Katherine Villyard's Blog, page 9

SALE! Love Stories only 99 cents!

Do you want a copy of my short story collection for a very low price? Love Stories will be on sale until the end of the month. Grab it while it’s cheap!

Yet Another Novel Update

Hilariously, there is a part of my author brain that insists that my book is AMAZEBALLS and will be deeply beloved by anyone who reads it. It is clearly untrue that my book is for everyone and this is okay. (So far, my book seems to be for people over 30 who love cats and have a keen interest in religion and/or the politics of religion, as well the history of marginalized people in Europe and classical music. My parents met singing opera, yo. I started going to choir practice with them when I was six weeks old.)

That said, so far my new readers have been SUPER USEFUL for fixing my foreshadowing. My writer’s group has seen it twice, so they know all the reveals and can’t tell me if my foreshadowing is enough for a new reader. These readers seem to have helped me fix my foreshadowing! which is huge and OMG THANK YOU. I, er, have a recurring problem in which I think I am being BLINDINGLY OBVIOUS and instead am being ludicrously obscure. One of my early short story critiques from a friend included a stern lecture about “WHY ARE YOU SO DEATHLY AFRAID OF PROVIDING ANY INFORMATION TO A READER? YOU’RE GOING THROUGH THESE BIZARRE CONTORTIONS IN ORDER TO AVOID GIVING THE READER EVEN THE TINIEST SCRAP OF INFORMATION! THIS IS THE OPPOSITE OF SUSPENSE!” while my response was “I thought I was being sledgehammer obvious.”

I’d like to say I’ve moved past this, but no. 😉 I have a weird brain and need the eyes of normal people upon my work from time to time. 😉

Current comps, btw: When the Angels Left the Old Country by Sacha Cohen, Silver Under Nightfall by Rin Chupeco, and A Discovery of Witches by Deborah Harkness. Er, mostly the first, but it does have vampires and queer like the second and a vampire married to a witch with lesbian moms like the third. (Resemblance was coincidental but I’ll take it.)

Goodreads and Apple Books issue

Hi!

Due to a mix-up with my audiobook, an incorrect category was applied to my book Love Stories. It's listed as Romance here at Goodreads and at Apple Books on the audiobook edition only.

I'm trying to correct the issue, but authors aren't allowed to edit their own categories. These sync from the publisher. I've opened "an idea" to allow this, but in the meantime there's nothing I can do except apologize to any reader who is expecting a Happily Ever After out of Love Stories.

I'm so sorry! I have a ticket open with Apple Books, and Goodreads refuses to fix it.

So. Why vampires?

Vampires are interesting! They’re the most “human” monster, and they usually represent what society fears.

Look at the OG: Dracula. (He’s not the first vampire in English literature–Polidori’s The Vampyre, our lesbian queen Carmilla, and the serial Varney the Vampire predate him, but he’s the one people think of nowadays.) Dracula was published during a time period when people in England had a lot of anxiety about male “deviant” sexuality after the Oscar Wilde trials, and fears of reverse colonization following a large number of Jewish and Eastern European immigrants. Dracula is an oddly seductive Eastern European nobleman (and is metaphorically sexually deviant–he bites both men and women, insert penetration metaphors here) looking to “invade” England. I really love Kaz Rowe’s YouTube video on the topic and highly recommend it!

(Perhaps not coincidentally, the vampires in my novel in progress include a Jew, a queer man, and an eccentric freethinking woman who works as an actress during the 19th century.)

There’s also Interview with the Vampire, both the original novel series and the AMC TV reboot (love them both!). In Anne Rice’s books, they’re mostly queer and sympathetic. (Varney the Vampire was also a sympathetic character, but people usually think of Anne Rice when they think of the first sympathetic vampire–although Rice herself often credited the movie Dracula’s Daughter.) All Anne Rice novel vampires are bi and genderqueer; just look at Lestat’s mother Gabrielle who immediately starts living as a man. (I’m sure it’s banned in Florida.) AMC’s reboot takes it a step farther, with Louis as an angry gay black man and Lestat as a seductive, decadent bisexual European.

Even the much maligned Twilight can be read as a Mormon girl’s fear of teen premarital sex. Edward Cullen is sparkly and sexy, and that’s scary to someone who’s afraid of illicit sexuality. The True Blood TV series is also leaning hard on fear of intimacy and illicit sexuality.

