The Story Behind Sweetblood
In 1978 I was 26 years old and looking forward with great eagerness to enjoying the wealth, fame, and adulation that would surely follow the imminent publication of my first novel. Now all I had to do was write it.
Having recently read both Bram Stoker's classic novel Dracula and Anne Rice's Interview with the Vampire, I had become fascinated with all things vampiric. I decided to write a vampire novel. I moved from Minnesota to New Orleans and began my investigation into the dark and sanguine world of the Undead.
At that time I knew no vampires, so I headed for the public library. Unfortunately, there were few vampire books available at that time. I was able to find only a handful of nonfiction books concerning vampire legends and vampirism, and perhaps a dozen novels. Not much to go on if I wanted to write the Great American Vampire Novel, so I expanded the parameters of my research to include all things blood-related. I soon found myself in the Rudolph Matas Medical Library at Tulane University searching for information on the nutritional value of human blood.
I knew I could never write another Dracula, or another Interview with the Vampire--those books would each stand forever at the pinnacle of the genres they had defined. If I was to write a vampire novel, I would have to find a whole new approach. I needed a different sort of blood sucker.
Using the only formal creative technique I knew, I asked myself a series of "what if..." questions. And the "what if...?" question I was trying to answer on that particular day was, "What if an otherwise normal human being were to try to live on blood alone?"
The medical literature eventually revealed an answer based upon studies from, appropriately, eastern Europe, near Transylvania. During times of hardship and famine, blood sausage became a major component of some Slavic peoples' diets. Blood was relatively cheap, and was often given away free by farmers and slaughter houses. When times were hard, some of the poorer classes enjoyed blood sausage at nearly every meal. But how did this affect them physically?
Blood, I learned, ought not be employed as a major food group--unless you happen to be a tick, a mosquito, or a vampire bat. Red blood cells contain large quantities of hemoglobin. Hemoglobin contains large amounts of iron. And iron is toxic to humans. The human body can metabolize some iron--in fact, it is a necessary nutrient--but not the amounts of iron consumed by, say, a vampire or a blood sausage fanatic. Over time, excessive iron intake leads to a condition known as hemochromatosis. That's Latin for "Got too much iron in me; sick as a dog." You don't have to be a blood drinker to get hemochromatosis. Most hemochromatosis is the result of a genetic inability to metabolize iron, and had nothing to do with diet. But whether it is a result of one's DNA or blood-rich diet, hemochromatosis victims suffer from more than their share of health problems.
(Incidentally, the preferred treatment for hemochromatosis is regular exsanguination, or bloodletting. So if someone in the "real" world decides to become a vampire, they will probably become a very sick vampire. And the treatment for their condition will be bloodletting. In other words, vampires are the cure for vampirism.)
I continued my reading, now following the "What if...?" question, "What if a person had untreated hemochromatosis?" It turns out that high iron levels can damage the pancreas, leading to insulin-dependent diabetes mellitus, also known as Type-1 diabetes.
Today, a diagnosis of Type-1 diabetes leads to a little vial of insulin (the hormone normally produced by the pancreas) and a syringe. The insulin allows the body to properly metabolize carbohydrates, and the patient lives an otherwise normal life. But that wasn't always true. A century ago, the cause of diabetes was a mystery. No effective treatment existed. I wondered what had happened to all those untreated diabetics. How long had it taken them to die?
Until the discovery of insulin in 1922, diabetics were universally doomed. Unable to convert carbohydrates to energy, the untreated diabetic slowly wasted away--starving to death, no matter how much they ate. It was not a pretty way to go. In fact, the more I read, the more eerie and familiar the symptoms sounded:
- Severe weight loss
- Pale, cold, clammy skin
- Elongation of the teeth (from receding gums)
- Bloody teeth (from diseased gums)
- Ravenous hunger
- Extreme thirst
- A sweet, rotten odor
- Loss of hair
- Visual disturbances
- Painful sensitivity to bright light and strong odors
- Confused, angry and aggressive behavior
- Deathlike coma
- Death
I imagined, then, a scenario taking place in, say, eastern Europe in, say, the Middle Ages. A slowly dying diabetic might look a lot like a person possessed. As the disease slowly destroys his body, his physical appearance becomes increasingly bizarre and frightening. He is rail thin, deathly pale, and his hair is falling out in patches. His teeth appear longer, and his gums are bleeding. His behavior becomes erratic and deranged. He demands tremendous amounts of food and drink, bright sunlight hurts his eyes, and he is repelled by the strong odor of garlic. One might easily imagine him falling into a coma, being pronounced dead, then spontaneously recovering from his coma in a confused and famished state. A stake through the heart might have seemed a reasonable course of action to the frightened and ignorant villagers.
