0: what is going on??
welcome to a newsletter about your favourite fictional indie rock vampire band
Hello. My name is Sunny. The vampire novel I’m writing has taken over my life and I want to talk about it.
That’s the short version. Read on for the long version, and by ‘version’ I mean ‘justification for this publication’s existence’ because I am a well-balanced and highly secure person who doesn’t love the sound of their own voice at all:
Okay so I’m working on this book (currently titled THE VAMPIRE SHIFT) and, in an excellent bit of semi-accidental strategy, I’ve become obsessed it. It’s like being in the most niche fandom. Which is great, because it turns out (at least where writing is concerned) I do need to be Completely Infatuated with something in order to put this much sustained effort into it (I’ve tried being anything other than shamelessly self-indulgent before, and let me tell you, it has NOT! worked!!). HOWEVER it’s also frustrating because I want more content but — get this — I’m also the one who creates the content. Do you see my conundrum here.
Hence, this newsletter! An outlet. A theoretically more suitable place to share the endless thoughts/snippets that I have bouncing around in my head/Google Docs/chat threads with ever-gracious perenially patient friends.
Dispatches from The Vampire Shift Roster (yes I am proud of that name yes I do already slightly regret it no I don’t have an alternative) will generally go out every 1-? weeks and consist of news from the front lines of my writing life, random extracts of my work that I deem good/fun enough to share, and probably the occasional drawing/meme. (And, let’s face it, probably a slice of completely unrelated other things too.)
I’ve never done a newsletter before. It’s gonna be wild. I mean, I’ve not done a newsletter but I sure have had a double-digit number of Blogspots to my name throughout my adolescence and a sputtering anticlimax of a foray into Medium in my early twenties so, y’know, same thing. Cool.
As this is the inaugural post, I’m exempting myself from caring Too Much about how this turns out because otherwise I will never ever hit publish. And also, like. Will this newsletter become more cohesive and less rambly in future? Likely, but don’t count on it. Come on. If you’re reading this now (assuming it’s October 2022), you probably know what I’m like and what you’re getting into. You didn’t come to this newsletter for buttoned-down ad-copy-style brevity. Excuse me while I throw up in my mouth for a bit.
HOW IS THE WRITING GOING? I have a novel extremely loosely planned and I took a break from working on the novel to instead plan, draft and polish a short story first — just to test out my process. This was a stellar suggestion by my very clever partner and it sure is wild having written an actual complete first draft of something (a ‘short story’ that ended up 39,000 words long for reasons I’ll explain in a future post pretty soon lmao).
I finished editing the first draft a week or so ago, and have since been procrastinating starting the second draft. I did that yesterday. FUCK yeah. I cannot wait to have this finished and in a state ready for sharing that won’t involve me prefacing it with notes about how rough/non-final it is. EEK.
The short story’s currently titled Access All Areas. I’ll tell you more about it in a coming update :)
THANKS FOR READING HAVE A GOOD ONE X