SALUTATIONS! Today the water in the apartment stopped running while my hands were covered in blood. The water is back now. I no longer have bloody hands. Lady Macbeth wishes she were me.
It has been a long time since I shared updates about my writing. This is partly because it has been much much much more gratifying to simply share some writing. (‘Make a serial!’ I can hear my partner whisper-shouting encouragingly at me. ‘YES WHEN I KNOW WHERE I’M GOING ARGHHH.’ Hi Mike.) It is also partly because I’ve been doing some h-h-h-hAAARDDCORRRE flOunDeRiNg!!!!1!!1one!!1!
Sunny, what does that mean? Uh. Okay. Um. Excuse me while I put on a tie and then google how to tie it up and then do that and then loosen it theatrically around my throat, in the manner of a worn-down private detective, and then start coughing because all I consume is brown liquors, nicotine, and the psychic poison that starts to clog your arteries when you have Too Many ex-wives. Hey, pseudo-LARPing as a noir detective is so fun. Oh my gosh. Detective AU of The Vampire Shift? HAHAH —
— WAIT NO, WRITING UPDATES. And then detective AU of The Vampire Shift.
1. WRITING UPDATES
THE VAMPIRE SHIFT aka the novel: Y’ALL. WRITING A NOVEL IS HARD. DID YOU KNOW THAT? I bet I’m the first person to have ever said this. AUGH. Okay. Actual updates: I’ve set myself a threatening exciting theoretically definitely doable timeline of having a complete first draft by either December 2023 or January 2024. I’ve been making slow but pleasing progress on character development and bits of worldbuilding. I’m slowly emerging from the trenches of stasis. I’m aiming to have, by the end of this month of September, enough of an outline that I can hit the first draft running. Or at least jogging, in a cool and sexy and definitely not about to discover a dead body kind of way.
ACCESS ALL AREAS aka the porno story: I wrote a ridiculously scrappy first draft (it was fun!) and then annotated it by hand for editing (this was also fun actually) and then just became agonised by the prospect of revising it and now it’s … on the … -checks notes- dorsal combustion engine. Look, I still think the concept for it was an excellent idea, so it would be cool to revisit, but right now I simply have lost interest / it’s not as high a priority.
TERMINAL VELOCITY aka shipwrecks and stupid questions aka the porno-and-heartbreak extract/pseudoshortstory I have published on this newsletter: Y’all this is like … close to … being done. I went through the version I published here and edited it, then — for the first time like EVER IN MY LIFE LMAO — sent it to a few of my friends for feedback. Yes I did just say this is the first time I’ve ever deliberately/methodically sought feedback on my writing (school doesn’t count). I have long been a terribly fragile coward / sensitive flower when it comes to receiving feedback on my writing and lately I’ve been making conscious efforts to CHANGE THAT. And … man, getting feedback from a bunch of people is very interesting. It was extremely helpful but also I did take psychic damage because I’m a n00b but the point is! I have a few minor adjustments I’d like to make, and THEN! THEN THE TEXT WILL BE DONE! And I will then lay it out and wreak graphic design on it and TURN IT INTO A PRETTY ZINE WOOOO.
Okay, that’s the writing updates done. Now, onto:
2. DETECTIVE!AU!!!!!
AU stands for alternate universe. I perhaps could’ve explained that earlier.
GOD DAMN I love AUs they are so FUN to me. It’s like when your favourite musicians cover songs by other favourite musicians and you get to see this fun new variant. It’s like seeing artists interpret the same subject matter in various different styles. I LOVE THIS THING. There’s gotta be a name for this genre/category of thing.
On a mildly useful note: I think AUs are really good for character development, because when you take characters out of their natural/canon context and put them somewhere totally different, you gotta have a solid handle on who they are in order for the AU to be satisfying and not just, like. A totally different story about totally different characters who just have the same names/looks but otherwise bear no resemblance to their original forms. If you want it to function as an AU, in the sense of ‘same characters, different setting/context/etc’ then you gotta know the core of your characters well enough that you can create plausible and compelling analogues.
Okay, here’s some babbling about the detective AU which I thought of while writing this newsletter, AKA what would it be like if Sasha, Rae, and Killian weren’t vampires/magicians in a band together, in urban-fantasy-today, but INSTEAD they were in noir-detective-land.
RAE is some kind of lounge singer in the type of smoke-filled bar where the staff know secrets and highly illegal things are organised by people in dapper suits. She draws huge crowds and everyone’s in love with her as she serves charismatic angel-voiced femme fatale. Additionally to this, she knows everyone and serves as a kind of messenger/liaison in the criminal underworld who can put anyone in touch with anyone.
KILLIAN is a detective who’s been tasked with finding enough dirt on Rae to put her behind bars. He’s an pragmatic idealist from a law enforcement family and has a very strong moral compass which is about to be tested in a variety of new, exciting, and not at all identity-shattering ways — not least because his mother and father have just been busted for a truly extraordinary amount of dirt.
SASHA works for the local paper and is kind of the world’s worst reporter because her work is not so much journalism as personal ravings, except when she got fired the paper got an influx of letters clamouring for her return, so she can’t be the actual worst because, much to the chagrin of the editor-in-chief, she’s responsible for a good chunk of the readership. In any case, she doesn’t put much into her work, which leaves her plenty of time to hop from bar to bar in the evenings, playing guitar and singing songs on whichever stage will have her. One day, the loose change that strangers toss at her feet will pay more than the newspaper job, but until that day comes, she’ll still show up for the daily grind — especially now that a juicy series of murders has lit up the town.
…Wow, you know what, that was deeply fun and also quite helpful for story/character development purposes. I may do more of these AU write-ups. YEAH! YEAHHHH also who knows, maybe the final product of this story won’t be a modern-day urban fantasy string of hijinks but something entirely different. wHO KNOWS. WHO KNOWS. EXCITING!
Thanks you for reading, I’m now going to collect laundry from a Catalonian roof terrace. GOODBYE <3