Nosfera2: The Stakening
What is it with everybody and their dag-blamed sympathetic vampires? Specifically, the tired old faux-Byronic vampire boyfriends infesting YA novels? Why do we have to take supernatural creatures who traded their humanity for power and immortality and give them back human wants and motivations? Can't they just rape prey on humans and have crazy supernatural adventures behind all our backs? Is that so hard?
Then I started thinking about a vampire story I'd want to read/write (like all my other great ideas, including the AU where John Winchester dies instead of Mary, this will ultimately go nowhere).
I wanted to go back to vampirism's roots (of course, I'd have to do research instead of relying on stuff I've picked up secondhand), with the sunlight and garlic causing lesions (probably based on a real but rare genetic disorder that originated in Eastern Europe), burying them facedown at a crossroads with their limbs chopped off, and making them butt-ugly (mostly as a Take That to vampire romances, but hey, it's tradition, too!).
I was going to leave Christianity out of it entirety, but I wanted a bookish girl as the protagonist, and as it takes place between the fall of Rome and, say, whenever the educated middle class emerged (the Renaissance? The 1700s?) the only place for her to learn to read would be a monastery or convent. And if there's going to be Christianity, I'm not going to do it halfway. Rosaries! Litanies! (Anything with a large group of people chanting something magical or holy just gives me goosebumps. Like the Gregorian chanting at KU basketball games.) Exposition of the Holy Eucharist in a Blessed-Mother-loving monstrance!!
*ahem*
Sorry.
Catholicism is just so full of shiny things that I sometimes get carried away.
Also, that pun was terrible.
I'm going to try to write a story about Catholics who use methods peculiar to their faith to fight vampires, and not a Catholic Story about How Awesome Catholicism Is and how it's the One True Path to Eternal Salvation even though it is . I love the Narnia books as much as anybody, but from the end of Voyage of the Dawn Treader on, they got progressively in-your-face. (Aslan: Btw I'm liek totes also Jesus! Also, the guy Muslims think is God is actually the Devil, but they can still get into Heaven anyway!)
More on the main character later.
Then I started thinking about a vampire story I'd want to read/write (like all my other great ideas, including the AU where John Winchester dies instead of Mary, this will ultimately go nowhere).
I wanted to go back to vampirism's roots (of course, I'd have to do research instead of relying on stuff I've picked up secondhand), with the sunlight and garlic causing lesions (probably based on a real but rare genetic disorder that originated in Eastern Europe), burying them facedown at a crossroads with their limbs chopped off, and making them butt-ugly (mostly as a Take That to vampire romances, but hey, it's tradition, too!).
I was going to leave Christianity out of it entirety, but I wanted a bookish girl as the protagonist, and as it takes place between the fall of Rome and, say, whenever the educated middle class emerged (the Renaissance? The 1700s?) the only place for her to learn to read would be a monastery or convent. And if there's going to be Christianity, I'm not going to do it halfway. Rosaries! Litanies! (Anything with a large group of people chanting something magical or holy just gives me goosebumps. Like the Gregorian chanting at KU basketball games.) Exposition of the Holy Eucharist in a Blessed-Mother-loving monstrance!!
*ahem*
Sorry.
Catholicism is just so full of shiny things that I sometimes get carried away.
Also, that pun was terrible.
I'm going to try to write a story about Catholics who use methods peculiar to their faith to fight vampires, and not a Catholic Story about How Awesome Catholicism Is and how it's the One True Path to Eternal Salvation even though it is . I love the Narnia books as much as anybody, but from the end of Voyage of the Dawn Treader on, they got progressively in-your-face. (Aslan: Btw I'm liek totes also Jesus! Also, the guy Muslims think is God is actually the Devil, but they can still get into Heaven anyway!)
More on the main character later.