... having been breathed out

Sort of by accident I spent my morning eating blintzes and re-reading Joseph Shariden Le Fanu’s 1872 lesbian vampire novel Carmilla, just to make sure I wanted to offer it as one of my Yuletide fandoms. Now I am beset by the burning desire to rewrite the entire thing with the premise that Carmilla turns Laura into a vampire the first night she arrives at the schloss, and that they then spend the next several months having debaucherous lesbian vampire sex and delighting in pulling the wool over the eyes of the entire household with the fiction that they are both still innocent young maidens. (This would explain, at least, why Laura appears to remain so clueless about the obvious identity of her friend, even after someone literally tells her exactly who and what Carmilla is.)

Carmilla’s eventual execution could either be engineered by Laura as a bid for her own freedom, or an elaborate illusion that enables them both to escape to Italy. Either way, Laura spends the subsequent decades roaming Europe, feasting on virgins, and becoming a master of disguise, eventually taking on the persona of a “Dr. Hesselius,” who in the late Victorian era professes to discover the traumatized manuscript of a now-elderly woman who once, in her youth, was almost corrupted by a monstrous and malevolent beast. The old woman has subsequently passed away; however, as the good Doctor asserts:

She, probably, could have added little to the Narrative which she communicates in the following pages, with, so far as I can pronounce, such conscientious particularity.

#unfortunately this project would significantly outstrip the scope of a yuletide story #still #maybe someday