People often ask what prompted me to step out writing biographical historical fiction and write DRACULA IN LOVE. I have always loved vampires, ever since I watched Dark Shadows on tv as a child. Here’s why:
I Want to be a Vampire (and you should too!)
By Karen Essex
Friends and readers, let me give it to you straight. I do not want to die. It’s that simple. And now that I have written a vampire book, Dracula in Love, and fully explored the advantages, I really, really thirst to be an immortal.... Read more.
I really enjoyed doing this sixty minute radio interview with Jon Hansen. Few interviewers come so well-prepared to discuss a book on so many different levels with an author. Hope you enjoy.
The glass escalator is a new phenomenon similar to the glass ceiling, except that instead of hitting their heads as they try to rise to the top, men entering largely female dominated professions are carried past their women co-workers in winged chariots known as glass escalators.
Not surprisingly, as the job market shrinks, men are entering traditionally female-dominated professions—nursing, teaching, etc. This is great news for the professions, as far as I am concerned, and also great news for men who are willing to enter or retrain for these positions. The bad news for women is that they have to watch the men swiftly move past them for promotions and pay raises.
Old habits die hard. Though we’ve learned to respect and rely on female talent in the workforce, we still find it easier to lionize, revere, and promote men, and despite evidence to the contrary, we still find it easier to think of men as the major breadwinners.
Personally, I’d like to aim for equanimity in the workforce, based on talent and performance and not gender. But I’ll take the gain of men entering the more nurturing fields, where we definitely need a masculine presence too.
Few people know that my first career was as a costume designer in theater, film, and television. I studied theatrical design at university, and, thanks to a very lucky break, slid into the business and worked in that position for a few intense, fun years.
For my taste, Eiko Ishioka was the greatest costume designer in the world. She certainly changed my world with her exquisite costumes for Francis Coppola’s’ Dracula. I was always a “Francis Freak,” but it was Ishioka’s shockingly vibrant, wildly dramatic, luscious wardrobe that jettisoned me into Coppola’s Gothic fantasy and made me want to stay there. Forever. The reds were not incarnadine but blood itself. The juxtaposition of bridal white against the ruthless horror of an undead bride seared my imagination. The bizarre confluence of Japanese discipline, Victorian excess, unbridled sexuality, and sheer theatricality stunned me. I couldn’t get the images out of my mind. For decades.... Read more.
Friends, can it really be true that we’ve had no tv series with a single African-American female lead since 1974??? The article below mentions Teresa Graves’s as an undercover detective in the 1974 made-for-TV flick Get Christie Love!, which I do not remember, but I DO remember watching the beautiful Diahnn Carroll as Julia when I was a kid back in the late ’60s.
So, um, let’s see. Diahnn Carroll broke that glass ceiling, Teresa Graves followed her, and um, we’ve had a mere 40 year absence of series led by a single black woman??
Where have I been that I didn’t notice this disparity? Me, the lifelong feminist writer and (I hope) someone who lives without racial prejudice of any kind. Well, I guess I’ve been living where I’ve always lived, on PLANET WHITE! Apparently, everyone who runs network tv also resides there.
Thanks to the wonderful Shonda Rhimes, who created both Gray’s Anatomy and The Practice, we will once again have a network series fashioned around an independent, intelligent, interesting woman of color.
Check out the article and look for SCANDAL,an upcoming and LONG OVERDUE series inspired by the life of Judy Smith, a real-life political clean-up woman.