There’s also a long history of depicting societal others as vampires. From French cartoons depicting Jews as vampires during the Dreyfuss Affair, to racist cartoons depicting black men as vampires in reconstructionist North Carolina… well. You get a wide variety of things I’m not willing to link here.

There’s also the immortality. Immortality sounds great if you’re afraid of death (which most reasonable people are; even religious folk who say they’re not afraid of death sometimes say this because they believe in their faith’s version of immortality). On the other hand, you get to sit back and watch everything and everyone you love die while you continue. Since both of my parents are dead, as well as a large quantity of my pets, I think I can say with some authority that this fuckin’ sucks!

(Also, in the modern era in my novel in progress, the vampire’s mortal wife is… a vet. Someone whose entire life is built around our beloved, short-lived companions.)

So, what else? The no daylight thing was invented by the movie Nosferatu, if I’m not mistaken, but I love it. It’s a metaphor for hiding the shadow self, hiding the part of you that’s the thing that society fears. Also, I kind of feel like there needs to be a “price” for being a vampire if the vampire is the protagonist. For Anne Rice’s vampires, the “price” is that you have to be a very old vampire with excellent self-control to not be a killer. I… was more interested in the curse of Immortality, so I let that one go and stuck with no sunlight and no food. I mean, I love history so without all the icky blood (I’m a vegetarian), well. If there was no price and I would continue exactly as before without hurting anyone, sign me up.

Vampire tropes: You can either be the sad broody depressed vampire like Louis, Edward, Varney, Angel… or you can be the joyous, reveling-in-being-an-outlaw vampire like Lestat, Spike, etc. Or more, but those seem to be the most common vampire states of being. Why do Buffy/Angel fans love Spike? Marginalized fans love their marginalized-coded characters embracing who they are. I love Louis with all my heart, but ENOUGH will all the self-loathing! (On the other hand, to quote The Maven of the Eventide, if he’s not sad in the rain is he still Louis?)

Anyway. Yes. Vampires. Vampires are interesting. People tell me vampires are dead, but you can’t kill vampires! they’re UNDEAD and will always come back. 😉

Win a Paperback!

Do you want a free paperback of Love Stories? If you’re on Goodreads, you can enter the giveaway here. And if you’re not on Goodreads, why not? 😀 You can follow me on Goodreads, and I really do hang out there…

There are only five copies available because I have to mail them. 😀 Good luck!

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Giveaway ends August 20, 2023.

See the giveaway details at Goodreads.

Enter Giveaway

Some of my Favorite Authors

In light of continued fun and games with social media, well. You know. BTW, still open to social media suggestions. Tell me where you hang out!

But I digress.

Some of my favorite authors! People ask me about my favorite authors a lot, and I usually have the same answers:

Neil Gaiman. I mean. Come on! My favorite is probably American Gods–okay, this is actually kind of embarrassing to admit, but I bought a television when I heard they were making an American Gods TV series–but I also really love Good Omens. Lyda Morehouse/Tate Hallaway. If you don’t know about Lyda, well. She wrote an amazing cyberpunk religion series–religion as mythology, not as proselytizing, with a dystopian theocracy–with fascinating AI characters, thrash polka, a hard-boiled lady detective, a brilliant and sneaky hacker, a female cyborg cop, and angels–literal angels. Also a lot of queer themes. Tate Halloway is her paranormal romance alter-ego who writes fun urban fantasy and paranormal romance books (many with vampires). Lyda’s books have been re-released by Wizard’s Tower Press and I highly recommend them!James Tiptree, Jr. “Tip” was one of the all-time great short story masters. She (yes, she) was the author of some of my favorites, “Love is the Plan the Plan is Death,” “Houston, Houston, Do You Read?”, “The Screwfly Solution” (as Racoona Shelden), and the early cyberpunk story “The Girl Who Was Plugged In.” She’s also a study in the projections of others (if you know, you know). Anne Rice. I… have been coming to realize that I read Anne Rice at an impressionable age. I think I trailed off after Queen of the Damned, but… yeah. Ursula K. Le Guin. When my father was stationed at Hill AFB in Utah I basically lived in the Young Adult section of the Ogden Public Library, and I snarfed down every Le Guin book they had. My favorite is The Left Hand of Darkness, but I really love The Dispossessed, too.

Who are some of your favorites, and why?

