Walking in a Vampire
Hunter’s Shoes
By
Krystle Jones
I didn’t know my MC, Sloane, was going to be a vampire
hunter when I came up with the idea for The
Red Sector Chronicles. I just saw a dark-haired girl, standing in a
cityscape painted in shades of red. (Random aside: I think red moons look so
cool. Naturally, I had to find an excuse to have one in my novel. =)
A lot of my character ideas start like this, as
pictures in my head, and then I flesh them out on paper during my brainstorming
process. At first, I was just going to have Sloane be a vampire, because I
thought, “Writing as a vampire would be fun!” Then I got to playing the “what
if…?” game and thought, “What if Sloane was a vampire hunter who became a
vampire, and vampires are what she hates more than anything on this earth?”
That made
for a much more compelling character and plotline, so I rolled with it.
Thus, Sloane the Vampire Hunter was born.
I wanted her to be tough. I wanted her to be sassy.
Most of all, I wanted her to kick a lot of ass. But kicking said ass was a lot
harder to write about than I thought it would be!
In my original draft of the first book in my trilogy, The Scarlet Dagger, I knew she would have
to “prove herself” to the audience if she was going to be perceived as a femme
fatale. So I had her run-up on a vampire straight-away – and she got her butt
kicked. My hubby, when I shoved the manuscript in his face he lovingly
agreed to see my baby book, I said, “So, she’s pretty cool, huh?”
“Not really.”
Now, my husband isn’t known for beating around the
bush. He just says what he means.
“What?” I asked. “Why not?”
“She gets beat-up right away,” he said, pointing to
the manuscript. “She needs to kill this thing. Then I’d be impressed.”
“Huh.”
“Oh, and make her more like Blade, ‘cuz that’d be
cool.”
(No kidding on that last part.)
I did make
her more like Blade, in the sense of her being a lot tougher to tango with. And
that was part of the challenge. She couldn’t be so awesomely badass that no one
could beat her, because that gets old. Plus, it’s unbelievable. She needed to
have some kryptonite. And she gets that, in the form of a hot vampire, some
acidic metal called Scarlet Steel, and a whole slew of other problems.
One of my favorite parts of writing from Sloane’s
perspective were all the fighting scenes. I didn’t want to drag them out, but I
wanted readers to feel like they were there with her, so I put as many details
as I could in them instead of saying, “She punched him. He punched her. Sloane
goes flying through a cement wall.” I took karate lessons for many years when I
was a kid, and it was fun reliving those years through Sloane, because all of a
sudden, I had someplace to use my knowledge. (Never had to get in a fight yet,
thankfully!)
When she becomes a vampire, I also had to think about
how that affected her psychologically, since she despised vampires. I mean,
they did ruin the world. Sloane was
very complex and fun to write about while she was in the “figuring-things-out”
stage of being a vampire. She sort of wants to like vampires, but she knows
she’s supposed to hate them – and she really does – so she’s kind of stuck.
I’d like to keep writing about tough chicks. Not that
I have anything against softer heroines (the Bella’s of the literary world),
but writing about a girl who can protect herself is a lot of fun.
