Daniel Rambin, vampire sidekick

Today I welcome Sonya Clark to Toad's Corner. She's blogging about one of her characters in the ass-kicking urban fantasy novel, Mojo Queen. Welcome Sonya, and thank you for taking some time out to chat with us.

Early on in the writing of Mojo Queen I knew main character Roxie Mathis needed a best friend. In a moment of mad whimsy a thought occurred to me: vampire sidekick. Gasp! you say, and what kind of sacrilege is this?! Who makes a vampire the sidekick instead of the hero?

Someone fed up with all the brooding, romantic, jailbait-obsessed, oh-so-serious vamps filling up paranormal fiction, that’s who.

Thus was born Daniel Rambin. Although he does hit a few of the standard vamp qualifiers – he’s hot, he’s sexy, he’s dead – he’s not quite a typical vampire either.

The sensibility and world I was creating with Mojo Queen didn’t call for vampire politics or any of the usual types of bloodsucking plots, especially since Daniel is a sidekick. He enjoys tagging along with Roxie on her paranormal investigations, and occasionally he likes to blog about the jobs. He is a beverage connoisseur as might be expected but he’s also a foodie, even though he can’t eat. He likes to take Roxie out to eat and he’s inordinately fond of the Food Network.

Almost right away I realized I had an issue that needed to be dealt with: I had to get rid of any possibility of a romantic relationship between Daniel and Roxie. Roxie would get a love interest, sure, but I didn’t want it to be her best friend and I didn’t want to go down the well-trod path of the love triangle. The perfect solution presented itself. Daniel would be Roxie’s ancestor and they would tell people they were cousins.

Since Daniel was the sidekick he had to have some wacky character traits, the best one of all being his love for belting out classic country songs at the top of his off-key voice. Blame that one on too many over-heated montages set to twee emo or Hot Topic goth, with the vampire walking through the night all brooding and, um, brooding. My vision of Daniel included him singing Conway Twitty in a karaoke bar, flashing a smile at Roxie that bared just a hint of fang. Most of all I wanted Daniel to be a fun character, not like a lot of other vampires.

But he is still a vampire. There came a point in Mojo Queen when I knew that needed to be shown and it chilled me to write the scene. Suddenly I began to see Daniel in a new light. I stopped thinking of him as a wacky sidekick, a character I made up just for a laugh. The more I thought about him the more I wondered about that seemingly goofy choice to make him a fan of classic country. I strongly associate country music with family.

Roxie’s “living” family want nothing to do with her so Daniel is all she’s got. Family are supposed to be the people you can trust the most, and Daniel is that to her. But he – like family – is also the one who could hurt her the worst. There’s a lot of cheese in classic country, but when you look below the surface there’s a lot of darkness too. A lot of murder ballads hidden under the beer soaked cheatin’ songs. Without even trying, I had found the perfect music to correspond to Daniel.

That darkness is part of what brings Roxie and Daniel together. They share a deep bond in their love of the night, the ease they both feel in the spirit-filled dark. Daniel doesn’t have to hide his fangs and Roxie doesn’t have to hide the fact that she can see auras and spectral energy. They are open with each other but Daniel still hasn’t told Roxie everything about his past. Sometimes when he grabs hold of my imagination and whispers possibilities to me, I think about Daniel’s history. His life as a man, his transition to vampire, and what led him to seek out any descendents. Daniel may not be the protagonist or the love interest of Mojo Queen but he is deeply important to Roxie. As I’ve explored his character more he’s become deeply important to me, too. He’s one of my favorite characters I’ve created so far.

Oh, one more thing to tell you about Daniel: Roxie calls him “bubba.” But she is the only one allowed to do that. Anybody else tries it and they might get to see his fangs - without a smile.

Mojo Queen is available from Lyrical Press. Learn more about the author at www.sonyaclark.net (including free reads featuring Roxie and Daniel.)

