It Came from the Vaults!
Hello darlings,
Springtide greetings! (Especially to the alarming number of you who have appeared since the previous newsletter.) We’ve crossed the vernal equinox into a whole new season of me sending you e-mails. This one contains a little news (WMOM gets organized, plus an editing update), the first public release of a post from the Patreon vault, a poll, and books!
Ducks: In a Row
Having become completely fed up and disgusted with all websites — in particular the ones on which I host my work — I’ve put together, for your convenience and mine, an index of the chapters of What Manner of Man and another of all the supplemental content on Patreon. (Samples of which, like the post further down this newsletter, I occasionally make public, so you can check them out if you’re curious!)
The March of Progress (of Editing)
I’m making excellent progress on editing the final draft of What Manner of Man. In fact, I have finished reconstructive surgery on the first half of the novel. (It was a success! The patient is expected make a full recovery.) That means I’m finished the deepest changes!
I’m feeling madly, deliriously excited about some new scenes I’m adding to the novel - three in particular between Father Ardelian and Lord Vane. They must, alas, remain shrouded in secrecy, with the exception of those details which I’ve revealed in a new post on Patreon.
Non-Patrons, I have a treat for you too.
Monthly Post: October 🖋
The following is the Patreon-exclusive behind-the-scenes post for October 2023. It features a fun and flirty little priest drawing + some detail about decisions that led to the exorcism scene in chapter 18.
In the act of preparing for chapter 23 (in which Sylvia presents Victor with his repaired and embellished cassock), a sudden thought led me to do some hasty Google research into the question of "Are there specific rules about the damaging and altering of vestments?"
Results, I'll be honest, were a tad inconclusive as far as thorough information on the subject goes (it was very hasty research) but it does seem like he can't celebrate the Mass in his new frock. Lucky for Victor that he wasn't planning to.
Also: he can't show any leg!
(Did my editor get me to include this anecdote in the monthly post partly as an excuse to draw the above image? Who can say.)
Speaking of research — as I review the novel as a nearly-complete work, I've been thinking more about the big exorcism scene in chapter 18.
I'm sure you won't be surprised to learn that it was one of the reference points I had uppermost in my mind when starting out on What Manner of Man. (I may even have mentioned the fact before?) Anyway — it was a tricky little thing to write, and the trickiest part of all was figuring out the framing for the scene. I hadn’t realized until it came to actually writing it that essentially I had penciled in that Father Ardelian schedules a time and a place to have the exorcism, like they’re meeting at 12 for lunch, and Lord Vane agrees and shows up. Neat and easy, no problem.
Which is a terrible way to begin a scene, especially one that’s a climactic struggle — it’s got no momentum, there’s no dynamism between the characters. You’re shooting yourself in the foot opening a scene like that because you’re trying to achieve liftoff from zero, instead of a running start.
The problem was that once I’d realized this I had to figure out how to maneuver the characters into a more interesting position without throwing off the character dynamic I had going. Exorcism scenes in fiction usually involve the priest character forcing the subject to undergo an exorcism against their will — obviously something that wouldn’t fly here. Lord Vane had asked to be exorcised (a fun little twist, but there’s a reason it’s not usually played that way), and putting Father Ardelian in the position of making Lord Vane do anything he didn’t want to was entirely against how those characters are meant to work.
The solution, if I remember correctly, came to me in pieces. I had always planned for that scene to take place at the altar on a cliff, so I had to maneuver the characters there in a way that was a little more independent of one another, and then set them up in a way where it’s Lord Vane initiating the exorcism. Once I was able to articulate that, it came together fairly straightforwardly. I think the final piece in the puzzle is something that’s still a bit of a spoiler, so we’ll leave it at that. [Edit from March 2024: I have no idea what I was referring to here!]
It’s hard to decide when writing things like these how accurate to be. I have now read through the official Catholic doctrine on exorcisms in its entirety — like a lot of Catholic doctrine, it’s vague in a way that’s exactly wrong for my purposes. (I’m also really not supposed to have read it technically, since I’m not a priest, so hush-hush.)
It’s quite lengthy, and mostly involves the priest speaking continuously for hours on end. Obviously I couldn’t include all of that. Father Ardelian’s dialogue during the exorcism is my own take on some of the juiciest bits of the ritual. (Lord Vane’s dialogue is original.)
What's in a Name?
In the process of editing What Manner of Man, (reviewing notes on character backstories, etc.) it suddenly occurred to me that I fucked up a little. Having given our favourite priest's name as Victor E. Ardelian in the preface, I promptly forgot all about that E and never filled in what it actually stands for. (Real James R. Kirk situation.)
For the next 9 days, therefore, patrons have the opportunity to help me pick out Father Ardelian’s middle name! (Only $2 to join in… 👀) We’ve been getting such fun suggestions, I can’t wait to see which of them wins.
Yet More Books
In light of recent events, I have been reading How Sex Changed the Internet, and the Internet Changed Sex by Samantha Cole¹. It’s a fantastic history of how the development of the internet is intertwined with sex and sexual expression, how we lost control of the internet, and how we can get it back.
From its introduction:
When you peer under the surface of all this consumerism and chaos, and back into the history of the internet, it becomes clear that the internet was built on sex, and sex has remained its through line no matter how hard some people try to deny it. A demand for sex built the shopping cart, the browser cookie, ad revenue models, payment processors, and the dynamic web page. The desire to explore and share our sexuality constructed the internet, piece by piece, as we know it today. And then technocratic billionaires betrayed the sexual for the sanitized and safe. We started labeling things "safe for work" and "not safe for work," a binary that's telling of who we allowed to call the shots. Sexuality is either unsafe or safe under a pretense of labor, depending on whether a boss is cool with it. Capitalists built walls around the "safe" parts of the internet to appease investors, advertisers, banks, and zealots-and pushed everyone who didn't comply to the margins.
But there's a catch: There is no adult side of the internet. The internet isn't a wall with sexy stuff on one face and "family friendly" on the other. It's a web. And the ways we knit that web together, from the very beginning in late 1970's chat systems to today, is a choice. They include how we defend or concede our dwindling rights to sexual expression online, how control of that web looks, how we choose who gets to decide and participate, and how those decisions shape our lives away from the keyboard and at what cost.
If enough people read this, maybe it would help. It’s helping me, anyway.
¹Sam Cole is a journalist with 404 Media whose work I admire intensely. Her reporting on current events relevant to sex and the internet is so good and so important.
Big name romance novelist and friend of the publication Emma Denny has a ✨ new book ✨ coming out! You may remember that I recommended her debut novel, One Night in Hartswood, back in December. It has since been my privilege to receive a copy of the sequel and I’m having the time of my life with it.
All the Painted Stars is about a chivalrous noblewoman who disguises herself as a knight in a bid to win the hand of her beloved in a tournament. (She thinks it’s only to save her best friend from an arranged marriage, but, well, you see…) I know for a fact that a lot of you are avowed fans of sword-wielding lesbians, and on that front I can’t recommend All the Painted Stars highly enough! It comes out on March 28th (next week!) Available to preorder → here.
I’m indescribably grateful to my charming, juicy, and delicious patrons, whose blood I am not drinking in secret, and who, in fact, I’ve never bitten even once. Join them to help ensure I can finish editing What Manner of Man, work on new projects in the future, and slake my dark, unspeakable thirsts. 🦇💋
Your humble servant,
St John