What if, I asked myself, the vampire legends had their roots in the tragic demise of untreated diabetics? And there I had my idea for a new type of vampire story. All I had to do was write it down.
Six years later I was back in Minnesota, working as a marketing veep for a manufacturer of painter caps. I had failed to complete my vampire novel. My meager savings had quickly disappeared, and the discipline and skills required to write a novel had proven to be more elusive than I had imagined. In fact, I had written no more than five or six pages. Like most other would-be writers, my dreams of literary excellence had been sidetracked by the desire to have a roof over my head and regular meals. I was another wannabe writer with a 9 to 5 job. I still wanted to write, but I just couldn't seem to find the time.
To make matters even worse, my company was about to go belly-up. We were laying off employees every week, and every other phone call was from an angry creditor. I wasn't sleeping at night, but during the day I couldn't seem to stay awake. I had a constant headache, my temper was flaring with increasing frequency, I was losing weight, and I was having trouble focusing--both mentally and visually.
I thought I was just stressed out, but one night I woke up several times with a craving for something wet and sweet, and in the morning I found the rinds of nine large grapefruits on the kitchen counter. I remembered eating them as if it had been a dream.
That can't be normal, said I to myself.
My doctor told me that I was probably just stressed-out. Just to be on the safe side, he also drew a vial of blood from my am and sent it to the lab. The next day he called and told me I had Type-1 diabetes. The good news was that it was 1984, not 1884. The doctor prescribed a lifetime of insulin injections and dietary restrictions. Since my only alternative was death (or Undeath), I agreed to his regimen.
There is nothing quite like a chronic, potentially fatal disease to make a person take a hard look at his or her priorities in life, and that's exactly what I did. I was 32 years old--at that time, it seemed old--and I still hadn't written my first novel. I decided to make it my priority. That meant that every day, from then on, I would devote the best part of my mental resources to my writing. I would write in the morning before I went to work. I would read everything I could find about writing. I would read novels analytically, striving to understand how the authors had created their complex worlds, characters, and stories. I would think of myself as a writer who happened to work in marketing, not as a marketing veep who wanted to be a writer.
In other words, I decided, all over again, to become a writer.
I wish I could claim that plots immediately began to crystallize in my head, that the words flowed like water, and that I never looked back. But that would be a lie. My commitment to the writer's life didn't take.
Sure, I produced plenty of pages of typewritten prose. I was up at four in the morning typing away. The vampire novel wasn't working. I moved onto a crime novel, then a sci-fi novel, then a scattering of unrelated, unfinished short stories. None of it was publishable--I didn't even try to sell any of it. I was still deeply involved in the painter cap business, which we had chopped up and parceled out to our creditors. I ended up with a similar job in a similar company, and although the stress levels improved, the job still sucked up most of my creative juices. Over the next three years my commitment to my writing slowly faded. My new company developed its own financial and cultural crisis, my diabetes care became routine, and my writing activity became increasingly sporadic and fragmented.
Then I caught a lucky break: I got fired.
Getting fired was almost as good for my writing as getting diabetes. In some ways it was better, because I suddenly had a lot of time on my hands. And I was five years older.
Once again, I had decided to become a writer. This time, it took.
I soon became well-published, fabulously wealthy, worshipped by billions. I have written novels about poker players, counterfeiters, taco vendors, time travelers and lottery winners, religious cultists and all sorts of other curious creatures...but where were the diabetic vampires?
Well, it took me 25 years, one chronic disease, one firing--and a few other horrific events that we don't have time to discuss here today--but I finally got back to that vampire novel. It turned out to be a completely different book than I had envisioned. It's a young adult novel now, the story of a sixteen-year-old girl with diabetes who develops a theory about diabetes and vampirism--a theory based upon my research in New Orleans a quarter of a century ago. Sweetblood was published in 2003.
I love being a writer for many reasons. But wealth, fame and adulation are no longer at the top of the list. That is fortunate for me, as I have enjoyed little enough of all three. Yes, sadly, I lied: I'm not really wealthy, nor am I worshipped by billions. Half a dozen, maybe--if you include my dogs. Today, the important things are the freedom, the flexibility, and the labor of writing itself. Even more important is the knowledge that no part of my life has been wasted. Nearly every experience I've had in this life becomes grist for the creative mill. Every lousy job, every embarrassing faux pas, every physical injury, every wrong turn--it all goes into the hopper.