Tea with Sonya Clark

Welcome to urban fantasy author Sonya Clark, who graces Toad's Corner this week. Sonya's debut novella, Bring on the Night, introduces readers to her world of vampires in werewolves, but Mojo Queen is coming soon, bringing an intriguing glimpse into the doings of magic practitioners in a contemporary Southern setting. This is an author who pushes all of Toad's buttons, in all the right places. **grins**

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Tell us a bit more about your setting for your debut novella, Bring on the Night, and does this tie in with your novel Mojo Queen in any way?

Bring on the Night is set in a fictional town called Concord. Most of the action takes place in the rougher part of town on the waterfront. What I envisioned was a sort of semi-abandoned industrial area like what you’d find in a city with a failing economy. All the blue-collar middle class jobs are gone, and what’s left is poverty and predators. The setting, along with many other aspects of the story, was very noir-inspired.

Bring on the Night and Mojo Queen are unrelated stories, but they do have something in common: people living outside the bounds of normal society, trying to do the right thing and help others.

Obviously you love vampires. How are yours different from the standard vampiric themes gadding about in the media today?

In Bring on the Night vampire Jessie is not afraid to drink straight from the tap, so to speak. She’s sexy and flirty but she’s there to break heads, not fall in love. With vampire Daniel in Mojo Queen, I made him basically a sidekick just because I wanted a vampire that wasn’t a main character. Usually vamps get the headlining role. Neither of them are broody, love-obsessed, or at all interested in passing themselves off as high school kids. I want to write vampire-free stories too but at some point I know I have to write something where the vampires are evil. Sometimes you just have to let monsters be monsters.

Which one of your characters do you resonate with the most, and why?

In Bring on the Night it would probably be Brandon, the curious journalist who discovers vampires are real and at one point asks Jessie to show him her fangs. I’d probably do something really stupid like that in a similar situation, let curiosity overrule fear and good sense. In Mojo Queen it’s the main character, Roxanne Mathis. Without really thinking it through I gave her my love of music and it changed the character. You look at the world through the lens of what you’re passionate about, because that’s what you’ve studied, even if informally. With a love of music being so much a part of who I am, it’s almost impossible to keep it out of anything I write. So far she’s the character that has been the most informed by that.

What are the top three movies you'd have in your collection and what is it about them that makes you revisit them?

I love Christopher Nolan’s Batman movies – love the intensity of them, love how they took what is really a crazy ridiculous idea (vigilante in a bat suit!) and made it fit with the world we live in now. Especially Dark Knight – the metaphors at work in that movie alone are dissertation-worthy.

The Princess Bride is like an old friend. There are few situations in life that a quote from that movie would not be relevant to.

There’s not been a movie vampire I really loved yet, but I have high hopes for Dark Shadows. I’ve been waiting for Johnny Depp to play a vampire since I was fifteen!

Who is your all-time favourite villain, and why?

I’m having a hard time thinking of a villain that didn’t go through some sort of redemptive story arc. If I can count villains like that, I have to go with Spike from Buffy the Vampire Slayer. I always loved how he thoroughly embraced being a vampire, even after he changed from villain to anti-hero.

Care to spill the beans with regard to your works in progress?

My next novel-length work will be a sequel to Mojo Queen, tentatively titled Red House. MQ is set in Nashville, which was hit by catastrophic flooding this past May. In deciding whether or not I wanted to deal with that in a fictional setting, I thought about what it might do to have that kind of energy unleashed through the spiritual plane. People are uprooted when a natural disaster strikes. What happens to the spirits that haunt a place when that place has been smashed by the enormous energy of a flood? I’ve got some ideas about that, and I’m doing some research about ghost stories from this area as well as other major floods, plus some other things.

I always have other projects going on, too, for fun or to experiment. I’ve found that when I challenge myself, even if I fail it somehow manages to push my writing forward. So that’s cool.

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Useful links:

http://www.lyricalpress.com/store/index.php?main_page=product_info&products_id=245

http://sonyaclark.webs.com/