Re-reading Dracula and, yeah, I think we can say that Bram liked to organize his action around meals. I don’t think I can get away with that. “Dinner is ready,” isn’t really a good cliffhanger chapter end these days.
Here’s an interesting thing, at least to me: Mimi is the target of the Worm’s ire in the source, and that’s a major plot-point. The whole tea-with-Wormy and subsequent chase—which is absolutely a monster set piece in the rewrite—depends on The White Worm wanting to go after Mimi.
I’ve visited and re-visited Mimi trying to figure out why. I think Stoker was going for a snake-charmer thing: The idea was probably that Mimi was going to, somehow, be able to stare-down the WW perhaps with the aid of the Aeolian harp (which, I confess, I have retained), but if she had this power I can see no way for her to discover it without either neutering the snake (ouch!), evolving the power somehow, or going full Buffy.
The latter is right out. (I had an English teacher say you could only use “latter” for the last two items, but Stoker uses it pretty routinely to mean the last of a list, and the dictionary bears out Stoker on this one.) The Buffy tropes were pretty tired when Whedon trotted them out, but they are stupid-worn-out now.
Evolving the snake-charmer power also presents a problem: We have to assume this is a racial feature—which I don’t have a problem with per se, as the book is all about “race”, in the sense of the features of one’s particular lineage or tribe—that Mimi develops, but if she really develops it, in means she has to confront our Nemesis and be able to stare it down.
I dunno. Stoker loooooved him some staring contests. But I’ve already got more than I can handle with just Caswall. And while the text is thick with various forms of mind-control—I mean, I’ve thickened it, because Edgar was just awful at it in the source, so he has to be able to do something with it—it’s also a fairly sinister power, which does not suit our Dear Mimi whatsoever.
And it neuters the snake, as it were, because if it can just be stared down, it ain’t all that scary. The beast has to have an imposing physical presence, I think.
So I’ve figured out why the White Worm wants to kill Mimi in a way that doesn’t involve her being super-powered and ties into the denouement already written. (Writing backwards was such a boon in doing this.)
Anyway, none of that is the interesting thing I was talking about earlier. The interesting thing is that I’ve revisited the characters and strengthened them in my own mind, and in ways that I think reveal them better to the reader, and as I’ve done this, Adam has become a worse and worse character.
I started this transition from the get-go, having him be more puckish, and rather antagonistic to Edgar.
But he’s also the stand-in for the Dear Reader, alas. He has to carry the disbelief. And this has made him increasingly obnoxious, as I anticipate a “normal” response to the ideas being presented. (Mimi can also be a little bitchy, but her reasons are a lot better.) This makes the Snake Reveal better because he’s has to come around awful fast, but I will have to go back (again) and refine things so that he is more the pragmatic and upbeat hero, and less a whiny little brat.
Most of the characters (except Uncle Richard?) have analogues in Dracula. Lucy and Lilla, Mimi and MIna, Sir Nathaniel and Van Helsing, Edgar and Dracula, and Adam… He’s kind of like John Seward or maybe more like Quincey Morris, the Texan. He doesn’t know what the hell’s going on, he just takes Van Helsing’s word for everything and goes.
I’m adding little bits (Easter eggs?) from Dracula to this in homage to the better Stoker. I hope he would appreciate it.
Lair Of The White Wyrm 