If I were still teaching magazine writing, I would be sending students to this blog (which I found on Rod Dreher’s blog).

What a great feature-writing idea, albeit in blog form. (Which all goes to show how publishing is changing, &c. &c., and I am glad not to have to be the one to explain it all.)

In essence, high-school senior Jamie Kelles is attempting to live her life according to the dictates of Seventeen magazine—and blogging about it at The Seventeen Magazine Project.

At one point she realizes that a majority of the mag’s “hot guys of summer” are “associated with a vampire franchise.”

Must be super weird for devoted Seventeen readers when they finally follows all the tips, achieve the perfect tan and “healthy” sun-kissed glow, and then realizes that the ultimate Hot Guy of Summer is just a sexed-up, long-haired version a of pale, nocturnal Xbox gamer .

And then there is more about the senior prom, &c. &c.

If you want more on the literary history of vampires, Michael Sims assesses it  in The Chronicle of Higher Education:

So, wondering how I would find a new angle on vampire stories, I said yes. Anthologizing is a dusty sport, half antique hunting and half literary gossipfest, and I love it. I went home and prowled my shelves and realized how many of the Victorian-era stories I had already read. Why, here’s that pasty-faced bastard Lord Ruthven, by Byron’s doctor and hanger-on, John Polidori, and so obviously based upon Byron himself. Here is Théophile Gautier’s crazy priest, in love with a vampire courtesan and wrestling with his naughty soul. And there were many stories I hadn’t read before—gay vampires, child vampires, even an invisible vampire.