INDIELIFE: Finally ☑️ An Item Off That Indie Author Endless To Do 📋

As part of the Blood Eternal audiobook release, I’ve been getting reviews coming in. While chatting with one of the reviewers, he pointed out that it would be good to have the Glossary of the Am’r Language and Index of Non-English Phrases (that are in the end of the paperback and ebook versions of all the series books) uploaded to Audible.
This is something I’ve been intending to get around to for literally years, but it has just never has moved up the Indie Author Endless To Do List high enough to actually materialize 🙄

So I wrote back to the lovely fellow, thanked him for applying a boot to my ass in this regard, and now if you buy the novels on audiobook, those downloads finally come with them. (It should also work for you if you bought them before—but if you have any issues, hit reply to this email and I’ll shoot you over the PDF directly!)
Here is the review of Blood Eternal:

🎧 Listen to Blood Eternal at Audible 🎧

🎧 Listen to Blood Eternal at Amazon 🎧

🎧 Listen to Blood Eternal at Apple 🎧

RAVENLIFE: When Shit Gets Real, But You’re Not Fictional…

So far, I’ve written about stuff from my past. Today, thanks to a chest-thumpin’ idiot, you get brought into “a day in the life of Raven” as of last weekend. 🍿
For those of you who are new here, recently I’ve had to move in with my mom, as she is dealing with age-related memory loss. I haven’t been writing about it much— it would scare all of you off if I really went in-depth on how hard this is—but I am at the moment not living with my partner, Trent, and we are grabbing time together when we can get it.
Trent had come out to do a special weekend hike with Archie and me.
As we pulled into the parking lot, we saw a man. We didn’t see the off-leash dog he was letting just wander around the parking area until after Trent had almost hit it, due to neither seeing nor expecting a dog to be there. It’s understood that you don’t have dogs off-leash in the parking areas around here. (It’s also basic common sense, but common sense is not as common as one would prefer.)
As we exit the car, both upset about that close call, the man yells to Trent, “Whatcha doin’, TRYIN’ to hit my dog?”
This was not the correct thing to say, to either of us. Trent responded, “What are you trying to do? Get your dog hit by letting it run around the parking lot off-leash?”
“Oh, Big Man are you? That’s fighting words! You wanna fight?”
“Sure.” For those of you who don’t know Trent, he is my main resource for choreographing the fight scenes in my books. He is practiced in a number of martial arts traditions, and has never not been in-training since he was a little kid. Trent is not looking to start a fight. He is, however, perfectly happy to finish one, as a salutary lesson: “Don’t start none, won’t be none.”

Trent showing me some moves for That Lesbian Vampire Pirate Story fight scenes

I at this point have Archie tucked under one arm, and have moved to a safe distance to give them room if they are going to get into it. I have my phone out, because Trent, being Black, will likely need evidence that he didn’t start the fight and did not use unreasonable force during it.
Trent meanwhile, has already prepared himself for the fight. He’s assessed the guy, guessed at what he will do for an opening move, come up with a plan of response, and decided the exact level of pain he’s going to put the guy through for being a loud-mouth bonehead who endangers his own dog. He is just waiting for the guy to take the first swing, because he is Black and the guy is white, and he needs to be able to tell the cops that he did not start the fight.
But the guy doesn’t want to fight. He just felt he had to be, as he put it, a Big Man, but he doesn’t really actually want to exchange blows. Every time Trent relaxes out of stance and starts to move away, the guy goes, “That’s right, walk away, you know you can’t take me on!” and so Trent obliges by getting back into a fighting stance and saying, “I’m not moving away. Come here and fight.”
Now, I’m on day three of a migraine and the meds are barely touching it, and I just want to get on with walking my dog and my partner in the woods. I’m getting tired of this nonsense. So, Archie still tucked like a football under my left arm, I walk over to the guy, hold out my right hand, and say, “Give me the leash. I’ll hold your dog so you can go fight.”
The guy’s eyes got wide. He was not expecting this, especially not of a “girl,” who should at this point either be having hysterics or begging her partner, “Don’t do it, baby!” But while Trent was assessing his opponent, so was I. This guy was no threat to Trent. He was profoundly unlikely to get even one strike landed. And Trent was not so amped-up that he was going to lose control and hurt this chucklehead too much. This was a “safe” fight for Trent, and while the guy would be injured a bit, it was a “safe” fight for him, too. I was just tired of the whole situation and wanted it over, one way or another.
As I made this offer, Trent got back into fighting stance. “So he thinks he’s a ninja?” the jackass asks me. “Yes, he’s trained in martial arts,” I reply. “Hand me the leash so you can fight now.”
But the dolt is clutching his leash. He really doesn’t want to fight now. Trent said that I probably scared the guy more than he did, at this point, because I was “calm and a bit condescending,” as he put it.
The craven imbecile was clearly not going to do anything, so I went back to Trent, put Archie down, and we started to get back to our rudely interrupted walk. “Oh, yeah, walk away!” the blockhead yells after us.
I’d had it. I turn around, look him dead in the eye, and say, “You’re an idiot. And you lost.” He stares at me, stunned into silence. I turn my back. Trent and Archie and I walk away.
We saw him two more times on the walk, and he hid behind a tree each time, in that nonchalant, “I just happened to step behind a tree right at this very minute, it had nothing to do with seeing you,” kind of way.
Trent informed me, grinning, that I’d just done “epic girlfriend shit.” Which is hilarious, because if I tried to be “epic” I’d have failed humiliatingly. I just had a headache and enough of that guy’s toxic masculinity.
Which, I realize, is in it’s own way what Noosh does to survive the am’r. Except I don’t get the timely quips. Instead of what I said, Noosh would have turned around and shot off: “Fight or shut the fuck up. And your dog deserves a better human.”

