NEW YEAR, NEWSLETTER.

by Bee.

Welcome, everyone! I’m excited to finally start this newsletter and share it with people. I intend to post one of these every month, sharing personal and writing updates, as well as excerpts and recommendations of other artistic works, essays, etc., that have stuck with me. I will also publish a longer post each month, where I’ll like to alternate between longer samples of my writing (short stories, flash fiction, self-contained parts of larger stories, etc.), and more in-depth analysis of media.

I hope you’ll enjoy it! Let me know your thoughts.

ME, MYSELF & I.

Since this is the first newsletter, I thought I’d share a little bit about myself here. I was born in 1996 in Spain, where I’ve lived for the past 27 years, moving back and forth between my city and my hometown for my various temp jobs (paralegal in the city, farm work in the country, and camp counselor during some summers).

This 2023, after some really bumpy years, I finished my law & politics degree, and my long-term plan is to… keep studying (and working), this time with the goal of attaining a particular position as a public servant that will both give me a comfortable salary & means, and require me to travel a lot outside the country like I’ve always wanted. It’s not an easy position to attain (or an easy job to do once you attain it), and I anticipate it’ll take me a couple more years to get there, but right now it feels worth the extra effort, both for what it entails and for its perks.

For the first time in I don’t even know how long it feels like my life might finally be somewhat on track *knocks on wood*, and I think that’s going to mean good things for my more artistic side. I don’t think writing for a living is something I would want to do even if I could do it, but writing is certainly what I love doing most in the world, and I’m happy to say I’m moving forward with that too.

What do I write? Mainly fantasy, and speculative fiction in many forms; always directed at adult audiences, and always, always centered around women. The tone and specific subgenre varies, but it’s true I tend to work on the grim, melancholic side of things. If any of that sounds up your alley, you’ll find it here.

And just to tell you a few other things about myself… I do some amateur photography; I’m weirdly fascinated by owls; I want to re-learn how to play guitar; I love everything purple/lilac/maroon/etc.; I just started learning Arabic; and I am currently deep in the clutches of Detective Comics Comics.

WRITING WOES

My biggest problem as a writer is that, to put it bluntly, my focus is shit. I have no problem coming up with (what I personally consider) good ideas that get my creative engines going, but either something happens in my academic, professional, or personal life that must take precedence, or worse: I end up distracted by another idea –the issue, really, is keeping them at bay. Changing the way my brain operates is probably a lost cause, but I can try to adapt to the circumstances, course-correct, and do the best I can with what I have.

In the short term, that means I’ve taken the decision of putting a lid on my longest, multipart WIPs, saving them for a later date. It’s inevitable that I’ll still think about them, and I know I’ll talk your ears off with them at some point. But the goal for those this year will be to essentially kill my darlings: take a hard look at my stories, my characters, etc., and see what trees must be cut down to save the forest, so to speak.

My priority then will be the shorter passion projects I’ve collected over the years. First in line is a story I’ve thought a lot about this past month, and that I predict will stay at novelette/novella length: “Underground Elysium”.

It consists of an adult political fantasy/dystopia, told in third person omniscient. It originated from a joke during an ask meme in tumblr a while ago, of all things: I was asked to put two characters in either a Vampire AU or a Zombie AU, and from there the conversation veered into how a vampire could run a protection racket in a zombie outbreak… and the premise grew from there.

I’m not particularly interested in writing a zombie story, per se (although I have enjoyed some); but using an outbreak as a backdrop for the story sounded interesting. Eventually this nameless vampire became the visionary and tyrannical Lucretia, and this racket developed into this subterranean realm ruled by her and a matriarchal society of vampiresses who offered humans a choice between the risks of the exterior, or a life of servitude under them. Several decades later, Lucretia is well-established as a thrice elected Imperatrix… but a fierce political rival is raising against her. It’s election season again, and for the first time, Lucretia’s victory is not all but guaranteed.

