My journey pt1

If I’m not reading or watching movies, I often challenge myself with mental puzzles, math equations, or “what if” scenarios. These exercises usually result in interesting conversations with others (although not everyone understands how/why my mind works the way it does).

One day, inspired by a random thought, I set myself a challenge: What if a vampire came to a small town? What would the vampire’s goal would be?

First, I assumed it would be world domination - turning everyone into vampires like him. Reasoning that, if he wanted to take over a small town, before anyone realized it, I ran the numbers: given 1000 people in a small town, turning one person per night, the exponential rise in new vampires as they all turned even more people. Within 10 days, he could take over the entire town.

Well, that seemed like a long time - surely someone would get spooked and try to do something about it by then. So, I recalculated. What if he turned one household per night (2-5 people). Then he could take the town in only a few days.

So, if the town could be taken in less than a week, what would he do then? He’d pack up his stuff and move to a big city, where he’d have millions, rather than hundreds of victims. Great! The hero arrives at an abandoned town, has to put together the clues, and follow the vampire to somewhere like New York, where his work will REALLY be cut out for him.

I sat back, totally satisfied. I’d come up with a problem, logically plotted out the solution and following events. Now what? Keep in mind I only did this as a mental exercise, not as an idea for a book. But it bothered me that I’d also created a few other problems along the way to my great solution:

1. Why would the hero show up in town just after they left?

2. If the vampire turned 1000 in a few days, by the time the hero found enough clues to pursue the villain, New York would be over-run with vampires, creating an impossible task of eliminating them.

3. Even if you made it so that killing the main vampire released all of his followers, you’d end up with thousands of people walking around with mental trauma, remembering the evil deeds they did as vampires.

“Well,” I said to myself. “Let’s concentrate on the first problem first. How/why would the hero show up, how/why would the hero take on something as powerful and scary as a vampire, and how/why would the hero be able to defeat the vampire?” (I didn’t know if it would be better to make the hero male or female at this point, so I just called the character “the hero.”)

See next…