I don’t know about you but I do not care for stories where vampires can get by on animal blood — sometimes termed vegetarian vampires. I believe it’s a conceit that undermines the nature of the vampire. Vampires are immortal, can heal from just about anything, have beguiling powers — there should be a price for all that. In my novel, vampires must feed on human blood, though they need not kill, in fact they seldom kill, their donors.
Now, it’s not to say stories with veggies don’t work, it’s just often the stories I have read (or watched) they comes across as a way to garner sympathy for the vampire protagonist. But doing so skirts something that intrigues me. If you have a sympathetic vampire character, how does he or she go about obtaining a donor? What are those moments like? Especially the first bite. It’s an intimate, sometimes violent, act – what is that like? He or she is drawing the victim’s essence into him/herself — how does that affect the character?
I don’t see keeping a half-dozen white mice in the house like a six-pack of blood as anywhere near interesting.