Special Guest Blogger: Bram Stoker

There is a misconception that my story of the vampire Dracula is based on Vlad the Impaler but sorry to disappoint but i never even knew who he was then and i never came up with the concept of Vampires, they were around a long time before i wrote about the guy in Transylvania who i originally called Count Wampyr but changed to Dracula which is Wallachian for 'the devil'.
Although Dracula may be the most famous vampire story ever written, i didn’t invent the vampire story, they had been around for decades, there was even one called Varney the Vampire.
Drac's spooky castle in Transylvania is based on Slains castle in Scotland where i was staying when i was writing the story, the bit where i described it in the book was based on me looking around the room i was in when i wrote that bit and the handsome and suave image of Dracula that you have probably seen on screen and based on Lord Byron, is not how i originally described him in the book, my version had bushy eyebrows, a cruel mouth under a heavy moustache and sharp white teeth which didn't retract at will.
Very few writers make enough money from their writing to pursue it full time, and my story wasn't much of a hit at the time, it wasn't even the most famous horror story at that time, vastly outsold by other horror stories, so i had to work as a civil servant at Dublin Castle and writing theater reviews on the side which saw me offered a job as manager of the famous actor Henry Irvings London Lyceum theater.
I did show Irving my Dracula story hoping that he would play the role in his theatre but he refused and called it dreadful and the whole Dracula thing really didn't take off until it was made into the unauthorised movie Nosferatu and then went up a notch with the Bela Lugosi movie, a decade after i had died so i departed relatively unknown, my obituary barely made mention of my writing at all, noting briefly that i wrote 'creepy fiction' but remembering me more for being the manager of Henry Irving's bloody theater.