True to form, I reached somewhere between the two- thirds and three-fourths mark of this book and now I'm putting it down in favor of another book

All these posts about Dracula Daily are delightful and fun, and I'm glad others are enjoying themselves.

I don't intend on joining the club, though, because Dracula, for me, reminds me of one of the reasons I left School in Year 11. The reason being I took Extension English because I was an aspiring writer even then, and the first term of that class was about Gothic Lit.

And I dunno if the teacher was at fault, or the curriculum, or I just wasn't getting it, but apart from The Raven, all the examples of Gothic media (mostly books) given were Horror. So I associated Gothic Lit with Horror for the whole term.

Dracula and Frankenstein were two of the books I could choose from to study, and I had The Turning of the Screw ordered for me in Braille as well. I did not enjoy reading any of them, with the possible exception of parts of Frankenstein.

We were also made to watch The Others in class, a film I'd only watched once before, with my mother and sister, and which had scared the crap out of us all. It was not fun for me, I assure you.

I had to do a speech based on two of the assigned examples of Gothic media and it was one of the worst public speeches I'd ever done, because I was not comfortable studying this genre. That wasn't what made me want to drop out, though.

Between terms, my homework was to write a short story in the Gothic genre. And I. Could not. Do it. I was sixteen, and my family was really going through some hell at the time, and all my association with Gothic stories had involved ghosts and possessions and vampires, with the exception of The Raven, which I didn't properly understand for what it was. I tried, and all that came out looked like The Ghost-Whisperer but written really badly. I hated it, I knew it wasn't good enough for me to pass, I didn't have it in me to write anything heavier that might have been a better fit, and I knew I'd fail the semester.

It wasn't the only reason I quit school, but it was one of them. Writing Horror or Horror-adjacent fiction, at least with regard to this kind of dark stuff, as I saw it as a sixteen-year-old Christian girl, went right against my grain, and I simply could not force it out of me.

This is part of why I stick to my genre of choice even now and don't do exercises where I write outside my comfort zone. The last time I did that I sucked at it.

Ironically I'm actually weaving in more horror-flavoured aspects into certain storylines of my fanfics and original fantasy now. Not so you'd always notice, but I do think more about how someone under specific curses would be impacted mentally and the experience itself can be horrifying on its own level.

And I have a better understanding of Gothic Lit now and almost wish I'd been given Wuthering Heights instead of Turning of the Screw. Maybe then I might not have misunderstood the genre so badly that I thought I had to write about restless/vengeful dead or evil vampires to get it right.