I would rather not have diabetes. And I did not particularly enjoy going broke, or being fired. But I would not be writing today had those events not occurred, and I certainly would not have written Sweetblood.
Having recently read both Bram Stoker's classic novel Dracula and Anne Rice's Interview with the Vampire, I had become fascinated with all things vampiric. I decided to write a vampire novel. I moved from Minnesota to New Orleans and began my investigation into the dark and sanguine world of the Undead.
At that time I knew no vampires, so I headed for the public library. Unfortunately, there were few vampire books available at that time. I was able to find only a handful of nonfiction books concerning vampire legends and vampirism, and perhaps a dozen novels. Not much to go on if I wanted to write the Great American Vampire Novel, so I expanded the parameters of my research to include all things blood-related. I soon found myself in the Rudolph Matas Medical Library at Tulane University searching for information on the nutritional value of human blood.
I knew I could never write another Dracula, or another Interview with the Vampire--those books would each stand forever at the pinnacle of the genres they had defined. If I was to write a vampire novel, I would have to find a whole new approach. I needed a different sort of blood sucker.
Using the only formal creative technique I knew, I asked myself a series of "what if..." questions. And the "what if...?" question I was trying to answer on that particular day was, "What if an otherwise normal human being were to try to live on blood alone?"
The medical literature eventually revealed an answer based upon studies from, appropriately, eastern Europe, near Transylvania. During times of hardship and famine, blood sausage became a major component of some Slavic peoples' diets. Blood was relatively cheap, and was often given away free by farmers and slaughter houses. When times were hard, some of the poorer classes enjoyed blood sausage at nearly every meal. But how did this affect them physically?
Blood, I learned, ought not be employed as a major food group--unless you happen to be a tick, a mosquito, or a vampire bat. Red blood cells contain large quantities of hemoglobin. Hemoglobin contains large amounts of iron. And iron is toxic to humans. The human body can metabolize some iron--in fact, it is a necessary nutrient--but not the amounts of iron consumed by, say, a vampire or a blood sausage fanatic. Over time, excessive iron intake leads to a condition known as hemochromatosis. That's Latin for "Got too much iron in me; sick as a dog." You don't have to be a blood drinker to get hemochromatosis. Most hemochromatosis is the result of a genetic inability to metabolize iron, and had nothing to do with diet. But whether it is a result of one's DNA or blood-rich diet, hemochromatosis victims suffer from more than their share of health problems.
(Incidentally, the preferred treatment for hemochromatosis is regular exsanguination, or bloodletting. So if someone in the "real" world decides to become a vampire, they will probably become a very sick vampire. And the treatment for their condition will be bloodletting. In other words, vampires are the cure for vampirism.)
I continued my reading, now following the "What if...?" question, "What if a person had untreated hemochromatosis?" It turns out that high iron levels can damage the pancreas, leading to insulin-dependent diabetes mellitus, also known as Type-1 diabetes.
Today, a diagnosis of Type-1 diabetes leads to a little vial of insulin (the hormone normally produced by the pancreas) and a syringe. The insulin allows the body to properly metabolize carbohydrates, and the patient lives an otherwise normal life. But that wasn't always true. A century ago, the cause of diabetes was a mystery. No effective treatment existed. I wondered what had happened to all those untreated diabetics. How long had it taken them to die?
Until the discovery of insulin in 1922, diabetics were universally doomed. Unable to convert carbohydrates to energy, the untreated diabetic slowly wasted away--starving to death, no matter how much they ate. It was not a pretty way to go. In fact, the more I read, the more eerie and familiar the symptoms sounded:
- Severe weight loss
- Pale, cold, clammy skin
- Elongation of the teeth (from receding gums)
- Bloody teeth (from diseased gums)
- Ravenous hunger
- Extreme thirst
- A sweet, rotten odor
- Loss of hair
- Visual disturbances
- Painful sensitivity to bright light and strong odors
- Confused, angry and aggressive behavior
- Deathlike coma
- Death
I imagined, then, a scenario taking place in, say, eastern Europe in, say, the Middle Ages. A slowly dying diabetic might look a lot like a person possessed. As the disease slowly destroys his body, his physical appearance becomes increasingly bizarre and frightening. He is rail thin, deathly pale, and his hair is falling out in patches. His teeth appear longer, and his gums are bleeding. His behavior becomes erratic and deranged. He demands tremendous amounts of food and drink, bright sunlight hurts his eyes, and he is repelled by the strong odor of garlic. One might easily imagine him falling into a coma, being pronounced dead, then spontaneously recovering from his coma in a confused and famished state. A stake through the heart might have seemed a reasonable course of action to the frightened and ignorant villagers.
