New character

I have begun trying to work on a new installment for The Hunter Chronicles. So far I have only written this brief character sketch (just so you know I haven't given up).

“More coffee, hon?”

Darla called everyone “hon,” regardless of any difference—real or perceived—in age or gender. I nodded and pushed my cup toward her and she filled it a half-inch short of the rim with one smooth dip of her wrist, and without even seeming to look at the cup. She didn’t ask me how I wanted it because I ate there so often that she already knew I took it black and wasn’t interested at all in decaf.

She was fortyish, with straight hair tied up in a loose bun that was somewhere between brown and blond, and wide-spaced eyes that were somewhere between brown and hazel. She had the good looks of someone who had probably won a local beauty pageant twenty years before and had tried hard to stay pretty but hadn’t succeeded as well as she would have liked but had succeeded quite well enough for any man who saw her. Thin crow’s feet appeared at the corners of her eyes when she smiled, a strange secretive smile that made her look like she was amused by something no one else could see, a smile couched parenthetically between the curved wrinkles at each end of her mouth.

An old-timer had told me once that sometimes when one of these little diners were built, the owner studied such things as population distribution and economic standing, traffic density flows and so forth. And then sometimes they just found someone like Darla and built the diner around her.

This is a character that keeps turning up in my thoughts. I just haven't figured out what to do with her. But I hope to make her into a recurring character in the story.

I am also wrestling with a problem that must turn up eventually: Hunter's views, or the lack thereof, of God and religion. It seems to me that in such fantasy/horror stories, there isn't really any religious background to the main character (maybe I'm just wrong about this because I'm not well-informed enough on the topic). But seriously, how would learning the truth about vampires and then dedicating oneself to become a vampire killer impact one's preconceived religious beliefs? Maybe I'm trying to be too realistic, but I have been trying to allow the reader as little suspension of disbelief as possible, given the theme of the story.