🏳️‍🌈🧛🏻‍♂️ Big news that's NOT about the election! 🧛🏻‍♂️🏳️‍🌈

Gay vampires! So much more pleasant than American politics.

Nov 05, 2024

Friends! Romans! Countrymen! I have some extremely exciting news. I have a new book coming out in 2025:

Announcement of Neon Hemlock's 2025 Novella Series, with Lara's No Such Thing As Duty right at the top!

I don’t know if I’ve even TALKED about this project in my newsletter before. Possibly because I was working on it in the midst of, you know, my whole “slough of despond” era. But the keen observer will have noted, in my victorious post about finishing my novel, that I mentioned a novella I wrote by accident while procrastinating on the bigger project.

WELL. It’s coming your way in 2025, along with the rest of Neon Hemlock’s marvelous 2025 novella series.

You may or may not know this but I’ve been into the gays of WWI for a long time! I’m also very interested in spies (shocker). And let’s face it, we ALL love vampires. So when I came across this line in Selina Hastings’s The Secret Lives of Somerset Maugham, way back in…2016? 2017? my horrible little brain began to churn.

…his superiors, however, were impressed by his performance and more than ready to give him further employment. Wiseman suggested he might act as liaison with Polish group sin London and Paris; but more immediately there was a job for him in Bucharest, where he would be required to undertake the same kind of work as before, lending support not to the Mensheviks but to the Cossacks, and encouraging Romania to continue the fight. As before, Maugham was flattered to be asked and, excited by the opportunity, tempted to accept. This time, however, he knew he was in no condition to travel.

Maugham, noted novelist, playwright, secret agent, and bisexual was, in the winter of 1917, very much nearly dead of tuberculosis. You know. That disease where you COUGH UP BLOOD. And they wanted to send him to BAT COUNTRY?

He didn’t go. But what my novella presupposes is…what if he DID?

The research for this one was so fun, y’all. Period medical journals. Correspondence with a Romanian history professor. Emailing authors to ask annoyingly specific questions about their esoteric out of print academic texts. The book doesn’t even take place in Bucharest! Because in the course of my research I realized it was definitely occupied by Germans at the time!

Anyway. What does this book have? It has blood. It has sex. It has Bad Ideas like 1. dating dracula and 2. eating cake in bed. There are awkward parties and excruciating dinners and annoyingly specific styles of architecture. There’s even a tough-talking prostitute! It’s got EVERYTHING! Including a lot of this energy:

thanks answermywearyquery for the gif, 100% worth clicking through for context

But where can I get this book? you ask. Where can I read about one old man and one like…really, REALLY old man struggling through twin existential crises by making out (with teeth!) while a cozy snowfall blankets Iaşi and the war grinds slowly on at the edges of everything?

Well. You can sit tight and be as patient as you’re able (preorders will go live in early 2025), OR you can head over to Neon Hemlock’s Kickstarter for Shatter the Sun and pledge at the Club Serpentine level, which will get you ALL of their 2025 titles and the Shatter the Sun anthology. They’ve been doing REALLY cool stuff—stuff I haven’t seen other genre presses doing, stuff that’s weird and lovely and different and exciting. Definitely worth the subscription!

However you get your hot little hands on it, I’m very excited to share No Such Thing As Duty with you in 2025.

An Amusing Irregularity

Discussion about this post