This story covers some themes which continue to fascinate me:

• Immortality - perhaps strongly influenced by Zelazny.
• Vampirism - most strongly influenced by Hamilton.
• Elite Special Forces - most strongly influenced by Jackson (As in GURPS.)

When I used to roleplay, I could get lost in character developement. In the GURPS system, you could build skill points in anything and everything. I think both the Morrow Project and Traveller games also had an influence on doing military style careers - you got the most skill points if you did the academies.

So I basically have a couple of vampire themed story lines where the lead character went to an academy and then into Special Forces.

I've just recently read a vampire set by Wm. Mark Simmons - One Foot in the Grave and Dead on my Feet. I thought they were not related and read them out of order. I actually loved it that way. The thing Simmons did with Chris Csejthe (the main character who shares blood with a vampire) in the second book (Dead on my Feet) really turned a lot of the genre upside down. In a typical story - the hero is new to the occult life and everyone else has been in it for eons. They all know the rules and don't know how to share them easily with our hero. So he stumbles about and eventually gets lucky.

It turns out that Chris does that alot in the first book, but between One Foot in the Grave and Dead on my Feet he does a lot of studying on blood diseases and vampiric legends. It really plays to the plot development and shows that if you have time on your hands, you can stretch your interests. Oh, and by the way, Chris was a SEAL for a little bit in his past life, which was covered up.

I like how he thinks out of the box to combating his enemies. It reminds me of the stuff Tonya Huff has Victory Nelson do once she becomes undead.

Anyway, back to The Nanovampire - I never reconciled the style of the first part with the rest of the story. I guess it is a voice over, with a narrator filling in necessary background. With a bit more room to play with, we could see the two characters being sent up into space, with the reader not knowing that their identities were fake. I happen to like that I can move Logan Fox from space back into the US. At times it feels rushed, I'd love to spend more words covering his discovery of Nanos and the powers it confers.

I've actually started a second story, one in which he meets up with a pretty FDA agent. I didn't know where to take the story after that.

Also, I don't know the character's real name - it hasn't come to me yet. I find that weird, but also refreshing. I get to introduce new names from his past and enjoy him revealing to whomever that it is fake.