Make the universe a better place! Join Daily Science Fiction for only $15 / year.

Enter any portion of the author name or story title:

[ go to advanced search ]

SUBSCRIBE TO DSF

your email will be kept private

Get a copy of Not Just Rockets and Robots: Daily Science Fiction Year One. 260 adventures into new worlds, fantastical and science fictional. Rocket Dragons Ignite: the anthology for year two, is also available!

DSF stories are available in monthly digests for Kindle!

Publish your stories or art on Daily Science Fiction:

Check story status

Everything we've published! Click on a topic to read...

Science Fiction

Aliens (183 stories)

Biotech (109)

Clones (27)

Disaster (92)

Future Societies (149)

Nanotech (31)

Other Worlds (103)

Robots & Computers (149)

Space Travel (84)

Superhero (48)

Time Travel (88)

Virtual Reality (79)

Science Fiction (153)

Fantasy

Fairy Tales (151)

Parapsychology (26)

High Fantasy (42)

Medieval (35)

Magic & Wizardry (86)

Monsters (109)

Other Worlds (17)

Religious (81)

Modern Fantasy (104)

Fantasy (96)

Hither & Yon

Slipstream (99)

Magic Realism (125)

Alternate History (38)

Horror (1)

Humor (38)

SF/Fantasy (79)

The Alphabet Quartet (26)

The Numbers Quartet (12)

Twisted Fairy Tales (14)

Postmark Andromeda (9)

The Future of Future Planning (6)

Dear Jezzy (12)

Tasting Menu (5)

Tales of the Rose Knights (24)

Careers for Magical Creatures (10)

Captain Percina Saunders (10)

Clickbait for Paranormals (7)

Alien Salvage (5)

From Diaspora to New Jupiter (6)

Childhood at Crossroad Station (6)

Cara Watt, P.I. (12)

Maradia's Robot (6)

The League of Magical Felines (5)

Date Order

Stories by Month

Friday Features

Not just rockets & robots...

"Science Fiction" means—to us—everything found in the science fiction section of a bookstore, or at a science fiction convention, or amongst the winners of the Hugo awards given by the World Science Fiction Society. This includes the genres of science fiction (or sci-fi), fantasy, slipstream, alternative history, and even stories with lighter speculative elements. We hope you enjoy the broad range that SF has to offer.

comment on today's story, or read what others say:

13 Ways to Detect Vampires Online

by Luc Reid

author bio

Luc Reid () is a Writers of the Future winner, the founder of Codex Writers' Group, a third degree black belt, an organic gardener, a Zen Buddhist, and an energetic advocate for carbon footprint reduction (www.faceclimatechange.com, www.sustainablewilliston.org). His prior publications include stories like "When a Bunch of People, Including Raymond, Got Superpowers" (Daily Science Fiction) and "Ways to Enjoy Nutrient Blend 14" (Nature) as well as plays, articles, the flash fiction collection Bam! 172 Hellaciously Quick Stories (lucreid.com/bam) and the non-fiction book Talk the Talk: The Slang of 67 Subcultures (Writers Digest Books, 2006; expanded and revised edition 2014 - lucreid.com/ttt). Luc lives near Burlington, Vermont with his wife, kids, and compulsively disobedient garden.

[close author bio]

* They have user names like Vlad1428 and IWontKillYouAndDrinkYourBloodNoSeriously

* Their Netflix binge-watching always stops at around 5 AM

* Amazon wish list disproportionately comprised of coffins

* Google history includes searches like "dental hygiene canines"

* Purchase unusually large amounts of lip balm

* Have bookmarked multiple Lifehacker articles on getting bloodstains out

* Facebook friends mysteriously stop logging in after a while

* Repeated visits to neck porn sites

* Spotify playlist includes Mozart's Requiem Mass, various Death Rock standards, and "O Fortuna" from the Carmina Burana

* Repeatedly unavailable to Skype during work hours

* Their files don't show up on mirror sites

* Never like your cute kitten pictures, but always have a nice comment when you post a photo with your Aunt Vicky who has the problem with over-prominent neck veins

* Lots of upvotes in Reddit hematology threads

The End

This story was first published on Thursday, July 20th, 2017

show author story comments

I admit this piece is fluff. My fond hope is that you find it to be entertaining fluff. Either way, it's fluff frolicking on the surface of a much more substantial issue, which is that increasingly, a lot of what we do happens online, in forms that can be saved, viewed, and analyzed. If there really were vampires among us, I think they would be having an increasingly hard time keeping a low profile, as uncountable multitudes of tiny facts gradually coalesce into neon signs pointing out our deepest secrets. Then again, we live in a world where people can watch horrors march past and terrible things be done and put them all in a fake context that makes them seem acceptable. Let's hope we eventually lose our stomach for that particular way of dealing with the ever-rising tide of information in our world.

- Luc Reid

[close author story comments]

BECOME A MEMBER!

We hope you're enjoying 13 Ways to Detect Vampires Online by Luc Reid.

Please support Daily Science Fiction by becoming a member.

Daily Science Fiction does not have a paywall, but we do have expenses—more than 95% of which are direct payments to authors for their stories. With your $15 membership, less than 6 cents per story, we can continue to provide genre fiction every weekday by email and on the website to thousands of readers for many years to come. Tell me more!

Support Daily Science Fiction

RATE THIS STORY

Please click to rate this story from 1 (ho-hum) to 7 (excellent!):

show this story's ratings

Please don't read too much into these ratings. For many reasons, a superior story may not get a superior score.

3.7 Rocket Dragons Average

SHARE THIS STORY

JOIN MAILING LIST

Please join our mailing list and receive free daily sci-fi (your email address will be kept 100% private):

SUBSCRIBE TO DSF