Proud of both of my guys!

But I’m not a quick-witted fictional character. I’m just a tired gal with a headache and no more fucks to give. The real winner of this whole story—besides my partner Trent, who will always stand up to a bully—is Archie, who stayed calmly under my arm the whole time (despite the fact that I know for certain that he senses all emotions around him strongly) and who just trotted off with us without any reactivity after it was over. My Archie-boy is definitely a fictional character come to life! 💝

OK, I’ve got a novel to get back to writing! ✒️ See you in two weeks…and as always, 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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SHOP PAPERBACKS:

Blood Ex Libris

Blood Demands

Blood Eternal

Blood Triad

GET SOME SHORT STORY ACTION:

Interview with the Vagabond King

That Lesbian Vampire Pirate Story

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Grab the whole series in Amazon’s KU

Listen to the series as you do other stuff

I was going to put off the newsletter another week, but then it would throw off my usual schedule, so I decided, you know what, fuck it! Let’s just have the newsletter this week, despite the extra one last week! Go crazy like that!

And I do have a funny story to tell you. And it just happens to fit in the new section…

INDIELIFE: Who’s the bitch who got featured? 😁

Just as I was starting to pull together the Blood Eternal marketing stuff, I saw a note from Publisher’s Weekly Booklife, offering authors a chance to submit a piece for their new segment, “Behind the Story.” So one afternoon, when I had an awkward period of time between my mom’s appointments, I bashed one out, polished it up, and sent it over.

And then I didn’t hear back. Not even a confirmation of receipt. Ah well, I thought, I can find a way to recycle it. Such is the life of an indie author. We write stuff that gets rejected all the time, and eventually (and often unexpectedly) find a good place for it.

And then the next issue of the Booklife Report comes out. In the header it says, “A Vampire Series Evolves.”

“Godammit,” I mutter to myself, “Who’s this bitch author who got featured when I never even got a confirmation of having received my piece?!”

And I open the email…and they actually had run the piece I’d written and hadn’t bothered to let me know it was accepted and running in the next edition 😂

I’m still chucking about that. Who’s the bitch who got featured? Me, I’m the bitch who got featured 🦚

Go read the full thing HERE

And now, poll time! You know you wanna…

Don’t forget to go grab your copy of the Blood Eternal audiobook, which is available on Audible, Amazon, and Apple Books:

Where in the world is Caaisho?

I am indeed cranking along as best I can with Blood Depths. Caaisho has left Trinidad now—in less-than-willing company with our favorite Trinidadian pirate—and is now half-way across the Atlantic. I’m so excited about Caaisho’s part of the story. And Noosh’s. This is going to be such a good book!

RAVENLIFE: Ironical beginnings…

So, since I’m now feeling really free to talk about my life with a chronic illness (and thank you all again for wanting to hear the good, the bad, and the ugly—it means so much to me!) so I wanted to start in with an early story about becoming chronically ill.

At first, no one knew what was wrong with me. Almost one had heard of CFS, and the formal title of Myalgic encephalomyelitis was a decade off. When I first got sick, there was actually some senator somewhere in the middle of the country who was trying to put into law that CFS was hypochondria, not a “real illness.” My father informed me that I was “afraid of life,” and so I was staying in bed pretending to be sick so I wouldn’t have to face my fears. (I didn’t bother to tell him that since I was 17, all I wanted was to be out of bed—and out of the house!—and going on dubious and unwise adventures and living life to its teenage fullest.)

Being 17, I didn’t want to have some stupid, boring illness. And I certainly didn’t want anyone to know I had some stupid, boring illness. I’d been getting so many blood tests that I had track marks on the insides of my elbows, so I started wearing short-sleeve shirts to school and walking around with my arms twisted slightly outwards, in hopes that people would think I was a junkie, because that seemed “cooler” than having some stupid illness.

Eventually they ran out of blood tests. The last one was for Epstein-Barr Virus, which is one of the viruses that can set off ME/CFS (like COVID can end up as Long Covid). The doctor actually said to me, “Let’s hope it’s not this, because there is no cure for it…”

Ding! Ding! Ding! I won the door prize! A lifetime of uncurable illness! Woohoo! 🏆

You can imagine, since I thought being a junkie was more acceptable than being chronically ill, that I did not tell anyone about my diagnosis. I just showed up to school twice a week for half-days (when I could do even that) and tried to be as mysterious as I could be. “No illness here! I’m just inexplicably absent a lot. I’m skipping class! Yes! I’m a juvenile delinquent! Or becoming a vampire…! Something cool!” 😎

Meanwhile I did my schoolwork from bed, and my grades turned to straight ‘A’s—it turns out that I was both distracted by being in class and bad at tests, but if you gave me the books and left me alone I could basically teach myself. (I needed a math tutor, but that was it.) And since I was too sick to walk to the library, and I’d already read everything in the fantasy section of the home library, I hit the science fiction section and fell head-over-heels in love with Robert Heinlein and Samuel Delany and the genre in general. Indeed, I had always planned to write a science fiction novel, not a vampire novel at all! 🙄

Here I am about age 17 on a boat. How thematic and everything! You can see how sick I am, though… And really not sure about that scarf…

The amusing conclusion to this story comes from when I went to my five year high school reunion—to do what I called a “victory lap,” since I had moved to San Francisco, was at that point married to a woman, and felt like I was far, far cooler than the people who had bullied me in middle school.

