In prior installments of this recurring topic, I’ve talked about some of the inspirations that influenced the first Pandora Zwieback novel, Blood Feud: for example, HorrorPops’ song “MissFit” and Misfits’ “Fiend Club.” (Billy Joel’s “Just the Way You Are” also has its place in Zwieback history, but we don’t need to cover that one today.)

There have been other, nonmusical ones, of course—both the TV series Doctor Who and the comic book character Vampirella have been major influences on Pan and her mentor, Sebastienne “Annie” Mazarin (we’ll cover those in another post)—but for now, let’s focus on these three:

Highlander: Not so much the original Christopher Lambert/Sean Connery film that launched the franchise (let’s just pretend the god-awful sequels that followed never happened), but the 1990s TV series starring Adrian Paul as Duncan MacLeod. Four hundred years old? Warrior and lover? Flashbacks to historical adventures? Yeah, I guess you could say it had a tiny bit of influence on Annie’s immortal status.  😀

Kolchak: the Night Stalker: Before Mulder and Scully in The X-Files, there was intrepid-but-luckless reporter and monster hunter Carl Kolchak, created by author Jeff Rice in an unpublished novel titled The Kolchak Papers, and portrayed by fantastic character actor Darren McGavin. Kolchak starred in two early seventies made-for-TV movies (The Night Stalker—adapted from Rice’s manuscript—and The Night Strangler, both written by I Am Legend author Richard Matheson), and then in the one-season TV series that bore his name. From vampires and swamp monsters to Jack the Ripper and seven-foot-tall American Indian spirits, Kolchak chased and killed them all, in pursuit of the one great news story that would make him an A-list journalist. Of course no one ever believed him, and he never got that A-list story, but that didn’t mean Carl stopped trying.

Sonja Blue: Author Nancy A. Collins’s punk-rock vampire who hunts other vampires, introduced in the 1989 novel Sunglasses After Dark and still stalking her kind today in brand-new novellas. In an Anne Rice–influenced horror industry, at a time when just about every publisher was seeking to knock off Interview With the Vampire (or at least its success, as publishers do these days with their Twilight, Hunger Games, and 50 Shades of Grey imitations), Sonja arrived on the scene as the anti-Lestat. There was nothing romantic about vampirism in Sonja’s world—it was brutal and ugly and a curse, and being turned into a blood-drinking corpse only meant that Sonja was able to unleash her full anger to kill every stinking vampire she could find.

Brutal and ugly vampires—sort of like the way I approached the vampire clans in Blood Feud. Because if there’s one thing you can be certain of in Pan’s world, it’s that the vampires don’t sparkle.  😀

Still, it’s what you do with your influences that makes the final version of any writing project. Annie may take a cue or two from Duncan MacLeod and Sonja Blue, and she and Pan might be descendants of Carl Kolchak, but they’re only spices added to the flavorful stew called The Saga of Pandora Zwieback; the rest of the character ingredients come from me.

Hmm. Cooking analogies. I think maybe I’ve been watching Food Network’s Diners, Drive-Ins & Dives too much. Well, Pan does get her surname from a cookie, so…