(no subject)
Out now (well, as soon as the publisher finishes updating their site, anyway, ahah): Loveless, a vampire erotica short story by me.
Loveless has had an interesting life. I wrote it in 2007 as a submission to an anthology. It got rejected, so I put it on the shelf and mostly forgot about it, dusting it off only when a European literary agent asked to see some of my work a little while later. I never heard from the agent again and the story went back into the drawer.
A lot of the imagery from the story got incorporated into the Wolf House books, which I started writing a year later. Anyone familiar with those novels will see early echoes of scenes and characters in this story.
Fast forward to 2013, and I get a message from a girl in Croatia. She's loved a story of mine for many years, but has always wondered about a particular translation of a word -- what was my original intention?
Utterly puzzled, I wrote back, and discovered that the agent I'd sent it to so long ago had sold it to a Croatian-language horror collection. I was (and remain) a little too baffled and amused to be all that put out by the intellectual property theft -- after all, if you're gonna get ripped off, it's nice to get ripped off in such a weird way that it makes for a good dinner table anecdote later. I have a copy of the horror collection on my shelf now, along with the legitimately published versions of my stuff.
Until the message from the girl, I'd completely forgotten the story ever existed, but having been reminded I went back to it and decided to give it another try out in the world.
So, thanks to the lovely and generous Clandestine Press, here is Loveless, finally having its turn. I hope that, as well as being the first sketches of ideas that became a series of novels, as well as being the subject of international copyright violation, it also stands up as a sharp little story about vampires, and maybe about love.
Loveless has had an interesting life. I wrote it in 2007 as a submission to an anthology. It got rejected, so I put it on the shelf and mostly forgot about it, dusting it off only when a European literary agent asked to see some of my work a little while later. I never heard from the agent again and the story went back into the drawer.
A lot of the imagery from the story got incorporated into the Wolf House books, which I started writing a year later. Anyone familiar with those novels will see early echoes of scenes and characters in this story.
Fast forward to 2013, and I get a message from a girl in Croatia. She's loved a story of mine for many years, but has always wondered about a particular translation of a word -- what was my original intention?
Utterly puzzled, I wrote back, and discovered that the agent I'd sent it to so long ago had sold it to a Croatian-language horror collection. I was (and remain) a little too baffled and amused to be all that put out by the intellectual property theft -- after all, if you're gonna get ripped off, it's nice to get ripped off in such a weird way that it makes for a good dinner table anecdote later. I have a copy of the horror collection on my shelf now, along with the legitimately published versions of my stuff.
Until the message from the girl, I'd completely forgotten the story ever existed, but having been reminded I went back to it and decided to give it another try out in the world.
So, thanks to the lovely and generous Clandestine Press, here is Loveless, finally having its turn. I hope that, as well as being the first sketches of ideas that became a series of novels, as well as being the subject of international copyright violation, it also stands up as a sharp little story about vampires, and maybe about love.