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On Writing Mina Harker's Diary

I came up with the idea for Mina Harker's Diary as an alternative to a series of books I'd intended for decades to write, and never managed to do it.

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My initial thought was to write a collection of erotic short stories, with a twist of gothic horror.  The problem was, I had only one story idea (a good one, to be sure—but only one).  But in trying to conjure more, and seeking inspiration, I dwelt on a favorite tale with which I was very familiar: Bram Stoker's Dracula.  (For anyone who hasn't read it, this book is brimming with subliminal sexuality.)  And that's when the idea seized me: why not take the existing story and make explicit the scenes that Stoker had only made implicit?

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It seemed like a great idea to me!  But this led to another problem: I couldn't just rewrite Stoker's novel in an erotic vein—it's his story, after all; not mine.  I could at best only eroticize a few of his scenes.  And that seemed all well and good, but it still left me far short of a 'collection'.

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That's when I thought of another gothic masterpiece: Mary Shelley's Frankenstein.  I knew there was at least one scene from that tale—the rape of Elizabeth—that I could eroticize.  And of course, with this realization, Mina Harker's Diary was conceived.

I thought then of all the classic horror tales that I could include in this collection—Stevenson's The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde; Leroux's The Phantom of the Opera; Wells's The Invisible Man.  But of these, I'd only read Stevenson's work, and but once.  So, for my chapters, I'd have to do some deep-dive research.  Which I did.

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I must admit at this point: of these three, only The Phantom of the Opera truly lends itself to eroticism.  Jekyll & Hyde barely hints at sexuality, and rather abstractly; whereas sex in The Invisible Man is nonexistent.  For each, I had to invent characters and circumstances out of thin air.  A reader of my work will find only tenuous connections to the original novels.  (The chapters from The Invisible Man and The Phantom of the Opera are now found in my second book, Autumn Moon.  More on that later.)

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My research involved pornography, as well.  Since women are my target audience, I had to learn the specifics of what entertains them.  As luck would have it, I found more material on the subject than I expected—particularly, a well-researched study put together by a couple of PhDs.  Paranormal/supernatural sex ranked highest; then came homoeroticism, rape fantasy, bondage & discipline, and lesbianism.  I consulted with a lady friend on this, and she confirmed all but the order (lesbianism ought to rank higher, she thinks).  A few other subcategories not in the top five (but I learned from women's chatrooms) are domination & submission, voyeurism & exhibitionism, group sex, and cuckoldry.  I drew my line there, where the list turned into niche fetishes too dark and weird for my comprehension.

So, armed at last with all the requisite material, I began writing and arranging Mina Harker's Diary.

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I began with the Dracula chapters.  Both the subject and title of Confessions of Mina Murray were no-brainers; Stoker certainly hints at untoward goings-on between Mina and Lucy.  Confessions of Mina Harker took a little more license, since no such encounter between Mina and vampire-Lucy occurs in Stoker's novel.  In Seductions of Mina Harker, I tried to make sense of Mina's apparent desire for vampirism, making much more of the 'Jonathan's Journal' episode than Stoker did.  I'm happy with this, as I think it's one of his story's weaker plot points.  And I managed to reconcile Jonathan and Mina by the end of it, which I had to do for continuity reasons.  I almost didn't write Professor and the Brides, despite the scene's erotic potential, because it's told from Van Helsing's point of view.  And also, Stoker's brides have no real personalities to work with; I'd have to reinvent them myself.  I doubted that it would work as the conclusion to the three preceding chapters.  But I'm glad that I went ahead with it, because it remains my favorite chapter in the book, and Celestina my favorite character.

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Looking at my work and seeing that it was good, I then delved into Mary Shelley's Frankenstein.

This was tougher, as Frankenstein is as much a social commentary as it is a scary story.  Being exceptionally well-read, Shelley makes very complex allusions to other literary works—Milton's Paradise Lost and Coleridge's  Rime of the Ancient Mariner, to name but two.  She also makes numerous philosophical observations which she'd derived from Paine and Rousseau, among other august thinkers.  I'm not familiar enough with any of these writings to adequately mimic her, and I wasn't prepared to do that much research to achieve an effect that few readers would appreciate, anyway.

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Still, and despite her incredible erudition, Shelley left a few glaring flaws in her story, which I seized upon to reinterpret.  The first is the creation scene, which she describes in the vaguest terms and concludes with Victor's sudden, inexplicable revulsion of his daemon (he's hideous, but Victor surely knows this before enlivening him).  Another is the creation of the daemon's mate, which Victor never actually accomplishes in Shelley's novel.  I've always thought that Victor's motives in both of these scenes are a little weak, so I rewrote them.  Instruments of Life is so named for a phrase Shelley uses in the chapter, and works as a nice—albeit accidental—double-entendre.  I named She's Alive for Colin Clive's famous outburst in James Whale's classic film, Bride of Frankenstein.  The third chapter, In Elizabeth's Boudoir, is my reinterpretation of the rape scene Shelley subtly hints at, but never details.  I also wrote an ending that puts an even grimmer spin to Shelley's own grim conclusion.  I'm quite proud of all three chapters.

The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde, by Robert Louis Stevenson, required a second reading, because I'd forgotten much of the story's details.  But one of the things I did remember was that it has no noteworthy women in it.  This fact presented obvious problems for me.

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Of all my source novels, Jekyll & Hyde is by far the most accomplished in terms of plot and character development.  It has no inconsistencies, digressions or improbable plot contrivances that I can see.  But Stevenson did make an odd writing choice for his story, which perplexed me.  It's told almost entirely in flashback—conversations or letters describing events that have already happened.  (So is Frankenstein, technically, but it's not really noticeable.)  I kept to the spirit of Stevenson's novella and wrote both chapters framed within letters sent by Henry Jekyll to his lawyer.

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The rereading provided me with something extraordinary.  At one point, Jekyll refers to Hyde's excesses with the phrase, 'leaping pulses and secret pleasures'.  I felt as if I'd been handed my chapters' titles by the author himself.

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As far as female characters are concerned, I had to make up both of them.  Isabel Guest is the imagined wife of a character who makes only the briefest appearance in the story.  I just conjured Deirdre Jameson out of nothing.  I like the name Deirdre, and wanted a common Irish surname that didn't start with Mc- or O'-.  I happened to think of the Jameson brand of whiskey, and went with it.  By oddest coincidence, I then recalled that Deirdre Jameson is also a name I'd once heard in a British sitcom.  It seemed like fate, and a shame not to make use of it.

I later decided that my original compilation for the book was too long and arranged too messily.  So, I split it into two books of nine chapters each, with new arrangements.  Mina Harker's Diary is now the Dracula, Jekyll & Hyde and Frankenstein chapters, presented in that order.   The other nine chapters now comprise my new book, Autumn Moon.

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So, there it is: how Mina Harker's Diary got written.

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