I went to check in as I entered the high school cafeteria, and the gal looked up at me and said, ‘Oh! Raven! Hi! You’re the one who was chronically ill, right?”

So, despite all my best efforts to come off as a juvenilely delinquent junkie (which since I knew there was a rumor that I’d slept with every guy in the school*, seemed like a do-able rumor goal), somehow people had known all along about my damn illness. The thought that I’d hadn’t gotten away with being anything but sick shook me.

(*at the time I was having trouble getting a boyfriend, so the irony of that rumor was truly not appreciated. I felt that if I was going to be called a “slut,” I should at least have the enjoyable sexual experiences to go along with it.)

But I only stumbled for a second. Soon I was sauntering around the cafeteria telling everyone about my glorious life in sin-tastic San Francisco. In the end, the illness hasn’t kept me from achieving the “coolness” I longed for at age 17. I wish I could go back and tell that poor sick girl it was going to turn out OK, at least in that regard.

It’s been a few emails since I expressed my appreciation for you all. Thank you for staying subscribed, staying engaged, and staying supportive of my author journey. It’s because of YOU that I am able to keep bringing you the stories of the am’r. You are the bestest and I routinely brag that my readers are the finest readers any author could hope for 💝

OK, I’m going to now leave you alone for the usual period of time—and I really mean it this time! 😂 See you in two weeks…and as always, be good or be good at it! 😘

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

💞 Enjoying this newsletter? Forward to a friend! They can sign up here.

SHOP PAPERBACKS:

Blood Ex Libris

Blood Demands

Blood Eternal

Blood Triad

GET SOME SHORT STORY ACTION:

Interview with the Vagabond King

That Lesbian Vampire Pirate Story

SHOP EBOOKS & AUDIOBOOKS:

Grab the whole series in Amazon’s KU

Listen to the series as you do other stuff

You’re getting this newsletter a week early because today is PRESS RELEASE DAY for the Blood Eternal audiobook and I didn’t want you all to have to wait a week with this exciting news

Here’s the official press release

And here it is in pretty picture form, if you prefer:

Click here to see all the carousel

👉 Here’s the link to pre-order it on Audible! 👈

And this takes us directly into our new featured section:

Indielife: Why have you released it only to Audible???

Those of you who don’t use Audible/Amazon for audiobooks will notice that we didn’t do the release “wide,” but exclusively to Audible.

While we are only doing this for the first three months, there are very good (for some value of “good” 🙄) reasons to do so.

If you release your books as “Audible Exclusive,” you get paid out 70% of royalties. If you publish your audiobook “wide” (to all platforms) then Audible pays you a mere 35% of royalties. Now, you might think, “Well, the income from the other platforms will make up for that.” That’s what I thought, when I decided to go wide for the first three audiobooks I made…

However. It doesn’t work out that way in real life. The combined income from Libro.FM, Chirp, Overdrive/Libby works out to less than $30 twice annually, which just doesn’t come near to the income that Audible/Amazon yields.

So now we hit the ethical quandary place. My whole soul wants my audiobooks to be available in libraries, and through Libro, who supports indie bookstores. And in general I am anti-monopoly. So that’s what I want to do.

But if I do that, I don’t make enough money to pay off my investment in making good audiobooks. Making audiobooks isn’t cheap, and I have taken the most expensive path because I’m an audiobook person and I couldn’t make an audiobook I wouldn’t enjoy listening to. (And that has led to getting to work with Amber Fuckin’ Benson, which make it one of the best decisions of my life, as she has brought Noosh to life better than anyone else could.)

So, having started by going the ethical route, and paying the price for it, my publisher and I have decided to walk the “middle path” this time. We are going to start Blood Eternal out as an Audible Exclusive, and make the best royalties from the early sales burst.

Once that plateaus—as it sadly inevitably will—we will take Blood Eternal wide (and make a big fuss about it, so that people who have been waiting can ask their libraries to get it through Libby). My income will drop precipitously…but my soul will be happier about things 💖

And this is the thing about being an indie author. (Or, like me, someone who works with a small publisher who is willing to work with you about business decisions.) If you are an author with a bigger publisher, you have made the decision when you signed the contract that you are aligned with their ethics, and then you don’t have to think about it further. But for me, I am having to wrestle with ethics for every decision no matter how big or small. And that is really exhausting and frustrating—no matter what, you feel like you have chosen wrong every time.

