Vampires With Foot Fetish?

I woke up with this idea. You know how it is, you have this idea and you just can't let it go? That was me this morning.

I have Alucard, who I'm basically making as only one of the nasty people Sabrina has to deal with on Beyond Black Veil. His job, basically, is as a blood broker at a place called Arabella's. It's like a tavern back in the late 1800's--say, Dodge City. Well, that's where Arabella is from, and the time she had come to B.B.V.

But back to Alucard. The vampire has approached Sabrina once while she was at Arabella's, and tried to take her in the back to sample her blood. Enter hero, Jett. So his whole idea of tasting Sabrina's blood is squashed for time being.

Fast forward to a later chapter. The ball. This is where Sabrina is pretty sure she is going to find her cousin. That was the whole purpose of her being on this other world. She isn't trapped there, but other people are. She'd met another person who doesn't belong there and knows if she, her cousin and this guy are all there, there has to be more. Her sense of duty calls.

Ah, but there's a whole lot of bad people willing to screw things up for her.

Alucard only being one of the bad guys.

I don't know where the idea came from but I thought, Huh, make Alucard have a foot fetish, and he's licking her feet when she wakes up from the drug he put in her drink. I figured the guy has to have his fetish. It gives him character. Plus, well, it's funny.

I've been working through the story that I have thus far. I had to take out a number of things, including a satyr--which no longer belonged in this--and a number of other things that drew away from the steam punk atmosphere. I think what I took out won't be missed at all.

The Wisdom of Waiting for The Answer to a Problem

The problem was--well I have this character in the third book. He is actually one of the main characters who dies at the end of the second book (nope, not gonna tell who), and somehow comes back into existence. I had to find a good explanation of what happened to him, how he would be able to come back.

I knew what he was going to do in the third book, and how I was going to play this out at the end. But the problem was to explaining what he becomes, more or less--that was my problem.

I woke early today, just before I needed to get up at 4 am, and I went searching for something, an article for some other thing I wanted to do, totally not related to my problem.

You ever do that? You loose an object, can't find it, you look all over, tear the place up looking for it, but can't find it, and weeks or months later, you're looking for some other thing else and BINGO! There that other thing is!

Well this was sort of like that. I wasn't looking for this particular thing, but I picked up pages I'd printed out - because it was so interesting - from some site I belong to, and it had a couple of magical/vampire terms and explanations of these terms, and I read one and went AH! That's IT!!!!

I found this explanation for an astral vampire. Astral vampires move through the astral plane and/or subtle reality and feeds off the energy of others. They can be nonphysical entities, or may be living, physical beings who have the ability to move and interact on a nonphysical levels of existence. According to Dion Fortune, "an astral vampire is created when a particularly powerful magical worker resists the second death and perpetuates this unnatural existence by preying upon the energies of others."

Perfect!!!

Sometimes being anal about saving stupid things, like articles from papers, and the various things I find interesting that I might have printed out, sometimes saves my butt. In this case it merely saved me from fretting over how to explain what this character eventually becomes, and also why he can't really be around a lot. Dead, or even un-dead.

So, now I've patched this into place. Things are finally coming together. Plus, I have the last week of this month off, and I'll use it to my advantage. I hope in several ways. More on that later!