Today in class we learned about fanfiction which was not something I was familiar with. Fanfiction is when fans of certain TV shows, books, movies write their own fiction versions. Today in class's we got to write our own ending to Dracula which was pretty interesting. We made ours pretty suspenseful with Mina running away with Dracula because his power had fully taken over her. It was a lot of fun to write our own version and make it however we wanted to.
here is a link to some fanfiction of twilight!
http://www.fanfiction.net/book/Twilight/

We had our Vampire Symposium last week! It was fun to do something different with our projects. I really enjoyed the trivia and we got candy. I also enjoyed the projects because I learned a lot of interesting facts about vampires and the history of them. All the the history has influenced how much people are so interested in vampires today. It has even got to the point where people are starting their own vampire community. It was also neat to see how vampires have turned from such ugly creatures to desired ones. I'm glad we did the third project like that, it was a good idea.

We are going to give our presentations this week. We have been discussing different ways to improve  presentations and being able to present. We want to keep the audiences entertained and not bored. We need to make sure that our information is organized and correct. We are going to practice presenting to also improve the organization of the presentation. This will make everything feel more prepared and easier for us to present. Here is an article on how to improve your presentation skills!
http://www.inc.com/guides/how-to-improve-your-presentation-skills.html

We have started our third project and we are going to do a presentation instead of a paper. I really like this idea because it something different than just a regular comp paper and gives us an opportunity to have the experience of doing presentations. Me and my group are doing Religion,Folklore, and Voodoo influence on vampire craze. We came up with the idea of doing a vampire time line and how the histories of vampires have influenced their popularity today. One main interest we have are the people who actually consider themselves real vampires and how they use the history to influence the way they. Here is a short video of some people who follow this belief.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=knKCKvJ-icE

We have started reading Carmilla chapters 1-4. I like this book so far. I can tell that it relates to the other pieces of literature we have been reading. It hasn't said it straight forward yet but I'm guessing the girl Carmilla is a Vampire. It talks about how she is very beautiful and how she draws Laura in. These are similar characteristics that the vampires in the twilight series and Lord Ruthven. All of them are extremely attractive and draw people in with their desirable characteristics. This book so far reminds me of a mix between Northanger Abbey and the Twilight series. I'm excited to keep reading!!

I'm doing my next paper on the social problem of women being to dependent on men. I'm using the book Northanger Abbey and the Twilight series to show this issue. I'm going to compare the role of the two main actresses Bella and Catherine. One of the parts I am going to use for Bella is when Edward leaves her in New Moon. I am using because of how much she lets it affect her life. She becomes very depressed and shuts everyone out.This is very unhealthy for women to do and is a problem. Here is a clip of Bella from new moon to show how depressed she was.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=fvwp&v=GNQASF3STWM&NR=1 

Today in class we went over the poem the Giaour. When I first started to read the poem I was pretty confused about what was actually going on. However, today when we went over it together step by step it was a lot easier to understand. Another thing that helped was defining some of the words that we were not sure of the meaning. The thing with understanding poems is that it helps to break it down line by line to understand.the Giaour was a little hard to understand because it jumped from one thing to another. Other than that it is a good story so far. Here is a link that gives advice on interpreting poems!!!
http://www.webster.edu/~armbruka/engl1030/handouts/interpretpoem.htm