Teagan's Books

Saturday, March 14, 2026 

Hello, all.  Yes, you saw the word vampire in the post title.  You don’t see me with those ever-fashionable blood-suckers — at least not much.  I’ve only written a couple and they were definitely quirky.  However, I’ve been ponderating ways of bringing you readers into the fun again.  It will not be one of my Three Things serials, but it would involve your participation.

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What? you ask… Yesterday, Marian Allen mischievously suggested a story idea to me.  I say mischievously because a couple thousand ideas are always kicking around in my mind.  Marian’s idea had to do with language.  Her adult daughter, Sara, had said, “Why do people always act like vampires ‘made’ in Victorian times would dress and speak like Victorians? It would be a mish-mash of fashions and slang from all the years they’ve been through.”

For me, vampires are made for mashups.  They’re food for funny fantasy.  They’re the quintessential queens (or kings) of quirkiness.  So, keep that in mind as I bid you come out and play!  

Build Your Own Vampire

In these dark days we need to bring our silly sides out into the light.  (They won’t go up in flames like a vampire.) I know that’s hard to do when the world is overflowing with awful things.  So, getting quirky with something inherently dark, like vampires, might be easier than trying to act like there’s sunshine blowing up your ass patootie. 

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Remember, this is meant to be “interactive.”  I’m going to help you build your own quirky vampire.  You can participate either by leaving your “Vampire Design” in a comment, or posting it on your blog.  If you do make a blog post, then please include a link to me.  By the way, if you’d rather, you could build a vampire’s minion/thrall.

Ready?  Let’s build a quirky vampire.

Ask yourself these questions:

When was the vampire “made” (turned, sired, brought across, etc.)?

What era?  Is yours a stereotypical Victorian vamp?  Maybe there was a big historic event happening while she/he was sired. 

Was there anything off-kilter, weird, unplanned, or oopsie! about the moment when they were turned?

Charlaine Harris wrote, as a minor character, what I thought was the most brilliant vampire, Bubba.  She had Elvis almost dead from the drug overdose, turned at the last instant by a fan who was a vampire.  The drugs had an unfortunate result. This also explained decades of Elvis sightings.  No offence to Elvis fans.  I love him.

What’s your vamp’s job or career?

Maybe your vampire is hundreds of years old and saved their pennies, so now they don’t need a job.  How did they do that?  Or if instead, they need to make a living, then how do they go about earning that paycheck?

What’s your vampire’s hobby or favorite activity?

Maybe after being turned, your vamp came up with a creative way to engage in an activity that doesn’t exactly work well with the limitations of vampirism.

What does your vamp miss most about being human? 

How does your vampire usually dress?  What’s their favorite outfit?

Where does your vamp live? 

This can be an actual city/town type location (real or fictional) or you can design their abode.

What unexpected annoyances does your vamp see about being a vampire?

Is there a particularly unique (nonstandard) part of your vampire mythology?

For instance, the Twilight vampires glitter in sunlight, but it doesn’t make them instant fireballs. 

Relating to the standard vampires not having a reflection, in the Moonlight series mythology, a vampire’s image cannot be captured with analogue cameras containing silver emulsion in the film; digital cameras are able to capture an image because they do not use silver emulsion.

Into what creature might your vampire shapeshift?

Answer some or all of these questions to Build Your Own Vampire, and then come out to play.

Taking this reader-participation a step farther, I hope to build a zany town for your quirky vampires and make a few future posts about it.

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Friendly comments are welcome, even if you don’t come out to play — but I hope you will.  Wishing you wonders and whimsy.  Hugs.

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Of course, here’s the obligatory shameless self-promotion.  Speaking of whimsy, what could be zanier than secret agent Fang Pinkerton, who has a fondness for his hot-pink fishnet tights, and costumes in general?  By the way, he used to be a tiny armadillo from a species called “pink fairy.”

The Armadillo Files

Universal Purchase Links:

Kindle:  relinks.me/B0B8XX4ZSL

Paperback:  relinks.me/B0B8XDF1GF

Audiobook: Click here

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This work is entirely human-authored.  Furthermore, the author expressly prohibits any entity from using this publication for purposes of training AI technologies to generate text.  This is a work of fiction.  Characters, names, places, and incidents are either the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously, and any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, business establishments, locales, or events is entirely coincidental.

Copyright © 2026 by Teagan Ríordáin Geneviene

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