Warning there are some minor spoilers in this series of articles.  If you like to be totally surprised with the book then you might want to read the book first and then come back to this later.

World Building: Adding details

From the past post the reader can see that we had the basic idea of what the Plague of Vampires world would be like.   The next task was to come up with the characters that would populate this world.

Because the stories dealt with a disease it made sense that the doctors would play a major role in the adventures.  But the question then came up would the doctors be in charge of dealing with the disease?  Sure in patients and research, but who would deal with people trying to spread this disease? We thought that the police or government would be on the front lines if people are selling blood.  Unless some police agency had really, really screwed up and the government had to cover their…er…  behind… and come up with another group to deal with the “vampire problem”.

Having a department of the government deal with the problem also led into the idea of rather than having a single main character to create a cast of characters.  Liz and I have always loved shows with an ensemble cast, from Star Trek to more recent television shows such as NCIS.  These shows all have characters that work together towards a common goal and the most interesting are flawed people who often have friction between them.

These thoughts brought up another television show: Criminal Minds, which is a show about FBI Profilers.  This show is based on the real FBI’s Behavioral Analysis Unit (BAU) in which a specially teams helps local authorities deal with serial killers.

With the knowledge that in the real world the government had created FBI’s Behavioral Analysis Unit who’s to say that the government would not create something like it to deal with the vampire problem?

Would this new division be part of the FBI? It could, but the FBI is used so often in fiction that we wanted to go in a different direction.    Instead the task would fall to the Centers for Disease Control – (CDC) and a new task force.  This new department would become the Centers for Disease Control Tactical Team (CDCTT).