Weekend Writer: Camp NaNoWriMo Snippet Share

Hey all, Sam here.

All right…so I didn’t get the Weekend Writer post I was meant to post ready in time, so it will be coming tomorrow. For today then…how about a peek into one of my projects for Camp NaNoWriMo this July?

I’ve already done some sharing from Harbingers of Death, my Banshee/Valkyrie inspired fantasy. So for today, I’m going to share some from my cozy vampire fantasy story.

Tentatively being called Sink Your Teeth Into Some Good Books, this story follows a bookworm who agrees to become a vampire because it means more time to tackle her TBR. With the financial freedom granted by her new supernatural lifestyle, she is able to read, and also to travel to all sorts of places that give off peak reading vibes.

I’m having so much fun writing this book. It’s very low stakes overall, and mostly is about a love of books and travel mixed with some found family vibes. It’s just really cute so far.

All right. Ready for the snippet? Remember there’s no editing from me this month, so it is a very rough draft. Here we go…

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Before

Oh no, oh no….not again. Shit, once again I’ve lost track of time…and once again I am going to be late to book club. Maybe it was a bad idea to join three different book clubs, but I just wanted to give myself a reason, an excuse, to make more space for reading in my life. And apparently, it was now coming back to bite me in the ass. 

Today’s book club was one held at Autumn’s house, and I still had like 40 pages left to read of the book. Hmm…maybe if I put the audiobook on 1.5x or 2x speed while in the car, I could manage to finish it on the drive over. Well…that’s if I could get my hands on a copy of the audiobook.

Would the book gods be with me today? Grabbing my phone, I swiped down to the Libby app and typed in the book’s title and waited. Yes, okay, great. Thank goodness we didn’t pick one of the absolute newest releases. There were still a couple copies available…and one of them was going to be mine for at least the next half-hour. Perfect.

It was just so frustrating that no matter how much I tried, no matter how often I read, I never seemed to get any closer to catching up on my TBR. Sure, a lot of authors only wrote one or two books a year, but since I read a whole slew of authors, it always seemed like the new releases and the back catalog were so much bigger than my completed books list.

Even reading a couple hundred books a year just wasn’t really helping. For every book I read, it felt like I added three to my want-to-read list. The endless dilemma of a bookworm. I needed more time and more money would probably help too. I borrowed from the library quite a bit, and I definitely shopped at thrift bookstores, but there was just something about the desire to have a bunch of bookcases and show off all of my books, my collection, my beautifully organized hoard.

I wanted to be able to read more, to travel to the incredible places mentioned in books–the places that actually existed anyway, to collect all kinds of beautiful exclusive editions. I wanted to have one of those bookish destinations, a place that would be a reader sanctuary. 

Mostly I just wanted to leave my current life of monotony and drudgery behind. Why did reality have to seem so awful so much of the time? 

I wanted a life of magic and adventure and at this point I didn’t care what I needed to do to achieve that desire.

After

Pausing in my reading, I grabbed the mug on the side table beside the chaise lounge I was reclined in and took a drink. Hmm…it had been sitting a bit longer than I preferred and the temperature was cooling. I would need to take a few moments to warm it up before I continued with my morning of reading. 

It was strange to think how much life had changed in the past five years, because yes, a lot had changed. And yet, there were still some things that were the same. I still had pretty much no shelf control when it came to adding books to my ever-growing TBR. And thus far, I hadn’t managed to eke out much more than an extra hour or two of reading each day…but things were starting to shift, and I had a feeling that a few deals were about to go through, deals that would give me all the free time in the world. 

My new life was about to prove to be quite worth the more consequential changes. The first few years had been rough, difficult, brutal, and occasionally terrifying, but I had survived them without drawing attention to myself. And because I had survived and done what was asked of me time and time again, I was about to be set free from the short leash I had been kept on until now.

Oh…did I mention that my lifestyle was now about to be paid for by a generous allowance, an inheritance for becoming a member of a very secretive and elite “family,” and all it had cost me was my life? That sounds a bit dramatic, I know, but don’t worry, I’m not dead. Well, I am dead, but I’m now a member of the living dead. A vampire. I became a vampire. 

And honestly…it’s not as bad as how some books make it out to be. Well, okay, most of the time anyway. There are times when it can be a little more difficult to manage. 

It’s still weird to think that I’ve been a vampire for three years now, after a year long vetting and initiation process. It’s weird to think that vampires basically having a hiring process to bring new blood into their ranks, but I guess it works well enough.

It started with a broad recruitment process, a call for blood donors, but unlike with the American Red Cross, this offer was to receive compensation for your donation. The offer seemed too good to be true, but after a lengthy research and vetting process, it was clear that it was a legit business. 

That led to a narrower pool of donors to be brought in for further testing and more blood donation. It paid well enough to let me purchase some beautiful new bookcases as well as some wonderful exclusive releases for some of my favorite books. How could I refuse that? It was worth it.

After nearly a year of donating blood, I received an invitation to apply and interview for positions within the company…with a much better benefits package than the job I had been working. Plus, it was a hybrid job only requiring once a week trips into the office. So, more money, better benefits, and more time at home with my cats and my books? Sold!

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There it is. Feel free to let me know what you think in the comments.

I’ll have another Weekend Writer post up tomorrow. Thank you so much for stopping by, and I’ll be back with more geeky content.