So by going this middle road—start exclusive, then go wide—I am hoping that for once I will feel like I made the right choice as both a business woman and a person who holds her ethics strongly 🛣️

If you don’t fancy the idea of having to play this game with your livelihood, I strongly suggest you keep submitting your manuscript to agents and publishers and try to get trad pubbed. Indielife is all about these kinds of tough choices and frustrating outcomes.

Anyway, here’s me having a cupcake to celebrate!

No Ravenlife Segment today

I’m skipping the Ravenlife section today because I want to spend that time on working on Chapter 7 in Blood Depths, and I don’t think any of you will argue with that decision. But I do have a lot of plans for future features and honestly kinda excited about this new part of the newsletter—so thank you all for requesting it!

I’ll be back in two weeks with a more usual newsletter. In the meantime, if you are not an Audible user, feel free to email me if you want to be put on a list to be the first to know when Blood Eternal goes wide…

OK, I’m gonna go write! You go read the press release and/or pre-order Blood Eternal at Audible (if you use that platform) and then go be good or be good at it! 😘

💞 Enjoying this newsletter? Forward to a friend! They can sign up here.

SHOP PAPERBACKS:

Blood Ex Libris

Blood Demands

Blood Eternal

Blood Triad

GET SOME SHORT STORY ACTION:

Interview with the Vagabond King

That Lesbian Vampire Pirate Story

SHOP EBOOKS & AUDIOBOOKS:

Grab the whole series in Amazon’s KU

Listen to the series as you do other stuff

Hey Fabulous Readers! 💖

The poll in the last newsletter was instructive: those of you who responded said that you wanted to know more about being an indie author, and more personal stuff about me. So I shall pay attention to your desires and restructure things a bit, going. I will start newsletters with the indie author section, and put the personal section beneath it, so you can easily get to what you want to read 😊

And hey, here’s a NEW poll!

INDIELIFE: I hate all of this…But new covers coming!

So the last six or so years have taught me that my books sell best at events/conventions/goth markets—basically, anywhere I can talk to the customers about the books. I have had exhausting but exhilarating days where I sold a book to almost everyone who walked past. So I know that the series can build an audience who is enthusiastic and excited for more. (This would be YOU. And thank you for that!)

However, Amazon sales have always been dismal, and continue that way. And as much as I hate-hate-HATE it, I cannot make it as a writer without the biggest bookseller on the planet.

I tried getting help two years ago with an Amazon marketing company. That was a serious waste of my time and money, and taught me a very real lesson that selling sprockets (or self-sealing stem-bolts) on Amazon is completely different than selling books. (Also, that company was very unprofessional and it was a deeply unpleasant experience.)

Last year I worked with an agency which was much better to deal with, who focused on helping authors who wanted to run Amazon ads. After six months, they had not moved the needle, and after kindly giving me money back, they shrugged and said, “Some books just don’t sell well on Amazon”

That was frustrating, because my books are a good, quality product, with covers that people adore, and there has to be a way to get Amazon readers to give them a try. I have redone the book descriptions, gone through every few months and updated the categories—this is a terribly important thing that no one tells you about, and Amazon keeps changing the categories and will actually penalize you if you choose the wrong ones. I have jumped through the flaming hoops to make A+ content (which I was assured would entirely change the situation. Spoiler alert: it did not.)

Two weeks ago, I finally found another company who helps authors with Amazon sales. And finally, I found people with knowledge of how Amazon works, and years of experience selling books there. (I wish I had found them years ago!)

After a somewhat brutal first meeting, I have learned that my beautiful and unique covers are not selling because they are not what people expect to see when they look for books in my genre. And I do not have their attention like I do people standing in front of my table at a vampire market—they are standing in line in the grocery store or watching TV, anything but give it their full attention. So my books at first impression need to look like something they want to buy.

Now I can hear you say, “But your books are cross-genre!” That is exactly what I said, too. It was explained to me that we are looking for the most “forgiving” genre readers. For example, science fiction readers will read a science fiction book with a mystery in it, but mystery readers won’t read a book with a space ship on the cover. While I am an omnivorous reader (and most of you are, too) that rings all-too-true for me.

So the new plan is to look at best selling dark fantasy books and see what their covers have in common, and get new covers for the series that look exactly like that.

It breaks my heart into tiny pieces, and goes against everything I believe as an artist—I want my works to stand out from the crowd, dammit! But I need to actually sell enough copies of my books to afford to keep writing them. So we are doing this (and more—stay tuned to this newsletter for those future items.)

For those of you who adore the Kwasi covers, do not fear. Now matter what else is done, I will keep selling the Kwasi covered versions in person, as they do very well in that context.

It has been a real kick in the stomach for me to hear all of that, and to know that I’ve been accidentally sabotaging my own sales by trying to offer something fresh and new (everyone always says the vampire genre is “dead”—so stop buying shit with the same damn covers already! ) but I do feel strongly this is the right direction for the series, at least in terms of increasing the readership. However, ugh, I still hate everything about it!

Where In The World…?

Now that I have made the announcement to you all about Caaisho, I can start tracking her movements through the novel along with Noosh.

This—um, infographic, I guess?—is slightly out of date, because I’ve just finished reworking Chapter Five, and Caaisho is a little further on her journey of meeting the am’r, but I really wanted to show where her story starts, so enjoy this hint, and there will be more in the next newsletter.

