When I first started down this road I knew very little about vampire literature.
It all began with a viewing of John Carpenter's Vampires which, apart from some pretty creative ways of killing the vamps, was pretty meh.
This led to a discussion with my friend Meghan about how vampire movies tended to fail because they didn't have much if any room to develop the rules of their particular vampire universe, so they were largely stuck with having to colour within the lines of the most well understood tropes of vampire lore. From there we began imagining our own set of vampire parameters, and eventually those conversations turned into the bedrock upon which I have built Necropolis.
In the intervening years I have read and watched a decent sized scoop of the pop-culture vampire offerings the world has to offer. There is plenty I haven't bothered with.
A summary of the first Twilight novel from my girlfriend as she read it was more than enough for me to determine that I would rather suck a 12-gauge popsicle than read any of those novels myself. Ditto for watching the movies... may they fall into obscurity before my daughter becomes old enough for them.
True Blood was fun for a season, but I got bored with it pretty quickly as they started cramming more and more supernatural types into the tale.
Vampire Diaries I haven't got around to, and I suspect I wouldn't make it far, but I suppose I should at least give it a fair shake.
A friend of mine wrote for Blood Ties. I watched it while he was involved, and I always intended to keep watching, but when it was cancelled I couldn't have been bothered to get back to it.
Buffy and Angel. While I never liked the idea of vampires bursting into a cloud of dust, I was willing to let it go. The character work on those shows was so rich that once I got through the inferior first season of Buffy I was on board for the whole 12 seasons (between two series). I still read the comic book, and I really haven't been a comic book guy since Barry Allen died.
Of course I've read the Bram Stoker and some Anne Rice (who remains my favourite of the written options).
All of it has been in the service of learning what has been done before (and while I don't think I could ever read all that is out there, so I can still fall into that trap) so that I can either avoid doing it again, or at least find my way into a new approach.
To this point, the most significant change in my plans has come from Buffy. Both The Initiative and Buffy's Slayer Army (from the comic books) have influenced the structure of The Lazarus Group in ways that have already manifested if you have read up to this point and in ways yet to be seen.
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