LJ Smith, author of the young adult novel best known for the “The Vampire Diaries” series, has become a hit TV drama. Then she regained the character by writing fanfiction after being fired and replaced by a ghostwriter, and died on March 8th in Walnut Creek, California. She was 66 years old.
Her partner, Julie Diborah and her sister, Judy Clifford, said Smith passed away in the hospital after enduring the cascade effects of a rare autoimmune disease for a decade. She lived near Danville, California.
The 2014 Wall Street Journal writes about the rebirth of Smith's clever career, calling it “one of the strangest comebacks in literary history.”
Smith has produced over 20 published books. Readers have purchased millions of copies of her work, starting with the fantasy novel The Night of the Solstice. The labels are given to readers ages 8 to 12, and Smith started in high school.
The book, published in 1987, sold only about 5,000 copies, but was intrigued by the editors of Alloy Entertainment, the packaging and production company for the book acquired by Warner Bros. Such companies come up with book ideas, find authors for them, and sell them to publishers.
At least in the world of publishing and entertainment, vampires thrived in the sun. An Rice's Gothic “Interview with the Vampire” (1976) inspired a film starring Tom Cruise and Brad Pitt, and later starred in a short-lived television series.
Alloy Entertainment searched for the young adult version of Supernatural Romance and signed Smith to write “The Vampire Diaries.” This is a series centered around a love triangle that includes Elena Gilbert, a popular high school student and a vampire brother, Stephen and Damon Salvatore.
The first three books written for Harpercollins were published in 1991, with a fourth released in 1992. However, the first agent was her typist who never represented a client, and she told the Wall Street Journal that she wrote a trilogy for a thousand dollars advance without realizing she would work for employment.
She continued to write other young adult series until the late 1990s, when her career entered a tumultuous period. For almost a decade, she went dormant and developed the writer's block while caring for family trauma. Her brother-in-law developed a stage 4 melanoma (he recovered), and her mother died of lung cancer.
“I was immersed in this, but I was completely uninspired,” Smith said on her website in a Q&A with readers. “There was no story in my mind.”
However, during her fallow period, the vampire book grew in popularity, unraveling the success of Steveney Meyer's “Twilight” series. By 2007, sales of “Vampire Diary” had increased, and Smith had signed a deal to continue the series by writing a new trilogy of Alloy Entertainment.
In 2009, “The Vampire Diary” fitted into a dramatic television series that lasted eight seasons on the CW Network. Popular among younger audiences, the show used a variety of musical genres to explore topics such as romance and morality, and helped to popularize the fashion look of grunge and leather jackets.
By 2014, the Vampire Diaries book series sold over 5 million copies, but Smith had not written a certified version. In 2011, Alloy Entertainment told its president and founder Leslie Morgenstein that it was a creative difference to the Wall Street Journal.
The author, who uses the pen name Aubrey Clark, was brought in to complete the final six books in the series. In an interview, Smith said he believed that Alloy and HarperCollins wanted a shorter book that was more closely related to the television series. They continued to surprise Ms. Smith's name by being the creator of the series, and to the cover of the book.
She told Salt Lake Magazine in 2012 that her dismissal caused her to “amputize” and ultimately helped her to destroy her creation, “limbs by limbs.”
Morgenstein did not respond to a request for comment.
Eventually, Smith found an outlet to reclaim her character – book lovers found fanfiction they had written and posted for a long time, spooling out their own amateur versions of stories and characters, despite not owning intellectual property and often not strictly legal.
In 2013, Amazon created Kindle Worlds. KindleWorlds is an online service that grants permission to fanfiction authors to write about certain licensed properties, including Alloy's “Vampire Diaries” series, and grants permission to fanfiction writers to make money for their ventures.
In 2014, Smith published novels and novels in the unofficial continuation of “The Vampire's Diary,” becoming a rare and well-known author who produced fan fiction as a way to retrieve lost characters and story arcs. (Kindle Worlds was cancelled in 2018).
Her partner, Diborah, a tax lawyer in San Francisco, said she turned to fanfiction after being left “very hurtful and in,” when Smith was replaced by a ghostwriter.
“When you're a writer, you feel like your characters and your world, they belong to you,” Diborah said in an interview. “You gave birth to them. They're like your child. I do that in a custody fight.”
Lisa Jane Smith was born on September 4th, 1958 in Fort Lauderdale, Florida. Her family soon moved to Southern California. She grew up in a villa park. There, I was interested in magic, fantasy and supernatural flowers in the adjacent orange groves.
Her father, Glenn C. Smith, was the star end of the Clemson University football team. He became an engineer and was a partner in the company that made metal connector plates for floor and roof trusses. He passed away in 2017. His mother, Kathryn (Check) Smith, who passed away in 2007, was a flight attendant and teacher for Pan American Airways before raising Lisa and her sister Judy.
In addition to her younger sisters, Clifford and Diborah, Smith was survived by Nie, Ne, and Grand Ne.
Smith often said that when teachers “admired the horrifying poems I wrote,” they were inspired to become writers as kindergarten or first grade children.
Her imagination was excited about a lot, her sister said, including a tall story in which their father was a Martian trapped on Earth, placing a tiger on the trunk of his car. Once, while babysitting in a house with a strangely shaped mirror, Smith got the idea that they might be a portal to a parallel world.
When her sister was teased in middle school, Smith comforted her with a humorous tale about how her antagonists get their deadlines, showing a sense of justice that is characteristic of her writing about strong female characters.
Smith received his bachelor's degree in experimental psychology from the University of California, Santa Barbara in 1982, and became a full-time writer after teaching kindergarten and special education for several years. She passed LJ Smith in writing, sounding more author-like, honoring two of her favourite novelists, CS Lewis and JRR Tolkien.
In addition to “The Vampire Diaries,” Smith has written three other popular series for young adults, “Night World,” “Dark Vision,” and “Secret Circle.”
When he went in and out of hospitals over the past decade, Smith, a rarely impossible writer, had a laptop with her. Her agent, John Silversack, said before she passed away, Smith completed two books to close out the “Night World” series and the adult novel “Laraby,” about the apocalyptic world.
“She was quite ill, but despite the difficulties and pain, she was deeply devoted to continuing to write,” Silversack said. “She wanted to do it right, but it's completely perfect.”
