When I first envisioned THE FOURTH CHANNEL, the original incarnation had a vampire element to it. I tossed and turned over this aspect for a long time because the vampire theme is overdone. I must confess I’m getting a little tired of vampires, too. On the other hand, THE FOURTH CHANNEL isn’t about vampires — it’s about necromancers and there happen to be vampires in the story. So that should be okay, right? I decided it was, but continued to be bothered about it nearly every day.
That should have told me something, but I guess I wasn’t listening to my intuition.
This rewrite of chapter 17 has forced me to revisit the issue in a major way. To vampire or not to vampire? That is the question.
After a bit of soul searching and wikipedia-ing, I had to be honest with myself: I cannot write vampires to be more interesting than what has already been done by other authors.
Does that make sense? There are many other authors who make the vampire element interesting but I’m just not one of them and, if I can’t make it new and exciting to the reader, then it doesn’t belong. End of story.
So what did I do with this group? I made up something that works a lot better.