Inception

The original idea for my protagonist.  Pleased at how much of it stands up:

How was I transformed?  I do not remember.  I remember before: the house, my parents, the suitors, and Thoby.  And I remember after: hiding, and the slow realization that the shackles and rules of the old life no longer applied.  And Thoby.  But the in-between time I do not remember.  And Thoby will not tell.

You want to know what kind of vampire I am, how I feel about how I feed.  You are fascinated with how I choose my prey, with the remorse I may or may not feel, so I will tell you.  I feel no more nor less remorse than you do.  Certainly I put more thought into my meals than you, and I suspect that every meal I make (though, sadly, far fewer than you) improves the quality of the earth, for you merely denude the earth of resources sought or created for your own use, whereas I relieve the earth of a consumer, and survive on a resource that renews and regenerates all on its own without any husbandry from me.

But I should not lecture; it took me a hundred years to come to this realization, with agony and soul-searching (supposing I still have one), and too many moments of seeing the mirror that Thoby always insists on holding before me.  And before that, I had to stop using instinct and self-interest and blank opportunity to satisfy my desires.  And before that I had to be released from a way of life that prevented me from considering – indeed, which censored anyone who moved beyond our choreographed round of rise, dress, call, dress, dine, tea, ball.

I had a few shocks along the way.

So no, I am not the chupacabra-like creature feeding on animals and yearning for goodness that you might have encountered elsewhere.

I am not tormented by self-loathing into starvation, as one interviewee recounted, nor am I so drunk on my powers that I flaunt them to all whose attention I can claim.

Nor am I a mindless killing machine with no bounds or moral consideration, as the oldest stories of my kind portray.

No, I am none of these.  I am just a young girl of moderate intelligence liberated from the society into which I was born, and existing in a continuum far longer than a humans’s, with my senses heightened and my sensibilities enlightened by my companion and former neighbor, the astounding Thoby Stephen.  Like all of you, sometimes I do good, sometimes evil.  I make mistakes.  I exist in a society with its own rules and I don’t always know what to do with my own dissent.  I am just like you.  Except that I drink human blood to survive.  And for that, I do not apologize.