The Yuletide 2020 Commentary Post

[calliopes_pen]

-Ao3 says this story is 67,168 words. Not counting the words The End, LibreOffice’s word count of it is 66,996 words. Also, it was originally 62,499 words up until I edited in the previously deleted scenes in chapter 7. It was 101 pages long, according to LibreOffice.

-I went with There Is A Pleasure In the Pathless Woods for the title, though for a while There Is A Rapture On the Lonely Shore was a serious contender. The other options that were very, very briefly considered, and then rejected early on: The Bloodstained Moonlight. The Bloodstained Shadows Crawl Inside. With Basilisk Eyes So Ominous. The Long Night of the Grave.

-The origin of the title (and the runner-up title) is a passage in Childe Harold’s Pilgrimage, by Lord Byron. A portion of it is also quoted by Jonathan in chapter 5, as he speaks to Seward after Dracula attacks Mina and himself.

-Before I received a prompt after e-mailing the mods, I was trying to come up with a plot that incorporated the brides. Jonathan and Mina in the convent is what would have been the entirety of the story at that point, with it ending as she wonders if the glinting red eyes outside were real, or her imagination because of Jonathan’s delirium. I realized that I didn’t include Dracula in the story at that point, and wasn’t certain how to work him into that scenario.

And then I received the prompt. It was a scenario that I would dearly love to see myself, so that helped. A plot fell onto me, and I fixed things with a lead-in first set in the castle, and then working my way through the convent, before everything that leads to them being bitten together, and the build to the end, with the fighting as Jonathan is about to fully go to Dracula’s side. Didn’t have enough Dracula before? Well now it has all the Dracula you could ever want!

-I also went back and checked my Dear Yuletide letter a few minutes ago. Yeah. This is something I requested, too, in a way, judging by at least two of the prompts being very close to what I wrote, and lining up perfectly with my recipient.

-Mina promised to write to Sister Agatha with an update on Jonathan one year from the time she reclaimed him. Imagine the poor woman’s reaction to receiving all the accounts in the post, and a cheerful letter from Jonathan and Mina apologizing for the shocking things she’s reading. They’ve probably traumatized a nun.

-Before I rewrote the first portion of Mina’s opening (until Sister Agatha comes to get her, and take her back to a delirious Jonathan) in chapter 2, there was a genuinely bizarre bit of thinking to herself that she was doing. She wondered why the nuns didn’t have a fresco on the ceiling. She thought the whole place could use a splash of color. That ditzy aspect was entirely out of character. Rewritten, she just sits through a sermon from a Mother Superior after being unable to sleep for worry about Jonathan. That was more like her.

-I felt like the brides required names that were not what I had named the brides in Dracula (TV 1968). Copying what I wrote in the Author’s Notes: The three brides of Dracula were dubbed Ilona, Snežana, and Livana. Ilona means Queen of the Fairies, so she’s the fair haired bride, and basically in charge of tormenting Jonathan against Dracula’s express wishes. Snežana means snow, while Livana means the moon. It seemed fitting as the moon and snow appeared to become a theme with them all.

The one that is Livana, was almost named Rusalka. While research says it’s defined as an undead spirit, it’s also a Slavic mermaid. Livana felt better suited for my purposes. This part of the lore is why I considered it at all: “It is accounted by most stories that the soul of a young woman who had died in or near a river or a lake would come back to haunt that waterway. This undead rusalka is not invariably malevolent, and would be allowed to die in peace if her death is avenged. Her main purpose is, however, to lure young men, seduced by either her looks or her voice, into the depths of said waterways where she would entangle their feet with her long red hair and submerge them.”

-Sister Dunya was an accidental reference to Lord of the Vampires, by Jeanne Kalogridis. In that novel, she was a servant that was turned. Jonathan went on to mistake her and two others for being Dracula’s brides. After doing that, I just decided to go ahead and give the other nun a similar name. Sister Zaleska was a reference to Countess Marya Zaleska Dracula’s Daughter (1936). Part of my reason for the inclusion is the meaning of her name. “Beyond the forest.”

-Quincey and Renfield survived this story. I’m not sure if Renfield would ever fully recover, but I suspect he would have given up the eating of insects completely, given furious he was about how the Count used him, and discarded him. Quincey was just a delight to write. He’s basically adopted the Harkers by the end.

-There is a high probability that Quincey Harker was conceived when Jonathan and Mina finally had their first time. And, yes, he would still be named after Quincey (and the rest of their crew) despite the fact Quincey lived. They still owe the guy for helping them in major ways.

-Jenkins pops in from Dracula (TV 1968) to work for Seward in the background, in a passing comment in chapter 5. He is promptly maimed (or just knocked out and concussed) by Renfield. It started out as a placeholder name for some poor extra, before I decided that, yes, it would be fine to import him from the film.

-The horses dubbed Sandor and Magda were an inadvertent reference to Dark Shadows (1966). (Granted, Sandor could also be referring to Countess Zaleska’s servant in Dracula’s Daughter (1936), so choose your own path) Mina mentioning a hat pin to the skull when talking with Van Helsing could be construed as a reference to the way Angelique was murdered during a séance, in the 1970 Parallel Time storyline.

