…because I am finally caught up with the two missing days of the week!  Anything else I do after this will hopefully put me on schedule to finshing at the end of June and beginning editing.  I do have someone lined up for editing, so hopefully this one will be better than my first novel out there.

I said I was going to talk about my vampire project (which I am not going to get to close to being started until 2018. I am slow, but complete), and I want to talk about the themes I want to work with.  This might have been covered in an earlier post, so I apologize for any repetition.

First off…while I agree with the notion that the vampire is a polite Victorian stand-in for lust, but why should it be only sexual lust?  Yes, I understand that sexual lust exactly what the vampire was representing, and the triumph of the main character is symbolic of the triumph of will and manners over our bestial nature.  With me so far?  Good.

What if we substituted the idea of bloodlust for sexual lust? I know that I described the scene that got me going for this idea earlier on, so I won’t bore you with those details.  The time period I’m picking is World War I, because it’s the perfect time for something like this.  It’s the end if one era and really the beginning of the modern era as far as warfare goes.  The grand nobility of war is wiped away by the mechanization of the tools of warfare.  We get frightfully accurate (for the time) artillery and machine guns mashed together with 19th century tactics.  This is something that a being accustomed to the hot spray of blood on his face should be horrified over.  The intoxicating feeling in watching the light flicker out from someone else’s eyes is now lost to the notion of ‘advancing barrage’, ‘acceptable casualties’ and ‘trench warfare’.  In the modern era, we would shrug our shoulders, even though we are going through that change here and now.  Drones have been put out into the field to not only spy on our enemies, but kill them from long distances.  While it is good in the notion that we are shedding less and less blood on the battlefield (don’t believe me? Take a look at causality statistics going back from their height at the Civil War to today), I can’t help but think Chesty Puller would look at a drone and make the same statement he made about seeing a flamethrower: “Where the hell do you put the bayonet?”

So, if this vampire story is going to be about the spirit of bloodlust giving way to the cold calculations of modern warfare, should our protagonist and handy audience stand in get to become a vampire, or just see the horror first hand?  I’m saying first hand witness, but I do want to have someone undergo the change.  One of the vampire tropes I am not going to openly subvert is the notion that the main character is going to have to put down someone he likes.  We’ve seen this in almost every iteration of Dracula and every other vampire film (not Twilight…for that is not about vampires. It’s about sparkly bitches that my vampire character would tear through to the sound of thunderous applause).  I’m thinking, however, that while in the movies, the character does this with the notion that “so-and-so is dead, I’m just putting him/her to rest”, I want it to mean something else entirely.  What that should be, I have no idea right now.

My ultimate goal with this book is to bring vampires back to being something feared, and not to be cuddled up to at night.  That’s a tall order to be sure, but that’s why I’m not planning on getting to the rough draft until 2018 at the soonest.  I really want this book to be the best one. The Marvelous and Malefic Doomsday Medicine Show is going to be my best fantasy work, and The Dreaded Day Job my best comedy — I want this vampire story to be my best horror story.

Double points if I get it finished before I die.

Well, I will work a little more on this and throw some more ideas at you.  Thank you for reading, feel free to avail yourself to the tip jar or buy one of the books to the right.  Have a good evening.
Sincerely,

Seething Apathy