Flipping The Obvious

When writing, and trying to keep my readers on their toes, and trying also not to take the easy road by making everything that seems like this is the way it should be. Well, sometimes we forget to do this. You have a villain. Maybe this villain has a famous name (Dracula), and you think, "Okay, I'm goign to use him, but I have to make this different."

At least that's what I was telling myself when I got several chapters into my 3rd book and still wasn't sure who my villain was.

But introducing Dracula--or Drakulya--the way that I do in this different world where he is a vampire. That was an obvious choice, of course. But right there and then I still didn't want him to be the cliche.

Flipping the obvious is not hard to do, really. You find something that everyone pretty much accepts as true and you do something totally opposite.

No, Drakulya will be pretty nasty. I wanted a true-to-life sort of character. The fact he is a vampire in this world was not a new idea, but trying to come up with another character who is not as obvious to be the real villain was the way to go.

I also needed Sabrina to have a situation, a mystery to solve, which is finding her cousin Lindee, who has suddenly disappeared. But when she goes to find her in a local park, Sabrina is sucked through a ley line into a new world. Eventually she realizes that LIndee had to have been sucked through to this world, and has no way to come back. Stuck where the only thing humans are used for, Lindee hasn't a chance against the vampires, and Sabrina is the only one who can return her to Earth. But first she has to find her.

Of course Sabrina has to have all sorts of things get in her way before she could solve them. Drakulya being only one such distraction. Drakulya's son, Jett--a psychic vampire--is another one.

Also, in that I'd given her a nifty new dagger was something that I felt She had to have along. Plus, The Dagger of Delphi almost has it's own character, because it acts on its own with no help from her, it will go after a vampire, demon, their minions and manifestations. Because it will kill/maime on its own, Sabrina had to devise some way of keeping it in it sheath, because in this new world, nearly everyone is a vampire. She has a lot of reasons for not wanting the dagger to off every vampire she meets because most of them aren't half bad.

The other problem I came up with was something dark and nasty I named Dreadfuls. They are black cloaked figures that simply stand in a room. When they remain in someones room very long, the person become sick and usually dies. No one knows how to get rid of these Dreadfuls. There is no way to kill them. And they sometimes seem to multiply. Then we discover that Sabrina's dagger goes and stabs one at the death bed of Drakulya's wife and poof! I sort of deflates and it's gone. Which is wildly wonderful. She's a big hero, but she doesn't want everyone having her come to their house to get rid of Dreadfuls. She needs to find Lindee.

I had other thoughts for a few more characters pop into my head last night. So, I'm going to work on these.

About Vlad Drakulya

In some letters he signed his name as Wldislaus Drakulya. Here on this etching of Dracula, his name is spelled Vladislavs--or better known as "Vlad the Impaler"

I read the history of Dracula and was able to take from it the idea of how he had a perverted personality, as he'd been imprisoned by the Turks, along with his brother, as a deal made by his father--it was to keep his father from doing anything against the Turks, but the boys had lived under the Turks, and witnessed torture. Is it any wonder that Vlad became such a monster?

Vlad died at age 45. Thus, he has to be this age in my book. My problem was how the head and body were reunited in order to make him a vampire. I devised a pretty good plot of how thieves were payed to steal the head, which was displayed on a spike in the Ottoman capital, and brought back to where his body was. Using some ideas gleaned from a Christopher Lee/Dracula movie, I decided that the thieves, instead of being payed in gold, were actually killed, their blood drained onto the body and severed, rotting head, and because he was a vampire before death, he was then returned to full animation.

However, I'm going to probably revise this slightly. My thoughts now are that possibly that Vlad had planned this according to a sorcerer's idea of bringing him back to life, and instead of being human, he becomes a vampire. I supposed this could work. It would make the complicated theory that he'd had himself made vampire before the battle less attractive to me, since he would have probably been out in the sun at the time of it.

And then the hows and whys he was suddenly sucked into Beyond the Black Veil. I'm not yet sure about this.

Ah, but this is why there is a first draft. You make notes. You decide on something, and then re-thinking it, you change it. First drafts are rather fun in that way. I love working things out, the plot, and the characters. They reason why they act in such a way. In my books, the vampire recalls his human life, his personality doesn't change all that much. Possibly even his very deep seeded reasons for being the way he is. If there had been a mission in life, such as I've placed on Vasyl's shoulders, then, as a vampire he has continued it, but had made sure, before being turned, he would be told of his life's mission to find the sibyl.

Drakulya would be no different. He was a warrior. He didn't put up with shit. But he was very abusive with his powers to determine on the spot whether to kill someone or not. It would take a very deranged person to hammer a nail through some one's head because they refused to remove their hat, or cut the baby out of a woman's belly. Those are just a sample of the horrors Drakulya did in his Court, when he was a prince. His up-bringing in a Turkish cell must have imprinted horrible things on a child's mind, thus he had to have become emotionally stony to such horrors, and then to turn into someone whose atrocities are legend.

May 27th 2011

This is my newest blog, it is going to be my journal about my books/writing in general. I may not post regularly in here, and probably this won't be a place where a lot of people will stop by, but just in case, welcome to those of you who do!