On June 20, 2022, I published The Ballad of Skyer Dannon - Episode 3 - Hunger to Wattpad.

Tip-top!
Ranked #2 this week under #Halflings on Wattpad!
Totally obscure, and possibly irrelevant, but we gotta start somewhere.

This episode is about Skyer’s transformation into being a vampire.

When we read vampire-fic today, I think we gloss over the inhumanity of the experience. It’s like, in most modern interpretations of being turned, there’s a bite, maybe a little bit of sleep, and boom! You’re a vampire. You wake up and you’ve all of the same cognitive faculties, your mind and sanity are still intact, your emotional state is still as it was except maybe you’re a little more angsty … I mean, throw in some glitter and you’re got a Young Adult (YA) story.

I think the transformation to something other - like a vampire - must be truly horrifying, like stripping away rational consciousness and changing into an animal, one that’s perpetually hungry with killer instincts, can’t be easy. The physiological changes would be, of course, madness, but the mental transformation would probably be something the mind would retreat from, like what we see with people who encounter extreme trauma.

That’s kind of where I’ve headed with Skyer. Throughout the period he spends in the Wilds and before he goes to Amberglen, he’s in this transformative, traumatic state where mind has switched off. Readers will find his consciousness slowly returning in pieces as we work through episodes 4 - 7, but I want to believe that Skyer won’t be fully-realized as a new “person” for maybe a decade after his transformation. Hey, he’s immortal: I can take all the time I want, right?

Another thing. In my vampire story, I wanted to set the stage that Skyer consumed life in the form of living blood, that is, blood that is coursing through the veins of a living creature. So in current lit, authors tend to want to deal with what happens to a vampire if they consume something other than blood? What They Do in The Shadows makes a big deal out of this, for example, when the Baron consumes pizza and his body is thrown into the sky due to projectile vomiting and so on. I wanted to skip all of that. Vampires are undead. They don’t have a working digestive track, as their organs are shut down, so there isn’t any vomit. How does the blood get absorbed into Skyer’s body, as there’s no working stomach? Who knows?! What happens to the matter that isn’t absorbed? Who cares? I just didn’t want to deal with it. So in this story, we see Skyer eat crawdads, fish, and wood. I didn’t write about him puking it all up because it’s just so droll and, really, unnecessary. I think the reader accepts that Skyer’s a vampire and feeds on blood, that’s it, and that’s all I need to explain.

But I don’t know - what do you think? Do you think I should be explaining how that works? Let me know in the poll below.

And if you follow my Aevalorn Tales stories on Amazon Vella, look! I got a crowney-thing today, a top-faved story, so that’s kind of cool. Hopefully more people will see it…

Thanks again for reading. If you like what I do, please sign-up for my mailing list for follow me on Twitter at @blackanvilbooks.

R