-I was in need of a Latin prayer to repel vampires. When in doubt, borrow the one from Dracula (TV 1968), since I already had it jotted down in another story! "Adjuro te in nomine Patris et Filii et Spiritus Sancti,” which means “I charge thee in the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit.”

-Chapter 3, when Jonathan has a nightmare about killing Mina? That’s originally where that moment ended, but I didn’t want to hang on a horrific death. You get an undead Mina going at it with Jonathan on the castle floor as Dracula laughs demonically. So that happened! Jonathan’s reason for waking up shouting “no!” then becomes more an affront to his Victorian sensibilities, and a fear he likes that. The churning red tongue of Mina is a reference to the fair haired bride almost biting him in the novel.

-In the planning stages of Jonathan’s possession in the dining car, I considered Jonathan having enough time to leap to his feet and bolt part of the way for help before he was fully taken over. This was dismissed, as it wasn’t working as well. From that first attempt, you get Dracula pondering the very thing as he stalks away to attempt to kill everyone.

-Sidenote: I swear that I didn’t intend to turn it into Attempted Murder On The Orient Express. I realized at the last what the exact name of the train was in the novel, as I corrected the opening to that chapter with more detail, but long after Dracula had done his thing.

-There was a second version of the face-off between Dracula and Quincey in the dining car, before he leaves with a knife. Dracula was almost a bit too chatty. Quincey didn’t get as much to do with his reactions. However, for completion’s sake, have that alternative version as a bonus!

The Count imperiously bowed at Quincey, and then used the movement to grab the knife. Yes, this would be the perfect instrument of destruction to wield; it was the best tool of desecration and horror. He studied the man that wanted to bar his way. With unnatural speed, he moved Jonathan’s arm to plunge the blade through Quincey’s chest. He snarled, for the man moved at the last instant.

Quincey managed to fall backwards, allowing the silverware to tear through his coat pocket instead. He backed away, half crouched and waiting to see what else the creature did. He refused to approach if he wasn’t certain of what he would do next.

“Yet again, you are but a solitary, simple lamb drawn into the butcher’s shop,” Dracula expressed as he looked down upon him. He easily recalled his words to the men when they dared to seek to interfere; when they drove him back. They were merely pale faces in a row, like sheep in a butcher’s shop. “Your head could be nicely placed upon a pike as a warning to others that meddle in my affairs,” he reflected further with great fascination.

His ruminations made a cold smile stretch across his borrowed face. “Perhaps it will be soon, Mr. Morris. Perhaps my Jonathan will feed from you before that night.” With that, the Count turned and parted from him. This man was beneath him, and he had other matters to attend to on this night. When his Jonathan was transformed, he could come back for this man.

-Before I edited it into the story on January 1st, I really felt like the moment between Van Helsing and Mina in chapter 7 just was not going to work. Something felt out of character. However, that was pretty much the whole point, since Mina’s at the cusp of falling into full blown evil mastermind mode. Fiddled with a few smaller things, and it flowed fine.

And as MilleVisages said after reading it, “they are all lucky she's such a nice person or they would all be dead and the Harkers walking away fully changed and deadly forever.” Poor Arthur got the brunt of that, but he was very understanding of where Mina was coming from.

-In the novel, Jonathan made his promise to go into the dark with Mina in the privacy of his journal. Presumably it was only later that the others would have read it. This is what that original passage was, before I altered it for Jonathan to give that promise straight to Mina, and to reflect the situation of both of them potentially going into “that unknown and terrible land”:

“To one thing I have made up my mind. If we find out that Mina must be a vampire in the end, then she shall not go into that unknown and terrible land alone. I suppose it is thus that in old times one vampire meant many. Just as their hideous bodies could only rest in sacred earth, so the holiest love was the recruiting sergeant for their ghastly ranks.”

-Stoker’s original notes had the castle destroyed by a volcano when Dracula dies. In this, I gutted the interior of the castle with fire after remembering a line Jonathan sings in Dracula: The Musical, during Before The Summer Ends. “To dim the sun before the summer ends. To burn the castle down, before the princess is awake. To kill our love when it's still so alive. I would not do it. My heart would break.” Jonathan gets a similar line while off and corrupted. So that's how Van Helsing became an arsonist, and the maker of a dramatic ending for them.

-That Szgany that Jonathan pondered biting after he recognized him? My personal head canon (since there was no room to squeeze it in) is that while Jonathan and Mina are staring at the castle burning for an overly long time, Quincey and Arthur go back to see if the man’s dead. They wanted to bury him if he was. It turns out the body’s gone, and there are signs that the guy revived, dragged himself a bit, and that someone else popped up in a wagon. A bloody bullet would be found by Arthur, as it reflects the light of both his lantern, and the moon.

So while everyone was fighting and killing Dracula, and savoring the castle being burned, one of the Szgany performed rudimentary surgery on their friend or family member, tossed him into the cart, and left.

-“See! The snow is not more stainless than her forehead! The curse has passed away!" That’s the line that Quincey had in the novel, right before he died. He gets the same line here, even if he survived, with the additional benefit of grabbing Mina and swinging her around.

-The end scene of Mina and Jonathan dancing and feeling utter joy at being free was written on the same night that Biden's victory fireworks were going on. I think the scene hit me, and was then written while Sky Full Of Stars was playing.