For those of you who have read Interview with the Vagabond King, you’ll remember that the infamous Boysie Singh is located in “Trinbago.” So could that mean that he makes a guest appearance in Blood Depths…? Oh, com’on, you know me! No way I could pass that opportunity up 😂

Anyway, if you haven’t read it, it’s still only .99¢ on Amazon. Although it doesn’t seem to sell well at that price point, so I’m thinking about raising it. Which means now is the best time to grab it, before is gets more expensive!

I’m still doing my “get to know your character by cooking the foods she grew up with” thing

And maaaaan, does it beat any other sorts of research 🤤

Instagram post

The above video is me making malai kismayo (Somali fried fish), curried cauliflower, and the delicious flatbread muufo. I cannot begin to express how delicious Somali foods are. All the recipes I’m making are from Soo Fariista / Come Sit Down: A Somali American Cookbook and if you cook, you need to get it.

Oh! In making the above reel, I discovered Somalian funk band Dur-Dur Band (who had an album called “Mogadisco” which I think may be the finest album name in all of time and space) so now I don’t just have new flavors for my mouth, but new ones for my ears as well 🎧

RAVENLIFE: You want in…❓

Since there are a bunch of new readers here, I should mention again that I have Myalgic encephalomyelitis/chronic fatigue syndrome and I’ve had it since I was 17, which was, uh, a minute ago 😉

I had written a whole long thing about my life history of having that chronic illness, but it was super depressing and I’ve just deleted the whole thing…

There is no way to write about ME/CFS without it being tedious and miserable, because that’s what having a chronic illness is. I have the damn illness and I myself can’t stand reading other people writing about it, so I can only imagine how much non-chronically ill people don’t want to read a whole long thing about it 🙄

How do I let you all into my life more, however, and not explain it? It shapes every decision I make, every action I take (mostly actions I don’t get to take, that is) and how I plan both my life and writing career

When I post images to social media, it’s of me getting out and living life. But then I don’t post the images in the 1-3 days following, where I “pay for” my reckless expense of energy—or spoons, for those in the know 🥄🥄🥄

I actually took a picture of me crashed in bed the other day, to see if I could make it interesting. As you see, it is not particularly interesting…but this is as “real” as it gets!

Who wants to see pictures of me in bed feeling exhausted and in pain for three days running? Absolutely nobody. A chronic illness is not something useful for social media, the way recovering from a broken leg would be. With the latter, you can post pictures of the cast being put on, the cast coming off, inspirational pictures of you at physical therapy, and then eventually, a tearfully grateful post about how you are back to normal and what a journey it was.

I don’t get that. My illness looks the same every day. I can post the things I get done despite it, but after those triumphs are an unknown period of recovery for having inevitably pushed too hard, and we are back to me lying in bed, feeling miserable, hoping the “crash” won’t last too long. There is no feel-good story to attach to my invisible illness, and to tell the honest truth would scare most followers away—if only from sheer boredom 🙄

So there is a real temptation to only let you into the pretty, shiny parts of my life, but I would like to actually be honest and show the whole picture somehow…

Anyway, I will be working on how to give you the “full Raven experience” in the coming newsletters, because the fact is that I have learned a lot about managing a chronic illness since I was 17, and I have managed to have a rich life around it/despite it. And I have lots of stories to tell!

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

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

💞 Enjoying this newsletter? Forward to a friend! They can sign up here.

SHOP PAPERBACKS:

Blood Ex Libris

Blood Demands

Blood Eternal

Blood Triad

GET SOME SHORT STORY ACTION:

Interview with the Vagabond King

That Lesbian Vampire Pirate Story

SHOP EBOOKS & AUDIOBOOKS:

Grab the whole series in Amazon’s KU

Listen to the series as you do other stuff

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 📨

💞 Enjoying this newsletter? Forward to a friend! They can sign up here.

SHOP PAPERBACKS:

Blood Ex Libris

Blood Demands

Blood Eternal

Blood Triad

GET SOME SHORT STORY ACTION:

Interview with the Vagabond King

That Lesbian Vampire Pirate Story

SHOP EBOOKS & AUDIOBOOKS:

Grab the whole series in Amazon’s KU

Listen to the series as you do other stuff

Before we start, I’ve been working on the backend of this newsletter to improve deliverability, as for some of you it’s been heading right into the ol’ spam filter. Please add rb@ravenbelas.co to your contacts, so you don’t miss any of the really exciting updates that are coming this month…

Hey Fabulous Readers! It feels like it’s been two months since the last newsletter, not two weeks 😂😭 But that aside, let’s get this rolling with an announcement! 📢

I have been considering pursuing graphic novel adaptations, and would love to speak with any professional comics artists who might be interested in discussing this project.

