377 days - Blog #80 revisitng vampires

I’ve been thinking about vampires again.  I suppose it isn’t totally out of context, what with Halloween being two weeks away.  Although, compared to years past, there is precious little in my life, my office, or my residence that serves as a reminder of the fact that the holiday when the wall thins between the living and the dead is approaching.

As an aside, Halloween is a turning point in my novel.  Well, maybe that isn’t a total aside.  Because I have been thinking about my novel.  Rather, in the context of what I have been thinking about in terms of vampires, I have reflected on how I wrote my character Oliver… who makes his first appearance on Halloween.

When I wrote this manuscript, I did a lot of thinking on the mythology and contemporary departures and reinventions.  I had to make a choice what vampire was to me.  I read a lot of different novels – from the classic gothic to the pop romantic fiction to the urban fantasy to the post-apocalyptic to the historic, unnecessarily academic mystery.  I also started examining my own life and how things I did fed off the lives of others.

That last bit helped me to choose parts of Lizzie’s life.  Originally, I had a plot where she was involved with theater.  I was very bitter about theater at the time – and I suppose it was a way for me to purge myself of the cold cruelty I encountered.  But in a relatively neutral observation, I did think how an actor feeds off the life of a character, stealing emotion and history to put the color into a performance.  I ended up cutting that out because it was superfluous and really more about that petty, childish purge than any relevance to the plot.  

The one I did keep was working in a museum.  I remember I went to one of the Beauport trainings that first spring as I was editing the second or third draft.  We were sitting on the lawn one particularly brilliant spring day talking about Sleeper and his sexuality… and I think at that point what we weren’t supposed to talk about on the tour, but found great delight discussing amongst ourselves.  I was am endlessly fascinated by that interior decorator from the New England Bloomsbury.  But I realized how I was essentially a parasite, feeding off of his life so I would have stories to tell on my tour, in my blog, and to store away for some future fiction (and it is future because there is really nothing about Sleeper in the book – well beyond the fact I gave one of Lizzie’s gay male friends his middle name, Davis.  Oh – and his boyfriend’s name is Andrew, as an homage to Sleeper’s neighbor with whom he was heartbreakingly besotted).  And even beyond Beauport, I have stored away the essence of people’s lives from other museums where I’ve worked, or through books I’ve read.  So I can talk about them and use their exciting adventures to supplement my own boring details when stuck in a conversation.

No, none of it is sucking blood.  But it is stealing the essence of and profiting a sort of life spirit from someone else’s… soul.

Maybe that isn’t a hugely bad thing.  I mean, in a very real way I gave Sleeper immortality so that people knew who he was… and maybe even felt his presence, or at least imagined it  as they walked through his house seventy years after he died.  But there is still something creepy about taking it… without asking for it.

And we do that with people all the time.  Gossip.  I often say being the subject of gossip was what made me coil away from it.  But when I really think about it, I realize that it is somewhat a consequence of this contemplation.  It is stealing that life from someone else’s story to manipulate it into my own.  

Then there are those days when you’re in a bad mood and you have to spread it like a disease, siphoning away someone else’s good mood.  They might have a good defense, maybe even the faith of a crucifix or something… but sometimes it is really possible to be that evil, soul-sucking person.  Sometimes with trying.  Sometimes without it.

I observed a sort of this behavior recently.  Someone I know who makes an unknowing habit of feeding off of other people’s energy in this way.  And that made me think of Oliver, my tragic villain.  The monster who is bad because he fails to take ownership of his cruelty and keeps repeating the same bad mistake over and over.  (Spoiler alert) He does ultimately get what’s coming to him… and in my mind, because I love him as one of my creative children… finds a certain peace.  But, then again, he didn’t really learn the lesson.  It just… simply ended.

I think that’s true of real life vampires, too.

I guess as far as vampires go, this is a pretty philosophical musing.  But if you’ve read the book, I suppose that would make sense.