Hello darlings,
I can’t believe it’s been nearly two months since What Manner of Man wrapped up! I think I’m overdue for a check-in about how things are going. (Alternatively, if you love What Manner of Man but hate updates about how things are going, skip to the second half of the e-mail for fun links!)
I’m sure you’ll be pleased to hear I’ve torn What Manner of Man open and am busy rummaging around inside it. Right now I’m moving scenes around, rewriting dialogue, and adding in entirely new action. There is so much I’ve been dying to add that I couldn’t manage due to the pace of serialization, and it feels amazing to finally get in there and start adding meat to these bones.
Some parts of What Manner of Man will remain more or less unchanged between the serialized and final drafts, but I think you’ll be surprised by how much of the book is getting revamped (🔁🧛♂️) and how much better it is as a result!
At the moment, my focus is almost entirely on improving the section of the novel between Father Ardelian’s arrival at Whithern Hall and his descent into the catacombs. I’m expecting this to be the area which I’ll tinker with the most overall. (For more detail on the changes I’m currently making, see my latest post on Patreon.)
I’ve said so elsewhere, but just to reiterate: the serialized version of the novel will remain free to read even after I finish playing Frankenstein with it (I’m not going to pull an E. L. James on you.) Whether you’re one of the startling number of new subscribers or an old hand, you can read and re-read What Manner of Man ✨here.✨
I’ve turned over a lot of rocks during the editing process, and I thought it might be fun to share a little miscellaneous info + a few links:
❧ Cathedrals! You can doubtless imagine why I’m researching cathedrals, but — because I am the man I am — that means reading Fulcanelli. Who is Fulcanelli? Well, you would be far from the first to ask that, my friend, because nobody knows!
Fulcanelli was a renowned French alchemist in the 1920s (it’s rumoured he was among the handful of people who were able to transmute lead to gold.) After the publication of his masterwork, The Mystery of the Cathedrals, he performed a feat that in this era of permanent online record, many of us can only dream about — he vanished without a trace. The book itself is a complicated little thing about the alchemy inherent in cathedral architecture. (Will any of this make it into the final draft of What Manner of Man? Wait and see!)
❧ In Our Time (the BBC radio discussion program) has an excellent episode on the subject of blood. Highly recommend if you’d like to hear about how the discovery of blood transfusion upended millennia of mysticism by making blood into a necessary medical commodity — sort of like reverse transubstantiation.
Fascinating listen for fans of Dracula, a novel which is of course very concerned with blood transfusion. (If you want more, I also recommend the episodes on the apocalypse and the Devil.)
❧ Patricia Nell Warren is an author I’d like to highlight this month. Of particular interest to readers of my publication: the gay romance novel she wrote about a priest in 1977 (!) called The Fancy Dancer.
With the recent surge in censorship bills in the US and elsewhere, I think it’s worthwhile to highlight an interesting piece of recent but little known queer history, namely how queer small presses were crucial to preventing early internet censorship bills in the 90s from passing. Patricia Nell Warren testified before the FCC on behalf of her online indie publishing company, Wildcat Press, and this was instrumental to striking down the Communications Decency Act, an early forerunner of KOSA and SESTA-FOSTA.
If you’ve read and enjoyed What Manner of Man and want to help me out, there’s no greater service you can render me than talking about my book. Recommending it to friends, posting about it on Tumblr [glancing nervously at recent events] or, uh, wherever else you’re active1 — everything like that helps more than you can possibly imagine.
Your humble servant,
St John
love the illustrations in this email 👌 something something raven and a writing desk
this is all very exciting and interesting, but my brain snagged on blood transfusion as "reverse transubstantiation" and now it's all I can think about thank you