Vampires?

Why are young people of a certain age fascinated with vampires?

What is it about vampires that captures people's imagination?  Is it because they drink blood?  Is it because they live for ever?  Is it because they sleep in coffins?  Is it the main elements of the vampire myth that fascinated them, or is it the numerous details?  Is it the tragedy of their lives, the romance of it, the hopelessness of it, or the fact that they're fugitives for most of the time?  It saves authors from having to set up a dramatic hostile situation; it's all done for them.

Then, there's the comedic aspect; one of Terry Pratchet's characters is a vampire, Otto Chriek, who has sworn off human blood, joined something analogous to Alcoholics Anonymous, and goes to regular meetings, etc.  He is the photographer for a newspaper, and when he takes a photograph, the virus* thinks it is daylight, and reduces poor Otto to a small pile of ashes.  But, each time this happens, he carefully arranges to spill a little of his own blood on the ashes, and whoosh, he rises from it (unfortunately without any clothes on), and continues as before, only with a severe headache.

* The latest theory about vampires is that vampirism is caused by a virus, which also gives vampires all the special powers they are reported to have.

Something I Just Realized

I have been reading a whole lot of romances on Kindle, re-reading a few I had whizzed through before, and I'm noticing:

their covers aren't very satisfying.  In fact, my own covers, by and large, are far better than these professionally produced book covers!

I guess that's only to be expected; after all, I had the final say on my own covers, and these authors must have controlled their own covers, to a large extent.  I was trying to think of a reason why this was happening, and I could not.

My biggest sorrow is that I could never find an image of Helen, my favorite OC, as we on DeviantArt call them.  Helen's signature feature is that she has a long blonde braid.  It was longer when she was young, and gradually got shorter.  Her hair was tightly curling when she was a kid, and straightened out over the years.  But DA artists could never draw her to my satisfaction.  But my covers were definitely superior.

Kay.

And Another Thing ...

Well, maybe I'm showing my age.  But this has bothered me for years and years.

"I couldn't care less." Writers today, old and young, misquote this saying as "I could care less!". The obvious retort is, well, why don't you just go ahead and (care less) and stop bothering us?  The whole point is that being unable to care less, you've already arrived at the nadir of your caring.

I don't want to include this in my Homonyms post, for fear that someone would spot it from the corner of their eye, and carelessly use the wrong phrase.  (Even articles intended to be helpful can be inadvertently misused.)

Ok, bye bye until I get annoyed at something else!

Kay H. B.

Elfed!

Erick Schubach (?) has written a fantasy trilogy about Elves living in New York--and all over the world--and I just finished the first book in the trilogy, and I'm halfway through the second.

He writes good, colloquial prose, steeped in the idiom of millennials and younger readers, with really snappy dialog (which I can't write for love or money).

However, Eric uses the word tenant to mean something like axiom, a sort of basic principle, which puzzled me, until I realized he meant tenet.  I wonder whether tenet is a common enough word for readers to understand what he intends, in the first place, and for them to infer that he means tenet when he writes tenant.  'Basic principle' might server him better.