(I know what you are thinking, but sadly Kwasi is too busy already with other projects to take this on 😭)

So if you know any comic artists who would love to take on a dynamic vampire story with violence and history (and I have ideas on what to do with the spicy bits to make them compelling but not graphic), please pass along my info to them or theirs to me. Just hit reply to this email or send to rb at ravenbelas dot co

(This would seem like a crazy way to find people, but when I wrote about not being able to get the legal permissions to use “Bela Lugosi’s Dead” in my story “Finding Bela Lugosi,” it turned out that a wonderful reader of this newsletter was working in that industry and helped me make it happen. And I know that many of you who read this are fantastically talented in your own rights and have extremely cool friends, so from that perspective, it’s just the right place to start 😎)

Research with your tastebuds 👅

As you may recall from the last newsletter, the new character of Caaisho was announced, with some gorgeous art by Kwasi. Caaisho is a Somali-American woman who is about the come head-to-head with the am’r—and neither she nor the world of the am’r will ever be the same again…

(For those of you who might be worrying, never fear, Noosh is not going anywhere! Well, she’s continuing on the journey you last saw her embarking upon, in the story “Teeth Are Bones” in Blood Triad, but you will absolutely be seeing her )

Obviously, for Caaisho, I need to do my homework and do it well, giving the character’s backstory the respect it deserves, and I have indeed done a lot of reading over the past many months…

Instagram post

One fun part of the research is that I’m cooking dishes that Caaisho would have grown up thinking as the “taste of home.” I was excited to find Soo Fariista / Come Sit Down by Wariyaa: Somali Youth in Museums — high school students who explore cultural preservation and history through food.

During the nor’easter last Monday, I made my first dishes from the cookbook:

Digaag duban (spicy baked chicken) & Maraq baamiye (okra stew)

And canjeelo, a pancake-like flatbread that soaks up the sauces perfectly!

I need to work on getting the spirals in the bread, but I look forward to getting lots of practice because they are so delish!

Canjeelo reminds me to mention again that in the Somali language, the “c” is not at all like English. So our new character Caaisho’s name should not be said with a hard “k” sound at the front of her name. Here’s some perfect practice for you!

The first two dishes came out perfectly and I loved the flavors so much that I can’t wait to eat my way through the cookbook. For the canjeelo, I need much more practice, and I have found a more complex version of the recipe that I am going to try next time.

I won’t fill this newsletter with recipes, but if you want to try any of theses dishes without buying a whole cookbook, email me and I’ll send you that recipe, with my notes.

Blood Depths Update

Chapter One is finally done! (Well, at least pre-editing “done.”)

This chapter has been a helluva thing to write. First off, it is told by Caaisho, and it’s the first introduction to her voice, so it’s gotta be great—no pressure! 😂😭

Secondly, it must kick off the story with Action, Baby! I personally don’t need an initial action chapter to get into a book, but I grew up with Robin Mckinley and Susan Cooper and Tolkien, et al, and I don’t mind doing an “ease on down the road” into a story.

But all the advice right now is that your first chapter must kick the reader in the face for people to not put it on their “DNF” list, especially in the genre sandboxes I am playing in.

I first wrote this first chapter years ago, right after I finished Blood Eternal (which was still titled Blood Ad Infinitum, back in those ancient days.)

Then, well, I left The Terrible Publisher, and Blood Depths got set aside for years while I republished everything, blah blah, you know that story.

Then this past summer I finally picked it up again, heavily retooled the first chapter…and realized I was not ready to tell Caaisho’s story, and I had massive research and rewriting to do. I proceeded to jump head-first into that 🏊‍♀️

Last month I cut everything that was in old Chapter One, and started it from scratch. I wrote the chapter, finished it…and suddenly realized it was not an Action Chapter, but a very lovely “get to know the character” chapter. After swearing passionately under my breath (I was at one of my mom’s doctor’s appointments, in a waiting room), I selected the whole damn thing, moved it to Chapter Three (where it doesn’t need much rework to be perfect), and started writing Chapter One Yet A-Fucking-Gain.

I’ve lost count of how many rewrites that is, but honestly we are getting up into Blood Ex Libris territory, where I did a huge re-editing pass every time I got a rejection letter for five long years 🙄

Anyway, I am very excited about this shiny new Chapter One and I hope it will kick you in the face like THIS in a very satisfying way

I have two huge news items that I want to write about, but cannot yet, until they finish working through the stage they are in (publishing is such a frustrating business!) so I am going to keep this newsletter short, and go rework Chapter Three to being exactly the chapter it needs to be. So until two weeks from now, know 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 📨

💞 Enjoying this newsletter? Forward to a friend! They can sign up here.

SHOP PAPERBACKS:

Blood Ex Libris

Blood Demands

Blood Eternal

Blood Triad

GET SOME SHORT STORY ACTION:

Interview with the Vagabond King

That Lesbian Vampire Pirate Story

SHOP EBOOKS & AUDIOBOOKS:

Grab the whole series in Amazon’s KU

Listen to the series as you do other stuff

We started the annual Villantine’s Day celebration with the Baddest Bad Guy of the series: Kurgan. As we ramp up to releasing the audiobook of Blood Eternal this year, I wanted to bring back the first batch of Villaintine’s cards back for a rematch ⚔️

The winner last time was “The things I’ll do to your heart, Valentine” — and while I do love the threatening nature of that one, I also love both the other options just as much…

The results from the first round…

Also, there are a lot more readers of this newsletter now than when I first ran this poll, so I think it’s only right that I run this one again, and let our new friends have their input on this deeply important matter. So here are your choices:

OK, now, here’s the poll. Let the best card win!

