Smooth sailing with our vampire pirates 🏴‍☠️

As you read this newsletter, I’m in the hospital: knocked out and getting an endoscopy. So, ha, suckers! You are still experiencing 2026, and I, for a brief but glorious couple hours, am entirely not experiencing it 😉

Obviously not much writing is getting done today. But it has been a good couple weeks for Blood Depths. Caaisho is really letting me know her voice—meanwhile, I’m not putting her through the easiest time, so it’s very kind of her to be willing to work with me at all 😂😭

I’m sure I’ll be talking about this endlessly once the book comes out and I’m doing the promotion for it, but it’s on my mind now so I’ll just natter to you about it for a while: Caaisho is going to have a very different to introduction to the world of the am’r than Noosh did, and I think it’s very important.

Noosh had a very romantic (or at least intensely spicy) intro to the am’r, because Sandu/Vlad was feeling all nostalgic and finally ready to fall in love. But that cannot be the way all my protagonists discover the am’r underworld.

✔️ For one practical reason, my series isn’t romance. Yes, there are romantic sub-plots, but these books are the story of the personal growth of the protagonist—in a personal-growth-or-die kinda way—as opposed to the story of a relationship.

✔️ For a more fiction-centric reason, because vampires are monsters. And while there’s no lack of monster-fuckers amongst us kee 😉, I never want to get sparkly and forget that we are playing in the dark with violent mass murders. (I would add “inhuman,” but the am’r are really “more human than human,” at least in terms of flaws.)

It’s really important to me to balance carefully between the awareness and respect that since the Victorian era, vampires have been the “sex monster,” the alluring and seductive monster (who is the cause for the paranormal romance genre existing in the first place) but because before that time, vampires were the personification of death, death come back to walk amongst us—and those older vampires had no romance about them at all—they were pure horror.

So as more characters come into the series, some need to experience this side first. It can’t be all sexy strangers in evening wear seducing you to the dark side. And actually, the decision to go in the “vampire pirates” direction for the next book helped ensure my choice, because a pirate’s life is rough and violent and they have chosen a symbol of death as their own symbol: the Jolly Roger (although of course that was not the only pirate flag, but it’s the best known.)

“When someone tells you who they are, believe them.” Land-based vampires might not be forthcoming about being Death-in-a-tux, but seawater vampires are going to be a different breed, just like us kee landlubbers and sailors.

Still cooking my character to life

The latest Somali recipes I’ve cooked up were Mishkaki, which normally is done as meat-on-a-skewer, but since there were no skewers at my mom’s place, worked perfectly as meatballs—and which will be on very regular repeat in this kitchen going forward 🤤

And Bariis Iskukaris, a rice pilaf which was somehow even better than the Mishkaki, and which my mouth is watering for just looking at this picture

I wish I could put a plate through the computer for you, because it was that good, and I would love to share the experience with you 🍽️

I keep promising exciting news, but then delays and other annoying parts of publishing get in the way. So all that thrilling stuff is still just over the horizen, for now, but I can’t wait to fill this newsletter with excited announcements as soon as I can. For now, Blood Depths is sailing forward at a respectable amount of knots, and really, that’s the most important thing 🚤

Until two weeks from now, know that you are cherished readers, and I hope in all your endeavours you follow the guideline of “Be good or be good at it!” 😘

💭 I’d love to hear your thoughts, questions and feedback: drop me a note 📨

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