What if, I asked myself, the vampire legends had their roots in the tragic demise of untreated diabetics? And there I had my idea for a new type of vampire story. All I had to do was write it down.
Six years later I was back in Minnesota, working as a marketing veep for a manufacturer of painter caps. I had failed to complete my vampire novel. My meager savings had quickly disappeared, and the discipline and skills required to write a novel had proven to be more elusive than I had imagined. In fact, I had written no more than five or six pages. Like most other would-be writers, my dreams of literary excellence had been sidetracked by the desire to have a roof over my head and regular meals. I was another wannabe writer with a 9 to 5 job. I still wanted to write, but I just couldn't seem to find the time.
To make matters even worse, my company was about to go belly-up. We were laying off employees every week, and every other phone call was from an angry creditor. I wasn't sleeping at night, but during the day I couldn't seem to stay awake. I had a constant headache, my temper was flaring with increasing frequency, I was losing weight, and I was having trouble focusing--both mentally and visually.
I thought I was just stressed out, but one night I woke up several times with a craving for something wet and sweet, and in the morning I found the rinds of nine large grapefruits on the kitchen counter. I remembered eating them as if it had been a dream.
That can't be normal, said I to myself.
My doctor told me that I was probably just stressed-out. Just to be on the safe side, he also drew a vial of blood from my am and sent it to the lab. The next day he called and told me I had Type-1 diabetes. The good news was that it was 1984, not 1884. The doctor prescribed a lifetime of insulin injections and dietary restrictions. Since my only alternative was death (or Undeath), I agreed to his regimen.
There is nothing quite like a chronic, potentially fatal disease to make a person take a hard look at his or her priorities in life, and that's exactly what I did. I was 32 years old--at that time, it seemed old--and I still hadn't written my first novel. I decided to make it my priority. That meant that every day, from then on, I would devote the best part of my mental resources to my writing. I would write in the morning before I went to work. I would read everything I could find about writing. I would read novels analytically, striving to understand how the authors had created their complex worlds, characters, and stories. I would think of myself as a writer who happened to work in marketing, not as a marketing veep who wanted to be a writer.
In other words, I decided, all over again, to become a writer.
I wish I could claim that plots immediately began to crystallize in my head, that the words flowed like water, and that I never looked back. But that would be a lie. My commitment to the writer's life didn't take.
Sure, I produced plenty of pages of typewritten prose. I was up at four in the morning typing away. The vampire novel wasn't working. I moved onto a crime novel, then a sci-fi novel, then a scattering of unrelated, unfinished short stories. None of it was publishable--I didn't even try to sell any of it. I was still deeply involved in the painter cap business, which we had chopped up and parceled out to our creditors. I ended up with a similar job in a similar company, and although the stress levels improved, the job still sucked up most of my creative juices. Over the next three years my commitment to my writing slowly faded. My new company developed its own financial and cultural crisis, my diabetes care became routine, and my writing activity became increasingly sporadic and fragmented.
Then I caught a lucky break: I got fired.
Getting fired was almost as good for my writing as getting diabetes. In some ways it was better, because I suddenly had a lot of time on my hands. And I was five years older.
Once again, I had decided to become a writer. This time, it took.
I soon became well-published, fabulously wealthy, worshipped by billions. I have written novels about poker players, counterfeiters, taco vendors, time travelers and lottery winners, religious cultists and all sorts of other curious creatures...but where were the diabetic vampires?
Well, it took me 25 years, one chronic disease, one firing--and a few other horrific events that we don't have time to discuss here today--but I finally got back to that vampire novel. It turned out to be a completely different book than I had envisioned. It's a young adult novel now, the story of a sixteen-year-old girl with diabetes who develops a theory about diabetes and vampirism--a theory based upon my research in New Orleans a quarter of a century ago. Sweetblood was published in 2003.
I love being a writer for many reasons. But wealth, fame and adulation are no longer at the top of the list. That is fortunate for me, as I have enjoyed little enough of all three. Yes, sadly, I lied: I'm not really wealthy, nor am I worshipped by billions. Half a dozen, maybe--if you include my dogs. Today, the important things are the freedom, the flexibility, and the labor of writing itself. Even more important is the knowledge that no part of my life has been wasted. Nearly every experience I've had in this life becomes grist for the creative mill. Every lousy job, every embarrassing faux pas, every physical injury, every wrong turn--it all goes into the hopper.
I would rather not have diabetes. And I did not particularly enjoy going broke, or being fired. But I would not be writing today had those events not occurred, and I certainly would not have written Sweetblood.