This project is a meeting point of a lot of inspirations. First and foremost, it's inspired by the work of Poppy Z Brite, namely Lost Souls and Exquisite Corpse, which both left a tremendous impression on me. Rather than using Vampires as a pigeonholed metaphor for gayness, sadomasochism, wealth, or their oten antisemitic depictions, Brite paints with a broad brush, blurring the lines between individual metaphors and creating something more hollistically true, even if it ends up less concise in description. This made me really want to try my hand at the same, so there it is. In modern day LA, A small personal web of manipulation centers Will, a young man with a lot of pent up anger, Lena, an amnesiac transgender vampire and principal target of will, and Victor, a decidedly something-else Vampire hunter and masculine pinnacle that leads Will on the chase. It also nominally follows a disbanded industrial band comprised of vampires, and an obsessive compulsive cinephile talking at great length with one of the oldest vampires in the world. It also features intensive and gratuitous violence and gore. Can't have vampires without some good old fashioned tooth crushing! In the preface to her short story collection Birthday of the World, Ursula K Le Guin describes her own version of the fix novel, titled a "Story Suite" instead. She muses about how the term 'fix novel' is horribly british, and how collections of short stories can be something really special when merged together in that way. This novel is an explicit engagement with that idea, centered around juggling 5 interconnected but often seperate parties, all getting in eachother's ways. It also plays (because I cannot keep it in my pants) with deterioration and deconstruction of form. I am nothing if not consistent.
This one's tricky to estimate, because it has the capacity to turn fucking gigantic if I let it. I have written a couple of stories, but there can always be more. This will, in all likelihood, be a test of my restraint. I'll probably fail. I will, in all likelihood, try to piecemeal publish some of these individual stories, but no one wants to read this shit anyway, so it'll probably end up like First Wife. I've done quite a bit of prewriting on this one, but the scale makes it tough to get a good idea for.
Progress: around 10% ◼□□□□□□□□□