The Tribes of Dracula

Juda debuted in Israel in 2017 and got an American in 2019. Since then, I’ve been anxiously awaiting season two. Show creator Tzion Baruch has teased me with stills from production on his Insta, so I know it’s in the works. It just seems forever to get here.

Project Vampire: In death, we have a name

You might find this hard to believe, but science is on my side: Vampires are real*. And not only are they real, but we can name them. Well, two of them, at least. They lived in America. New England, to be precise: one in Connecticut and one in Rhode Island.

Vampires before Dracula

In case you didn’t know, Bram Stoker didn’t invent vampires. No, neither did John Polidori, who wrote “The Vampyre,” the great-granddaddy of all vampire fiction. Vlad the Impaler certainly did exist, and by many accounts he was a monster. But he wasn’t a vampire. Nor was Countess Elizabeth Bathory, who bathed in the blood of virgins in an attempt to keep her youth. So who were the first vampires?

Five reasons to like vampires

People are always* asking me, “Why do you like vampires so much.” I admit, I’m sometimes embarrassed by the question. I know it’s often thought to be the realm of angsty teenage girls. And if you’re demanding my honesty, that’s when I first became enamored of them myself.

There’s no such thing as a Jewish vampire*

Until now.

He’s not a bad guy, not really. But you can’t say he’s really good, either. So he makes his living doing the bidding of some shadowy underworld types. I mean, that’s not great. But on the other hand, he’s also the sort of uncle who comes home from a business trip with a giant stuffed animal for his nephew. It’s just that the business trip involved mob money.

Platform, they said.

Something big happened a month ago.

At least, it was to me. I reached the end of a sentence. The sentence was the end of a chapter, and the chapter was the end of a first draft, and that was the first book I ever wrote. Getting there was no small feat. This was the culmination of five efforts of writing the dang thing. By this point, I had lived with the idea of the story in my head for nearly twelve years. It was kinda a big deal.

And also, kind of not.