Exorcising the Slag: 2025 in Review
A vampire story without a sense of loss is just a gloomy power fantasy with a side of O-negative.
In my reckoning, this year started sometime in November 2024 when I broke through stagnancy and published a strange piece from Friday Perkins. With little actual plot, it stood out from the other skits around it, forming a disjointed journey through Friday’s mind, wherein she recovers the memories that had been stolen from her by Vladislaus Straud. Though her convictions are not always sound in reason, they are her own, and when she recovers what was once hers, it is again something to which she can lay claim and say that it belongs to her and her alone.
I tend to work the most feverishly through the long winter nights. Still, in late 2024, I was largely crafting my pieces on pen and paper, filling page upon page with my scrawlings, often striking out and removing entire passages before digitizing the material for publication. I tried my hand at humor when Mandarc failed to understand the concerns of his very human girlfriend, Yuki Behr. AVAEL finally followed her heart, bionic and caged as it had become. And Cedric found release in the darkness.
Straud Mansion would ring in 2025 and celebrate its last new year, but not until the old grievances were brought to the forefront. Between Davian’s disappearance, the threat of the Reveal, and amidst an ever growing rank of enemies, it became apparent that I had written myself into a corner. There were too many voices, all desperate to be heard. But Straud is one who is silent and patient, and when he’s had enough, he can, and will, summon the power necessary to obliterate a demon.
On February 14, I uploaded the last chapter of FPMC. These read-alouds followed in step with a disorganized dream I’d once had to create my own audio books. But with Cedric bidding goodnight to Kevin, now on the cusp of making the change in the world of which he’d always dreamt, I knew there was nothing more that these two could say to each other. After decades of friendship, brotherhood, and things unsaid, this was what made sense in this world: each of them returning to their own apartments, walking parallel paths forward, but never touching.
I had more to carve, but I had run out of marble.
Back in Black
I had, for a long time, been quite dissatisfied with many of my storylines. Many, dare I say most, lingered bitterly incomplete, and even the few seen to fruition stunk of a novice’s clumsy hand. Avaelle’s unhappy childhood brought a melancholy sense of longing to the beginning of the series, only to be abandoned for well over a century. Vincent’s saga was one of the few completed storylines, and yet the climax was rushed and concluded without a real sense of the stakes involved; I had built to an epic fight, and, at the last minute, slumped out with a whimper. There were certainly types of content with which I struggled, but I kept going, knowing I needed more practice.
But one question came back to me time and time again.
How did Cedric become a vampire? What was he like before he died? What of his humanity did he retain, clinging to his bones like perfume, and what did he lose irretrievably?
A vampire story without a sense of loss is just a gloomy power fantasy with a side of O-negative. Fine if that’s what you’re into, but that wasn’t the story I wanted to tell. For the vast majority of FPMC, none of my characters felt like vampires. The part where they were monstrous blood-drinkers conveniently happened during their off-hours, and while in the narrator’s spotlight they were shining beacons of impeccable morality. Was it true, in their bloodlust, that they’d never drained a creature and played at the skeletal hand of Death? Where was the Consent that I had been questioning since Cedric first rose unbidden to an endless vigil?
It didn’t add up. I had to start from the beginning.
The Convergent Eigenspace
The series, with an intentional nod to zero-indexing, begins with Book 0: What Time Cannot Touch. This installment details a beginning-before-the-beginning: the life of Cedric as a teenager before his descent into vampirism. In themes I had previously shied away from exploring, an intense, and sometimes uncomfortable, attention is paid to a young person’s initial conditions, and the inescapable fact that all subsequent events must evolve forward from the starting line.
As a man on the cusp of childhood’s end, Cedric is disaffected and aimless. He cannot put name to the persistent state of want that plagues his waking moments. Reeling from a boyhood wasted in the shadow of an impassionate, drug-addled mother, he enters adulthood in dire need of connection, but without the maturity to yet know what he lacks. In his deficiency, he remains estranged from those who could help him heal, while experiencing a subconscious magnetism toward the danger and neglect that feels as a familiar set of chains. When a supposed one-time drug run lands him behind bars, he trades the prospect of a life of crime for a night in jail.
But even safe from would-be exploitation, Cedric cannot rest. The closer he has drawn to New York City, the more he has understood the meaning of the City That Never Sleeps. His night terrors have become ever more frequent and distressing, and their remnants haunt his waking hours. Ever more persistent is the irrepressible suspicion that these images are more than just symbols and allegories; they may very well be as real as they seem.
Crashing Hard
If Cedric had been anyone else, in another story, maybe he wouldn’t have made the choices he did. Maybe he wouldn’t have followed a strange woman he’d never heard of back to Queens after she volunteered a thousand bucks to open his cell and set him free. Maybe he would have faced his shame and called the people he knew deep down in his heart already loved him, good people who would do anything to keep him safe and warm.
But maybe that would have required a strength he didn’t yet possess. For him to earn that strength, he would have to continue to grow.
From the Ashes
For five years, I wrote hundreds of FPMC skits from the perspective of an ever-increasing cast of characters. Everyone had a story to tell, and I thought what better way to explore that than to see things through their eyes. I thought Cedric was to be found in his world, and that was where I turned my focus. But in mid-2025, looking back at over 400,000 words, I found I had told many small stories, but I had never succeeded in telling the big story. With twenty-one FPMC ‘books’, each told from a different perspective, character growth progressed glacially, while plot advanced at breakneck speed, unfolding before all factions had time to react.
Those first few months stumbling at the keyboard with What Time Cannot Touch were achingly slow. Transitioning from free-flowing ink to the utilitarian precision of a keyboard was a tough sell, but where I lost the analog romance, I gained the ability to take my words wherever my phone or laptop could travel. Teasing ideas out of my mind was akin to fly fishing, and in the early days, I caught little, but I improved over the summer haze. Maintaining a single character’s point-of-view required attention I had not oft practiced. I could not simply switch to someone else when the weight became heavy; rather, like Cedric, I had to endure.
To add to the difficulty, I had left behind the style I had adopted for FPMC, a style that I had come to wear as a threadbare t-shirt. Adhering to a convention that was probably more fever dream than intention from its first incarnation, I had used a screenplay-inspired format for FPMC, setting dialogue apart from descriptive text as a way to avoid repetitive dialogue tags. But what had originally seemed like liberation had revealed itself as another kind of restraint, and the end result was sometimes fragmented and unnatural, reading neither like a television production nor a traditional work of literature. And of course there was the very real concern that my unusual formatting would drive readers away before they could even glean the ideas with which I wanted them to grapple.
Winter’s Bite
Finally, the format has begun to feel more comfortable and I have settled into some conventions to organize and structure the chaos. Each chapter is a set of digestible scenes, running 3,000 to 4,000 words in total. I’ve passed 43,000 words in my debut novel’s draft, with additional scattered sketches of pivotal scenes in the latter books. Emerging on the other side of FPMC, I can’t imagine returning to the old way; I’ve discovered I thrive in the planning. Knowing where I need to end up helps me find the pieces that propel me in the right direction. And once I know the reason why a scene needs to transpire, I can select just the right word to hold the others in their coherent melody.
Once you include specialized, technical, and archaic words, the English language is said to possess nearly a million words in its entirety.
And yet, as I pick apart the shades of their meanings and muse about their lyrical qualities, trying to place each one in its proper place and give every sound a space to shine, I can’t help but feel as if it’s still not enough.