​I think.  I’m pretty sure. 
It’s been a long plague.  This has been a wild year, and I think things are about to happen.  Guess we’ll find out.  I’ll post on here a little more often.  Promise.
Love,
Ryan Baron North

One of the frustrating parts of writing a novel about vampires is that when you tell someone you are writing a vampire novel, they assume you are writing a genre title around dark sexy things having sex with other dark sexy things.  And for my novel Strix, that is not the case. 

For vampires, you originally had your Draculas, your Ruthvens, and your Carmillas, and the stories tackled a fear of reverse colonization for Europeans, and it confronted the concept that a person could lose salvation—lose their ticket to heaven—by no fault of their own.  Even if you did everything right, a vampire could steal paradise from you. 
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These fears don’t mesh with the modern day.  Vampires in Strix are a commentary on the ethno-nationalism of self that we experience in modern society, specifically when we are grasping at our pasts.  The vampires are a metaphor for the actual possibility that in the desperate search for self-actualization we hurt the people we love.  Vampires, for me, are the fear that we may cross a line in our lives that leaves us trapped reliving, in our heads, the “golden years.”  And that memory most likely never existed the way it is remembered.