Discover Dracula Found in its Entirety!
Look what National Poetry Month 2024 produced! Seriously, it was not my intention to write this book; I merely started out – a little late – to National Poetry Month, and was trying to come up with an idea for the remainder of April. Cue found poetry – always a brilliant exercise when needing inspiration. I love the digging through words written by another and seeing what I can come up with (without plagiarism). Trouble was, there was more to the book than could be fitted in during April – and so I carried on through May, and well into June.
Bram Stoker’s Dracula gave me the opportunity to retell the story in found verse. But I also wanted to share the verses in a slightly different way so I created short video clips (on ClipChamp) and uploaded them to YouTube and TikTok. YouTube is the best place to go to as it has the playlist in the proper order. All videos used free images, footage and music from either pixabay.com and pexels.com. Note I actively avoided the numerous AI images which appeared on those sites – and which I found somewhat irritating, being horrendous in number. 70 videos were created in all, most on the day I wrote the poem, one or two written ahead of time when I knew I would be away.
Whilst all the poems are free to read on these videos – I didn’t get around to voice overs – I have created both ebook and print versions. The ebook is a straightforward gathering of the poems in one place. But I also wanted to play with formatting in a print book and so the paperback has some wonderful images, again sourced from pixabay or pexels, but worked on using Affinity photo.
Plus I love to find brushes and used Affinity’s FX settings to create the sort of 3D effect seen below with the fly (warning, you might find a spider or two in the book as well):
As well as playing with formatting, there was also something else I wanted to examine – amazon’s ‘quality’ paper for colour. Everything I’ve self-published before, has been standard paper and black and white. So yes, this put the price up, but it created a very pretty book. Again, I’ve used a new project to learn something.
Dracula Found was a deep dive into a classic not read for some time, a reassessment of the original against so many modern versions. I don’t think I’ve examined a book that closely, at that word level, for some time. Whilst having to omit or skim over many aspects due to the nature of the medium in which I was writing, I feel it carries the flavour of the original Dracula. Above all, it has shown me this is really the story of Mina Harker, a strong and clever woman, whose role seems to have been diminished in the many retellings – to me, anyway.
The poems remain freely available to read online, but if you want a copy, you know where to find them (and I’ve added Dracula Found to my Poetry Collections tab).
The last thing I would say is thank you to everyone who read and commented as I ploughed on with the task I set myself. I think I would like to do it again with another classic, but for the moment I need to reduce my other self-imposed workload! (Darklings, ahem.)
