Immortally Beloved: A Vampire's Vignettes

Notes & Intro

NOTE: This is NOT a chapter of the story!  If you are judging me, reading this story because it caught your attention, or looking to meet Eleni, please begin with the Prologue, which is effectively the first chapter. This is where I've tucked author's notes, research, and explanations of things.

Hello, and thank you for reading!

"Immortally Beloved" is the first book in what I plan to be a trilogy chronicling the life, death, life--and who knows, perhaps death again--of a powerful French Revolution-era vampire. Eleni's story is something that's come together over the course of years, and was originally a character created and developed for a roleplay sim. Whether via games, hundreds of years of literature, or collaborative storytelling, I noticed a trend among popular vampire franchises. The charismatic, poetically tragic, dominant, and obsessive vampire is usually male and would make women (and some men) swoon.

Eleni realised she could do that. She was not going to be the damsel in distress turned into a vampire. She was going to be Lestat. At one point, she was dubbed "The Queen Of The Damned With A Makeover." 

I want to thank everyone who left me their characters and asked me to tell their stories alongside Eleni's. It means a lot to people that people believed in my abilities to tell Eleni's story to the point they would do that. While I just didn't feel okay about using things created by another person, everyone I encountered influenced this book. Only two characters who were immensely important to Eleni and left to me "in memoriam" made it into this first book, but many people helped inspire the REALLY large cast of characters and the fictional town of Aubrey Parish. 

I'm not a big fan of disrupting the chapters with explanatory notes unless it's absolutely necessary, so I've added all my extraneous thoughts here. First, literature!

Eleni's journals are always written in first person, meaning from Eleni's perspective. The rest of the story is told in third-person limited through the eyes of multiple characters. Yes, this is difficult. Nope, not everyone is a fan of this technique. Much like George R.R.Martin's "A Song Of Fire And Ice", the story of Aubrey Parish is an unfolding mystery featuring a large cast of characters. Not a single one of them has all the information, and an omniscient narrator would kill all the mystery and suspense. Thus, this is the only conceivable way to tell this story the way I believe it should be told.

Please don't leave notes just to tell me how you hate books that use this point of view and consider it constant head-hopping. Some stories *need* this POV and have to have multiple protagonists to tell the story properly. Please understand this is not a fully edited manuscript, but a work in progress, so tense mistakes and so forth are fairly natural. My focus is on finding a way to tell a story through the eyes of multiple characters, while comparing it to the story of Eleni's life, as told through her eyes. I don't want to accidentally give away plot twists and surprises because I was focusing on "was/were/is/are/had been" problems. ;) This book will be edited to death, I promise.

I love when you tell me you love/hate/ship characters, or one annoys you, or how you feel about a character changes. This means I did what I wanted to do,

"Why don't you rewrite it to make this character more likeable/easy to understand at the very beginning?"

Well, that ruins part of the fun and engagement on the part of the reader. Also, likeability and charm is very subjective, as Eleni herself would tell you. <3

History! Let's talk about history! A good deal of research went into to telling Eleni's story, down to the dates on her journals, which are historically accurate.

For those who are uncertain about Eleni's story, she was born the daughter of a Duc and Duchesse during a time when the seeds of the French Revolution were already being sown. Eleni is approximately the same age as the daughter of Marie-Antoinette and Louis XVI. Had the Revolution not occurred, Eleni would have remained a part of of the Court of Versailles and encouraged to marry. Though I don't go into in the book, for Eleni to have been born with her title but not considered part of the immediate royal family, her father would have likely been a distant relation of Louis XVI, or have curried favour in a great way and given his Duchy through land and not blood. It is possible Eleni would have been in the family tree of Louis XVI, though she would have no relation to Marie-Antoinette--who was in fact Austrian. Any resemblance between Eleni and the Queen is due to the fact that women of any Court tended to copy the Queen.