It's that rival that I want to talk about right now: Dana, a younger vampiress. Lucretia is the protagonist of the tale, and Dana her up-and-coming antagonist. Dana once violated the most crucial rule of Lucretia’s new realm, and she was heavily –some argue disproportionately– punished for it. No one would’ve expected her to raise in the ranks as she did. But she’s charming and headstrong, and she has set out to avenge her humiliation at Lucretia’s hands.

I didn’t really have a plot in mind when I started developing the setting, or even when I first created Dana, but more and more she began easily filling the role of antagonist. I think Lucretia creating her own worst enemy due to an abundance of zeal is aptly fitting for her.

My plan for this month is to share a little bit of this story, specifically, to show you a window into what it was that happened between Lucretia and Dana all those years before the story properly starts, expanding from a shorter excerpt that I published and deleted a long time ago in a now inactive writeblr. Enjoy a short sample of what’s to come ^-^

The room was simple; artificial candlelight illuminated its dark walks, eerily bare except for a wooden cabinet by the left of the door and, of course, the woman chained by the right. Lucretia pursed her lips when she observed that, even if the bloodstains remained as proof of her punishments, Dana’s wounds had predictably healed. With the notable exception of the removal of her fangs, from which she still visibly ached to Lucretia’s satisfaction.

Beyond the dull pain that according to those sentenced with such fate would remain long after the gaps left in the four cavities scarred, what made the punishment so unique and so sparingly used was the utter shame that accompanied it. To remove such an essential tool from a proud predator not only greatly diminished the quality of their eternal life: it left them feeling bereft, castrated. Dana’s humiliation burned her from within.

RECOMMENDATIONS

• ONE BOOK: “The Sanguine Sorceress”, by Camilla Andrew. I recommend anything by this author (including her newsletter here!), but especially this novelette –for its tale of revenge, its opulent prose, and its lead woman, Serafina, and her corruption journey. I wrote a longer, non-spoilery review on goodreads here. I was hoping I could post some pictures of the paperback and its gorgeous illustrations, but I’m still eagerly waiting its arrival 😔. You can get it for yourself here, though!

• ONE COMIC: “Monstress” by Marjorie Liu, an ongoing epic fantasy series published in Image Comics. It’s delectably dark and gritty in a way that feels like it was made for me. Set in a matriarchal world inspired by early 20^th-century Asia, with a scenery of a costly war between several factions as backdrop, it centers around Maika Halfwolf, a teenage girl with a psychic link to an eldritch monstrosity, and the mystery that surrounds her very existence. It has incredible, well-constructed female characters, a gripping plot, and beautiful art by Sana Takeda.

• ONE ESSAY: “Blaming Daddy: The portrayal of the evil father in popular culture” by Dr Jason Bainbridge. A really interesting essay, that could be the jumping point to start a really poignant conversation on fatherhood and abuse portrayals in media (and for me, again, in the clutches of detective comics comics, its appearance on my tumblr dash was really well-timed).

I hesitated over whether to jump right into politics on my first newsletter, but well. It won’t be the last time; best to show what I’m about early on. If it’s going to alienate anyone, I rather it do it now so neither of us waste time.

Due to recent events, I do recommend reading "Israeli Practices towards the Palestinian People and the Question of Apartheid", a report written by Richard Falk and Virginia Tilley. It's from 2017 and thus a little dated, but it offers a clear view on the situation. I found the report immensely useful this past year, as I wrote one of my theses about this –both because of the conflict’s importance to international law and politics, my area of interest, and because I have family in West Bank and a personal stake in it.

A REQUEST

Right after first making this entry I heard about some issues pertaining the platform (it’s nazis. It’s always nazis). I’ll keep this post going, and use it in the meantime, free of charge, but I wanted to ask for any good alternatives to host a newsletter.

With all that, I wish you a happy new year! And feel free to recommend me other author’s newsletters ^-^