If you would like any of the images to send to friends, just let me know and I will send you the image, sized for easy email sharing 💌

I’ll announce the winner in the next newsletter, so stay tuned to this great channel 📺

Something kinda exciting has happened 💥

I now have a wee guest spot over at Warren Ellis’ newsletter (the comic book writer, novelist, and screenwriter), sharing “Raven Belasco’s Bizarreries” every week. His newsletter is one of the few I make time for regularly (along with Cecilia Tan’s and Tiffany Trent’s) so I recommend it highly to you.

This is the first one! Follow Orbital Operations to read the further ones!

Book Recommendation: Bound by the Blood 🩸🩸🩸

Two members of The Big Glasses Brigade 🤓

So, you all know my life has been subsumed by becoming the caregiver to my mother and needing to move in with her for the foreseeable future. But I did manage to get out yesterday to my salon for a very overdue haircut and color, and then after that to Cecilia’s book launch, which was conveniently at my beloved Pandemonium Books

I just frickin’ adore Cecilia. She is one of those people I can talk for hours with and then, when we have to go do other things, be sad because the conversation felt all-too-short.

Getting to be friends with Cecilia is one of the wonderful perks of having become an author. I’ve been a fan of C. Tan since, I dunno, college or right after? Pretty sure I found her in Blue Blood Magazine? This is a person whom I idolized from afar, and who I now get to be friends with?! I am a writer for many reasons … but the perk of getting to hang out with authors you adore is not to be sneezed at 😉

There was real excitement about this book, which is described as “An Urban Fantasy BDSM Romantic Suspense“ (so if you like those things, GO GET IT)

It’s on the top of my to-read pile, but you don’t need my review, because Cecilia has only gone and gotten a review from Anne Muthafuckin’ Rice’s son (I’m what you could call painfully jealous) and I probably couldn’t do a better review than this anyway:

If you haven’t voted, scroll back up and do so! And until two weeks from now, be good or be good at it!

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

💞 Enjoying this newsletter? Forward to a friend! They can sign up here.

SHOP PAPERBACKS:

Blood Ex Libris

Blood Demands

Blood Eternal

Blood Triad

GET SOME SHORT STORY ACTION:

Interview with the Vagabond King

That Lesbian Vampire Pirate Story

SHOP EBOOKS & AUDIOBOOKS:

Grab the whole series in Amazon’s KU

Listen to the series as you do other stuff

As you will recall from the last email, my entire life has been thrown up in the air, as I have moved in with my mom to become her caregiver as we try to get her to be able to walk again. More about that later in the email, but I have finally started to move my office into her home, and get set up to do direct sales from her house, and all the stuff an indie author needs 😮‍💨

So I can finally share our incredible new reader swag: Stained Glass Bookmarks!

Everyone’s favorite cover!

I am totally in love with this one!

I wanted to present these gorgeous bookmarks to you all set and ready to go, but I am missing one vital piece of information for our Shopify store: how much USPS will charge for shipping them! I’m used to dealing with getting the books out, but for orders of just these amazing bookmarks by themselves, I have no idea what it will cost 🤔

So it’s giveaway time! 🎁

The first three people who email me and request either the Blood Ex Libris or Blood Demands bookmark will get their order for FREE, and you’ll be doing me a favor, as I both need to find out how much they cost to ship, and also get to know the local post office where I’m now living.

🆓 Email me and tell me which bookmark you want – you might win a free one!

I honestly can’t tell which one I like best!

Argh! They are so good! 🤩

OK, that’s all the business stuff for this email, keep reading if you just want to keep up with me, or go on about your day 🙂

It’s been a FUCKING INSANE two weeks since last I wrote to you. I’ve moved from my house into my mom’s guest bedroom (and office!) The first week, she was in terrible pain, and everything was a huge, exhausting production, and I spent every moment of the day attending to her and trying to get her life back in some kind of order, as well as doctor’s appointments and PT.

At the end of the second week, due to some useful pain management, we are doing a little better. I am hopeful that I might be able to get a few hours each day to myself to write and do the other business of being a writer.

Never have I wished that the am’r would pay me a visit more. Seeing what aging is putting my mom through is terrible, and as rough and violent as the am’r world is, getting old as a kee is a billion times harder…

If you have elderly people in your life, give them a call and tell them that they are superheroes who kick ass each day in the face of all that an aging body is throwing at them, and how unhelpful health care can be, and how poorly society in general treats the elderly 🦸‍♀️

OK, that all said, next month is going to have some far more exciting emails coming out to you. Because our annual Villiantine’s Day has not been forgotten! And even more exciting news to follow that…!

Archie helping me write this newsletter on my mom’s sofa

Until two weeks from now, be good or be good at it!

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

💞 Enjoying this newsletter? Forward to a friend! They can sign up here.

SHOP PAPERBACKS:

Blood Ex Libris

Blood Demands

Blood Eternal

Blood Triad

GET SOME SHORT STORY ACTION:

Interview with the Vagabond King

That Lesbian Vampire Pirate Story

SHOP EBOOKS & AUDIOBOOKS:

Grab the whole series in Amazon’s KU

Listen to the series as you do other stuff

Hey Fabulous Readers!

