- Joined
- Jun 28, 2007
- Messages
- 22,289
- Reaction score
- 1,491
Okay, I have this idea that I want to write, but I think I want to make it adequately different from any vampire books, because the main character is most certainly not a vampire.
The MC is a ghost named Gene, one who had died a while back in a haunted forest (bare with me). He got the choice to either die there and have nothing, or to become a spirit to help out the other spirits that lived there.
So, what he's been doing for the past few hundred years is walking thoroughout town, hypnotizing bad children that won't go to sleep during the night hours to follow him and then get eaten by the hungry spirits. He doesn't need them himself, but it's his job, and being dead/undead/whatever doesn't exactly make him a lucid thinker.
So, as he does this, the world modernizes, and it becomes harder and harder from him to do his job properly. In the modern times, he can hardly gather any kids at all. Eventually, he takes back one little girl, but because she's an android and completely inedible, the spirits that would have eaten her demand that he take her back.
So he does, and doing this makes him think clearly for the first time in hundreds of years, and he realizes that there are a lot of things wrong with the world, at least from his perspective. The streetlights burn, the kids of today have been told enough not to talk to strangers so there's nobody to capture, and most of all, the forest that the spirits live in is being encroached upon for land development. I'm thinking of going on with this last one and make him try to protect the woods from the land developers, maybe making him look like a radical treehugger or something...
The woman who's the 'mother' of the android is having zombie problems, on top of this, and figures that having another undead around would be useful.
How do I make this character, Gene, adequately different from a vampire?
The MC is a ghost named Gene, one who had died a while back in a haunted forest (bare with me). He got the choice to either die there and have nothing, or to become a spirit to help out the other spirits that lived there.
So, what he's been doing for the past few hundred years is walking thoroughout town, hypnotizing bad children that won't go to sleep during the night hours to follow him and then get eaten by the hungry spirits. He doesn't need them himself, but it's his job, and being dead/undead/whatever doesn't exactly make him a lucid thinker.
So, as he does this, the world modernizes, and it becomes harder and harder from him to do his job properly. In the modern times, he can hardly gather any kids at all. Eventually, he takes back one little girl, but because she's an android and completely inedible, the spirits that would have eaten her demand that he take her back.
So he does, and doing this makes him think clearly for the first time in hundreds of years, and he realizes that there are a lot of things wrong with the world, at least from his perspective. The streetlights burn, the kids of today have been told enough not to talk to strangers so there's nobody to capture, and most of all, the forest that the spirits live in is being encroached upon for land development. I'm thinking of going on with this last one and make him try to protect the woods from the land developers, maybe making him look like a radical treehugger or something...
The woman who's the 'mother' of the android is having zombie problems, on top of this, and figures that having another undead around would be useful.
How do I make this character, Gene, adequately different from a vampire?