Unconventional Vampire #1

The Soucouyant (soo-coo-yan) is a vampire creature from Trinidad that also shows up in folklore in other Caribbean countries. It it sometimes called the Loogaroo. This creature disgusted itself as an old woman during the day. At night, she peels off her skin and her feet turn backwards. She stores the skin in a tub of water to slip back into the next day. She flies through the night in a ball of fire and crawls through open windows and doors from the roof.

The soucouyant has a long straw-like tongue, much like a mosquito, to suck the blood out of sleeping victims’ feet. Afterwords, she takes the skin of the still alive victim. To ward of the soucouyant, spread brick dust, uncooked rice, or salt in doorways and windowsills. It is said that before the soucouyant can enter, she must count every single grain. To kill the soucouyant, you must find the skin discarded in the tub of water and pour salt into it. This will render the skin useless to the soucouyant and when the sunlight hits her skinless form, she bursts into flames and die.

Research

I’m a nerd. As a nerd, I love when I’m reading a book or watching a movie and they use information from folklore to explain their fantasy creatures. On the flip side, it irks me when hey get their information wrong. I feel like the writer and the editor didn’t bother doing a simple Google search.

I understand that all fantasy is made up and I may be a bit uptight about this but if someone wants to solidify their work in the real world, they should get their info wrong. I can’t count how many times werewolf movies claim silver bullets are an ancient way of killing theme.

Because of this, I tend to do a lot of research into the fantasy creatures that I use. Someone do me a favor and slap me, tell me to just write and not to worry. Tell me I can iron out the details later and that the most important thing is to get all the major issues out of the way before I sweat the small stuff. Oh wait, someone just did…

Welcome

I am an as-of-yet unpublished young writer in the process of completing my first novel. Evanescre is something I have been working on for the last thirteen years of my life. It has changed from a short story, to a screenplay, to a webcomic, to a novel. The characters have changed in design and name at least three times and the plot has undergone dozens of revisions. As I grow, so does my story.

As a short story, the main characters Ely, Vam, Gara, Phant, and Drake were supernatural creatures in an industrial goth band touring the country and fighting hunters. They were joined by side characters Uni, Pegasus, Spree, William, Anna, and Faye on their adventure to stay alive long enough to get to the next gig. It was called The Fr34ks way back in the late 90s when netspeak was still edgy and hip. It was light-hearted and my friends loved it but that was SO seventh grade!

The screenplay stage found our heroes as a ragtag merc group in a slightly futuristic setting. The whole sci-fi/fantasy thing worked for a while but I wanted to soften the image a bit. The Evanescre webcomic was a sort of a Being Human kind of deal with these different creatures living in a shitty apartment building in LA. It was full of comedic culture clash situations and I named it Strictly Supernatural at that point.

Now the novel version started off as an urban fantasy, transformed into high fantasy (thanks to a Lord of the Rings phase in high school), then back to urban fantasy. I’ve flip flopped in the past but now it’s high time for me to sit down and just write to this story. Evanescre has been with me little more than half my life and it’s about time I let it fully manifest.