Novel in Progress Query Draft

All Abraham has ever wanted is connection: connection to his family, connection to his Jewish faith and community, and connection to an audience with whom he can share his love for the violin. But almost two hundred years ago, his musical patron turned him into a vampire without his consent, despite the patron’s own sire being a former Inquisitor. Abraham has been running from his grand-sire ever since, and his grand-sire has been trying to kill him ever since. As for connection, vampirism is a significant barrier to Judaism, and hiding is bad for one’s musical career. And constantly picking up and moving is bad for one’s love life. At least pets are portable.

But now that Abraham is in love with a mortal woman, he’s stopped running to honor his wife’s family and community connections, despite his own growing fear of mortality in general and outliving his loved ones in particular. Will he convince his wife to become a vampire as well? If he does, she can’t have the children they’ve both always wanted, and if he doesn’t, he’ll only have half a century with her at best before the inevitable. And if he turns her without her consent, he loses her for certain.

And about those children… what will they be? Vampires are only created one way—even if they’re pets—but that doesn’t guarantee that his genetic children will be human.

What do you think? Any suggestions? Any volunteers to beta? 😀

Novel Update

Quick Aside: Locus briefly mentioned our reading at WisCon.

So! Novel update! According to Scrivener, it’s 99,000+ words; according to Word it’s over 100,000 words. NICE!

Where I am: So, I now have three POV characters, and the consistent feedback I’m getting is that one isn’t getting enough love, so I’m pondering expanding her bits. I’m percolating on that right now. I was a little distracted by GETTING A CEILING and assembling my new bed. Also my writer’s group has two more chapters to read, and then it’s probably beta reader time. After I expand Destiny’s bits, of course.

By the way, do you want to beta read? I’m going to need probably more than one round, so stand by. My book has had a professional developmental edit, two rounds through the writer’s group, and lots of self-edits, but has not had line edits or proofreading. I’m going to start including non-spoilery snippets and drabbles in my newsletter, by the way.

I do still plan on querying agents, but am mildly alarmed by the agents that say “no vampires” or “I LOVE smoking hot sexy alpha vampires!” because neither really suits my book. 😉 I do have vampires; one is a nice Jewish boy and Crazy Cat Man and the other is prissy and straight-laced. (Also people are welcome to read him as anything from homoromantic ace to gay.) So… let’s just say that I’m weighing plans B and C.

What social media do you think I should be on?

This has been a vexed question for me for some time now! I asked a buddy who’s in marketing and she didn’t know, either.

So, as some of you know, I deleted my first Facebook a few years ago. I really enjoyed it, but I was also very angry about Cambridge Analytica, and in the wake of the 2016 election I was basically angry about everything. I really loved Facebook at one point, and I’m back and am really enjoying all the people that I’ve known since 1995 on Facebook, but… ???????

Twitter: I’m watching the Twitter Shenanigans with some dismay, since every “how to market for authors” says “If you are an author you NEED Twitter! the entire publishing industry is on Twitter! if you’re an author and aren’t on Twitter you were clearly dropped on your head as a child!!!” I’m not going to go into the long involved All About Twitter because Scalzi does it better.

I do not have a Hive, Bluesky, Threads, or… whatever else.

I have a Mastodon! but have a lot of trouble luring my friends there. I have Goodreads (because of course I do!). I have an Instagram and a Tiktok and a sporadic YouTube that are mostly for silly cat videos. I’m pondering Tumblr. If you want to know if I’m on the same social media site you are, check my contact page.

What social media do you think I should be on?

I suppose that any social media post is incomplete unless I acknowledge the universal truth that the best social media is the social media your friends are on, and that any social media that has a bazillion features and is secure and private and [fill in cool thing here] is pointless if no one is using it.

(I should probably also add that I have an RSS feed and a newsletter…)

AUDIOBOOK IS HERE

My audiobook is LIVE and available RIGHT NOW! You can get your copy here.

Would you like a review copy? You can apply for one here. I have codes for both the US and the UK.

I got the incredibly talented Kyle Akers from the No Sleep Podcast to read it, and he’s AMAZING. Long=time friends might remember him as the guy who originally read “Saving Alan Idle” on Escape Pod, back in the day. I was so excited to see him using it as a sample on ACX! So he was my first choice, and… YES HE IS PERFECT.

ANYWAY. AUDIOBOOK IS HERE. ENJOY!