This will not be in
the finished story.  It’s a rough outline
of Victor’s feelings but it isn’t in a form that fits with the action.  I just had to post it to overcome my
nervousness about everything being perfect. 
I’m really impressed with the last installment I posted and I can’t
achieve that every time.  I have to just
go with what I have and go back and edit it later.

“You’re still trying to live it, Becky.  That’s all. 
You want something from it you can never get.” 

“Well, shouldn’t I be able to live it?  Shouldn’t I be able to put writing and living
together, after all I’ve read?”

“You feel it too much. 
I’m glad you feel it too much.  I
need you to care because it’s so bloody obvious no one else ever will.  And your inner life should never ever be
exposed to the world.  The world doesn’t
deserve you, and the public would kill you. 
If you want to write, write something for me.  I’m going to tell you something I’ve never
told anyone in the world.”

She looked askance at him, “I thought I already knew
everything about you.”

“No one knows this about me, Becky, not even Jennifer.  So now you can both learn it.  When I was ten years old I snuck into my
father’s office.  It was like tempting
the gates of hell.  He was the overlord
of the store my family had owned for generations.  It was my birthright and my ancestry and my
destiny all in one, and my father was the absolute master of it.  He ruled with mechanical brutality.  So, one night I snuck out of bed and broke
into his office.  And while I was in
there, looking through his papers, I heard him coming up the stairs
outside.  I panicked and hid behind a
bookshelf.  He came in with a woman I’d
never seen before and they were kissing right there while I watched.  Eventually they left and I went back home to
bed but I never forgot that woman’s face. 
Over the months that followed I caught sight of her several times, going
in and out of my father’s office.”

“So here’s my dirty little secret.  From the time I was ten years old I was
convinced that my father was having an affair without my mother’s
knowledge.  I believed he was a total
hypocrite and a traitor to our family.  I
utterly despised him.  It wasn’t until I
was in my twenties that I discovered that my mother had always known about it,
that they had discovered after a few years that they were not in love anymore,
and not ever going to be in love, but chose instead to keep up appearances out
of fear of their families.  This affair
he was having was totally unimportant to my mother, just as hers were to him.  But by the time I found out it was too late.”

“Because of this misunderstanding, I completely fucked up my
relationship with my father.  I wrote my
first novel as an act of sheer hatred against him.  He had forbidden me to ever reveal anything
about myself to the world, to ever in any way be genuine in public, and so I
wrote a novel about a vampire based on my father who victimizes a hero who was
me.  I knew I could never say what I felt
so I wanted to leave a terrible trail of clues for those who knew my family, so
they would secretly know what a bastard he was and hate him as much as I hated
him.”

“I’ve never told anyone before now.  It doesn’t matter that much.  Even if he wasn’t a hypocrite, he was still a
bastard.  He’s a right old prick to this
day.  But you have to understand that
whatever you think I achieved that you didn’t, I did for reasons you can never
have.  You wanted literature.  I loved literature too but the whole
emotional force of my early work, the work that made me famous, was the most
petty and primitive sort of revenge.  It
was stupid.“