Every girl loves a vampire.
Beautiful, powerful, irresistible creatures that they are, it's no wonder that they feature prominently in romance novels throughout the world.
Add immortality and a lust for blood so strong it all but consumes them, and you have the recipe for any woman's fantasy.
But for some of us who are (mostly) rooted in the reality of the here and now of this pragmatic world, it can be hard to fully embrace the fantasy of vampires.
Gorgeous though they undoubtedly are, they have a few traits that simply don't add up.
For a start, there are the retractable fangs.
Fair enough.
Snakes have fangs, so this is a theoretical possibility, I guess.
But the idea that vampires use their fangs to drink blood is a bit of a stretch.
Vampire bats drink blood, sure, but they use their fangs to penetrate skin and blood vessels and they lick the blood off the surface of the skin as it wells up.
Fine for a bat the size of a squirrel, but it's hard to picture a full grown man lapping up a few drops of blood at a time.
It would take hours.
Surely there should be a more efficient system for guzzling up five litres of blood in a few minutes.
Hollow fangs might sound great, but imagine all the slurping.
Sunlight, garlic, crosses, holy water.
Not such a stretch, really.
I know plenty of people who abhor at least one of these, and some who really dislike all four.
Wooden stake through the heart, yep, I get that.
Decapitation - that will work.
Bullets.
Nope? So you can harm a vampire with holy water but not your good old fashioned hollow point screaming at high velocity from the barrel of a firearm of your choice.
O-kaaayyyyy.
But the thing that really gets me, is the idea of vampirism as an infection.
A virus that can be transmitted to a human, rendering them briefly unwell (sick as a dog, really) and then, miraculously healed and suddenly strong and fast and bloodthirsty and with a sudden aversion to religious artefacts.
I work with viruses every day, or at least their manifestations in human beings, and believe me when I tell you - they don't work like that.
You get sick, and then, if you're lucky, you get better.
You are never fundamentally and wholly altered in any significant way by a viral infection.
At least, not in a way that makes you stronger than you were before.
Viruses are not your friend.
Imagine rather a vampire that looks like you or me, except much hotter, of course.
Instead of being infected and afflicted, he is born that way.
He has brothers, too.
He craves blood because his body uses the iron in blood to boost his speed and his strength and his thought processes to a degree that makes him supernaturally powerful and fast.
But he has learned to control his bloodlust to a point where he can live with the consequences of his actions.
He is human enough that the idea of cross species relationships doesn't rear its ugly head, but vampire enough to make him gorgeous and strong.
And faulty enough to be really dangerous.
A thinking woman's vampire, appropriate for today's world, real enough to be less of a fantasy and more of a possibility.
Hey, why not?