……and overall, it’s a fun story to write. There’s ghosts, a woman who can talk to them and she works in cemeteries and there’s a mystery to solve and, of course, vampires. Not the sexy, tortured hero kind of vampire – I don’t find the Undead particularly sexy or heroic. As far as I’m concerned, they’re animated corpses, just one step above being a zombie while retaining most of their former personalities. The vampires in my story are not nice, not heroic and certainly not sexy. They’re cold, predatory and, in some cases, insane. Major life to Undead changes can do that to a person.

The Narrator/Main Character of the story is fully aware of that danger – she wears a silver crucifix that was instrumental in her first encounter with a vampire. Her favorite type of stake is one made from ash. She sees their predatory nature and has little faith in the truthfulness of their words until her own research or outside evidence corroborates them. Vampires are of the past, living beyond their historical time period. Interestingly, they are also leading her to uncover the secrets of her own personal history.

So, while I’m not a fan of vampires as the sexy, tortured hero, they do have a place in the telling of a story. They are, like ghosts, a metaphor – unseen, unheard voices (ghosts) and the walking, talking voices of the past (vampires) – and that’s just one interpretation on those two types of supernatural characters. There are as many different points of view on this as there are writers, and that’s pretty exciting. I’m well aware that there are readers and writers who love vampires as the hero and that’s all good – I’m just not one of them*.

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*(There are, however, some vampire characters that I do like, because of their complexity and interesting development – Angel, Spike, Dracula, Drusilla. Please note that Joss Whedon created three of them.)

 

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