no picture! You know why? because Ariane doesn't really look much like anybody famous whose image I could steal -- she doesn't look like me, unlike what a lot of people might have guessed. if you'd like to try your hand at illustrating Ariane, please read the book, and consult with me very closely on what she looks like... I've been trying to draw Ariane for eight years now and I can't seem to do it right. I can give you snips and bits of features to work with.

BIRTH NAME: Ariane Caroline Dempsey AGE: 25 BIRTH PLACE: New Orleans, Louisiana HEIGHT: 5'4" WEIGHT: somewhere between 130 and 150 lbs/60-68Kg; it fluctuates wildly

FAVORITE ACTIVITIES: fractionating rat's brains, playing with liquid nitrogen, John Woo movies, complaining, smoking grass, making love, listening to music

INSPIRATION FOR ARIANE: Well, who knows. I thought of Ariane at the same time as I thought of Daniel and Ricari. I like to have an ideal female foil for these two powerhouses of charisma. To be completely honest I wrote VOTB as a reaction against Poppy Z.Brite and her opinion that women really aren't very interesting human beings, and thus not useful as characters. Being a semi-strident but proud and card-carrying feminist, this simply would not do. Yeah, you can actually say that there aren't really very many women in VOTB either, but having a woman-centered viewpoint is essential to this book being genuine as far as I'm concerned. This book does not make a feminist statement; its very existence is a feminist statement. Make no mistake, I think Poppy is brilliant and an extraordinary novelist and editor; it's just that I came away from her books feeling deeply unsatisfied and uncomfortable, kind of like all those nights I went to Darque Nights at various SF clubs and when I tried to talk to people, they were uniformly made really uncomfortable by me. I don't know if this is because I was dressed badly (which I probably was) or that I was too fat or that I wasn't white or that I gave off some other nasty vibe that wouldn't work for them. This is why I'm not officially a Goth; Goth implies a community, being part of something, and I never have been a part of anything, no matter how much I wanted to or tried to be what I thought other people wanted. The only difference now is that I do my own damn thing and I still don't have any community or belong to anything, but I don't spend hours preparing myself to please people who I know will judge me unfairly without ever bothering to scratch the surface. Now I'm just this odd figure all in black who is very polite and nice and will always give directions and be swift with a joke, but that hardly anyone knows. When I'm around all the lovely gothicks now, they give me that same look I've gotten used to over the last several years; if it wasn't genuine to me, I'd have stopped. I'm not a gloomcookie because I want to be a part of anything: I'm a sad moody bitter paranoiac because that's what I am. Anyway, this is supposed to be about Ariane and not me, but there is no Ariane without me; my experiences provided material for the construction of her character. Ariane is more me than any other character I've made since I stopped writing fanfic about Jemiah and Duran Duran. Nonetheless, she's not me; she's much, much smarter.

SECRETS ABOUT ARIANE: There aren't many that aren't revealed in the book, but...
- Ariane has almost never had any friends.
- Ariane's vision isn't bad enough to require glasses, but she is nearsighted.
- Ariane's favorite rock group is Joy Division.
- my mother's side of the family is from Louisiana and it's exercised an exotic fascination for me my entire life. I've still never been there and frankly, I'm afraid to go. Gimme a break; I went from the midwest (Denver) to the cuddly embrace of Portland. I'm a wimp.
- Ariane is a redhead because as a child, I had red hair and it's always been exciting to me.
- From an early notebook: " self-destructive: scientific: so unable to access her emotions that she's isn't consciously aware of the fact that they're repressed"
- Ariane will be featured in the next book, WOUNDS.