Here’s a new vampire for you. An Iraq war veteran now vampire private detective investigates an outbreak of nymphomania at a nuclear weapons plant. And it got published! Plus the sequel comes out next year.

The Nymphos of Rocky Flats (March 06) X-Rated Bloodsuckers (March 07) Rayo HarperCollins

Because 7 8 9.

Thank you, thank you, I’m here all week.

Seems to me, if your average vampire could live through a day (oops, not a day; a night) without killing himself it would be a miracle.

By the way, I’ve met two people who were convinced they were vampires. I actually believe them, they were fairly useless as human beings.

Of course, making something like vampires “more” realistic is kind of stupid, right? I mean, if you’re going to write about vampires, hell, make them VAMPIRES. Nothing you do is going to make them more realistic…right? Unless you take away the whole “drinking blood, living forever, sunlight kills them” thing. If you did that, they’d be accountants. Oooh, vampire accountants…

They’re the undead, the immortal … yatta yatta yatta. It doesn’t conjure much from the audience in the way of empathy and relating to the struggles of the vamp. We need a vamp we can get behind – the people’s vamp. Someone we can relate with and root on to victory.

So first we need to strip the immortal status. He too must die, but for obvious reasons, he should live longer than us. Let’s say a nice healthy life of 300 years. A vamp mid-life crises is good material, so why not give him the age of 150 years?

Now we assume that he has to kill people, but other movies have proven that you can subsist on rats and rabbits and the like, so it can be done.

A vegetarian vamp. Sure, it’s tough to build at this point – but let’s think V-8 here: he wakes in the morning to prepare a blender full of vegetables and fish blood. He’s exercising – watching his figure – trying to take good care of himself.

Then he’s off to his office job selling insurance. He genuinely cares about the mortals, they live far to short a life not to plan for the future. And his boss loves the guy – he does complex mathematical calculations to determine insurance risks – but he’s a good guy and fudges the numbers a bit to keep the rates low for the disenfranchised.

He needs an adversary. Let’s make him a young stud – something like 96 years old – a Nazi officer who was bitten by a vamp posing as a female French spy during the blitzkrieg of 42. Aftwards he’s recruited into the order of evil vamps – a terrorist cell that developed shortly after the war.

The theme? Average every day Joe vamp is called into action to defeat the world domination plans of the evil Nazi vampires.

But how does he defeat the beefy Nazi vamps?

I don’t know but it has something to do with invisible numbers:-)