talked about Caden last night, so let’s do it again.
Caden: It was when I left the cult. I hated every second of it, but I had to leave a friend behind. He needed my help to escape as well, but I couldn’t do anything for him in the moment. I had to run. He told me to go. I thought I could come back for him one day, so I ran, and ran, and ran.
#WritingCommunity #WritersOfMastodon #WingsOfQuietLonging #ParanormalRomance #Fantasy #Gothic #Victorian #Edwardian #Vampires #Werewolves #Supernatural
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Help me celebrate my 20th Year in Comics!
DUSK A DAY!
dusk #duskcomics #dusk20 #comics #comicbooks #horror #vampires
https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/rsbcomics/dusk-omnibus-20th-anniversary
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Just had one hell of an idea for Book 2 of the Bloodbound Legacy Series. I knew it was going to be about Caden (who's a vampire), but I wasn't sure exactly what his story would be or where it would go. Imagine that he becomes enamored with a local Wraith, Phantom, or Spectre (I haven't decided yet on the lore or the creature's species name, but he'll be a more corporeal and tangible spirit). Since Caden was a character that was vaguely based on Crowley from Good Omens, just for a friend of mine, I could make said creature a good/light-hearted, fun, loving, caring one (a bit like Aziraphale). Maybe he even loves books and occupies a library in Moray, Scotland. Haunting a bit, making friends, etc. They could fall in love. Why not do a full dedication of sorts for a friend? We would be the only people who knew where the inspiration actually came from lol.
Let me know what you guys think... Yay? Nay? I really like it, to be honest. 🤔
#WritingCommunity #WritersOfMastodon #WingsOfQuietLonging #ParanormalRomance #Fantasy #Gothic #Victorian #Edwardian #Vampires #Werewolves #Supernatural
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Chapter 28 of Scarlet Eye: Homecoming is available to read on #RoyalRoad: https://www.royalroad.com/fiction/153820/scarlet-eye
As Artemis and her team make their way through the prison, they encounter a monk sitting alone in a cell, who doesn't smell anything like a demon.
He quickly becomes frustrating, because he answers every question with one of his own, in the manner of zen philosophy.
@bookstodon
#author #indieauthor #writing #fantasy #actionadventure #fiction #witches #demons #vampires #webseries -
Abonnez-vous à la Vampilettre de nos copains de Vampirisme.
Vous aurez deux fois par mois toute l'actu sur les vampires !
Par ici : https://buff.ly/XxY9FNm
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#PennedPossibilities 1105: What secret does one of your characters keep that is dangerous to them? Does anyone else know about it?
I’ll go with the safe option for this answer.
Caden is a Dreamcaster. Simply put, he can send individuals to sleep and induce a dreamstate. He’s even able to influence and affect the dream if he so chooses. This is precious information, of course, and it’s a skill that he doesn't dare tell others that he possesses. It’s highly sought after, and it’s too dangerous to risk. Years ago, he was in a vampire cult and managed to escape them. They would use him if they knew.
Towards the beginning of the novel, he chooses to tell Fenella and Alistair. Well, I say *tell,* but what I really mean to say is that he *shows* them — of course, by putting both of them to sleep and making them dream. He’s dramatic that way. Anyway, he trusts this secret with them. They’re all such close friends. But the fact that he hid this piece of himself for centuries is mind-boggling to Fen and Alistair…
#WritingCommunity #WritersOfMastodon #WingsOfQuietLonging #ParanormalRomance #Fantasy #Gothic #Victorian #Edwardian #Vampires #Werewolves #Supernatural
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#WordWeavers 8/20: If your story had a tagline, what would it be?
Steadfast loyalty, compassion, and care are what make you family, not blood.
#WritingCommunity #WritersOfMastodon #WingsOfQuietLonging #ParanormalRomance #Fantasy #Gothic #Victorian #Edwardian #Vampires #Werewolves #Supernatural
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#WordWeavers 8/19: Which character has changed the most since your first draft?
Hati has changed the most for me (and she's still changing). She has gone from what was supposed to be a friend to the MCs and merely a SC to almost a third MC at this point.
#WritingCommunity #WritersOfMastodon #WingsOfQuietLonging #ParanormalRomance #Fantasy #Gothic #Victorian #Edwardian #Vampires #Werewolves #Supernatural
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#ScribesAndMakers 8/20: Create a poll describing two characters that feature in your stories and one who doesn't. Ask people to guess the one that isn't in your work.
We're strictly discussing Wings of Quiet Longing for this one, folks.
#WritingCommunity #WritersOfMastodon #WingsOfQuietLonging #ParanormalRomance #Fantasy #Gothic #Victorian #Edwardian #Vampires #Werewolves #Supernatural
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NEW EPISODE: Jim's ready to share his thoughts on the conclusion to The Strain Trilogy, The Night Eternal. This book takes some hard narrative turns. For the better, or not? Come see whether del Toro and Hogan land the plane, or totally crash. #horror #vampires https://youtu.be/E1oNxYYE2SQ
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This was a follow up to Dark Kiss & one I'd LOVE to redo being that the recordings then were done under poor conditions and could be stronger. -A love song for two immortals.- #music #musicsky #thomas #blackheart #vampires
https://thomasblackheart.bandcamp.com/track/hide-in-the-shadows
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#PennedPossibilities 1104: Where has your MC lived the longest? What kept them there for so long?
It’s Dorcha Castle in Moray, Scotland. In fact, he actually *still* resides there. Memories, loyalty, love, and friendship have all been the reasons why he stayed. It’s his home.
#WritingCommunity #WritersOfMastodon #WingsOfQuietLonging #ParanormalRomance #Fantasy #Gothic #Victorian #Edwardian #Vampires #Werewolves #Supernatural
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Help me celebrate my 20th Year in Comics!
DUSK A DAY!
#dusk #duskcomics #dusk20 #comics #comicbooks #horror #vampires
https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/rsbcomics/dusk-omnibus-20th-anniversary
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Good being prepared
Just in case of vampires
Wooden-stake ready#Haiku #OneHaikuADay #WritersCollective #writingcommunity #BackToHaiku #Vampire #Vampires #Dracula #Horror #Spooky #Underworld #Stake #WoodStake #WoodenStake #Summer #Akron #Ohio #USA #Photography #2026
August 19, 2026
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beatthebacklist2026 Day 5 - Carry On by Rainbow Rowell #CarryOn #simonsnow #rainbowrowell #fantasy #QueerBookRecs #lgbtqia #romancereads #RomanceBooks #vampires #youngadult #youngadultfantasybooks #fangirl https://www.k-squareproductions.com/gmbc