My Concept of Vampires

  I've read so many vampire books and seen so many movies that I wanted to come up with a unique history and mythos for my vampires.  I mention this because, as you know, the Nocent series revolves around a zombie vs vampire war.  My zombies are unique too, but I'll talk more about them some other time.
  The thing that makes my vampires unique is ectoplasm.  Their flesh is infused with it.  In my stories, ectoplasm is a substance that exists between the spiritual plane and the physical realm, as I mentioned in my blog about time travel.  That is why conventional weapons do not harm vampires.  Bullets pass straight through into the Other Side.  Garlic nullifies the ectoplasmic properties and traps the vampire in our world where it becomes vulnerable to mortal weapons.  Holy water has the opposite effect.  It traps the vampire in the spiritual realm where it can no longer cross over into ours.  Ectoplasm is also photo-sensitive and will dissolve in sunlight.
  The last thing I came up with is that ectoplasm feeds off negative energy.  Fear, anger and hatred will make a vampire stronger.  Faith, hope and love can weaken it.  I'll go into the history of my vampires some other time.  I don't want to go too much into it before you've had a chance to read the stories which will illustrate it.

Time Travel In My Stories

  At least two of the stories I have written involve time travel.  In one there is a time machine called the Horologe.  It works through the use of ectoplasm.  If you've read my blog on Chief Loh's myspace page, you know that in my stories, ectoplasm acts as a medium between the spirit world and the physical.  In the spirit world, time does not move linearly like it does here.  There is also no spatial location in the spirit world.  All time exists as one moment and all places exist as one point.  If you use ectoplasm to enter into the spirit world, you can re-enter our universe at any time and/or place of your choosing with the Horologe.
  A similar concept appears in Orson Scott Card's Ender's Game series, except they use an artificial intelligence to "pop" a metal box "Outside" and back into our universe.  They only use this box for "faster than light" travel.
  I mostly was inspired by Poltergeist, the way Carol Anne and her mother exited the spirit world covered in ectoplasm and fell out of thin air into their living room.  It wasn't until I saw the pilot episode of Deep Space Nine, "The Emissary", that I made the connection about timelessness in the spirit world.  Commander Sisco had to explain linear time to the beings in the wormhole near Bajor.  From this I asked myself: if there is no time over there, then why would anything that was able to travel into the spirit world have to come back out at the same time they left?  That's the sort of stuff a 15 year old nerd loses sleep over.  To be honest, a 34 year old nerd still loses sleep over it sometimes.  Just ask my wife, Kayla.