Due to unforeseen circumstances, the January newsletters aren’t going to be quite as thrilling as I had planned. My Mom had a serious health situation back in October, and she isn’t recovering well. I needed to pack up myself and Archie and move in with her for a while to help her with physical therapy and all the stuff she needs to get back on her feet — literally!

However, this means I’m away from my office, and most of my time and energy will be going to helping out my mom, not doing cool stuff for the books. So all planned stuff has been abruptly moved to February, and thus the two January newsletters are not going to be packed full with all the exciting stuff that was previously scheduled.

What this means for you is actually not bad news, because I will only have my laptop with me, and there’s not much I can do on my laptop except work on my next novel. So in between physical therapy sessions and stuff, I will be full steam ahead on Blood Depths, without other business distractions getting in the way. Since I know this is what you all want most from me, well, like I said, not bad news for you!

I was thinking about what to do with these two “lost newsletters” for this month while I was walking Archie this morning, and I decided what I could give you during this time-period was a couple “getting to know Raven” deep dives, since that’s always something you Fantabulous Newsletter Readers seem to enjoy.

But first, for those of you who were too busy to go grab the Sandu Xmas story, it’s ready and waiting for you — and has gotten some great reviews so far 🥰

To start us off, here’s… How You Build A Bookworm

The seeds for my eventually being the writer you know today were planted very early. My mom read me Lord of the Rings when I was five years old, and it definitely gave me a standard of what to expect from reading, one that the public school system was not prepared for.

And I wanted to read! I came home crying from the first day of kindergarten, and my mom, very worried, asked, “What happened at school?” And I responded, “I didn’t learn how to read!”

Eventually, the alphabet had been banged into my brain, and I was reading sentences. I was not enjoying those sentences, because the school was giving me books like Gordon the Goat. Now, Gordan was not having The Battle of Five Armies or engaging with dragons, or visiting Lothlorien. As I recall, the highlight of Gordon’s day was eating a tin can. Not very compelling stuff.

The next family story about me and reading comes when my mom was called into school because I was failing reading comprehension, in first grade. They were giving us these cards with a story on one side, and questions about the story on the other side. I was answering those questions not just wrong, but like I was on drugs at that tender age.

Luckily for me, the first grade teacher cared about her students, and she had taken time to ask me some questions, and had figured out that I had read the stories on the front of the cards, thought they were deeply stupid, had rewritten them in my head to be better stories, and was then answering the questions based on my far superior narratives 😂

That was probably the last time my mom got called in for any issues with reading or writing, because it very soon became clear that I was having troubles with math, and that became the issue for the rest of my schooling. Since girls weren’t expected to be good at math anyway, nobody troubled to notice that I am dyscalculic. My mom was regularly told, “She can follow the logic of the word problems, then she just gets lazy with the math part.” 🙄

So math became something I dreaded and did as little of as possible, and reading became my escape.

I needed the escape because from second grade on, I was rated as a glasses-wearing nerd, a bookworm and general loser. I was picked last in gym, I had no friends, and basically was a living example of a character from Revenge of the Nerds.

The glasses really were the final nail in my social coffin…

I avoided dealing with those issues by reading every fantasy book that would hold still long enough, making no distinction between juvenile lit and adult fantasy novels. (Starting things off with Lord of the Rings had really ruined me for reading at my age level.) For a nerd, I got very bad grades, because during class I was often holding a fantasy novel under my desk and reading it instead of paying attention.

All of this, of course, was excellent preparation for being a writer later. I agree with Robert Heinlein that “Writing can be learned, but not taught.” I think the best thing anyone can do who wants to be a writer is to read voraciously, through all genres and styles of writing. Doing that not only exposes you to incredible examples of writing, but also shows you how to do every aspect of writing. More importantly, it also teaches you how NOT to do things. If you are reading something and think a character is intolerable or the plot is slow and uncompelling, well, there you go, there’s an example of how not to write! 😁

I could talk about this forever, but this is definitely long enough for a newsletter! For those of you who made it to this point, you are fucking amazing and I appreciate you 🥰

To all my readers, I hope your 2026 has started a bit more smoothly than mine, but at any rate, I look forward to being in contact with you twice a month in the year to come. Please feel free to respond to the newsletters (just hit reply, it’s that easy!) and chat with me about stuff. (There is starting to be a bigger readership, but I’m still at the point where I am accessible to you all. If my plans work out, there will come a day when you write to me and get a reply from my personal assistant who will tell you I appreciate your email but am too busy to respond personally — but since we aren’t there yet, take advantage of it 😉)

Until two weeks from now, be good or be good at it!

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

💞 Enjoying this newsletter? Forward to a friend! They can sign up here.

SHOP PAPERBACKS:

Blood Ex Libris

Blood Demands

Blood Eternal

Blood Triad

GET SOME SHORT STORY ACTION:

Interview with the Vagabond King

That Lesbian Vampire Pirate Story

SHOP EBOOKS & AUDIOBOOKS:

Grab the whole series in Amazon’s KU

Listen to the series as you do other stuff

This is it! The week of Halloween! I don’t know what you’ve been doing (possibly focusing on small wee issues in other aspects of life, not that there is anything news-worthy happening these days…) but as you can see from my previous September and October newsletters, this holiday has taken over my life for two months.

That’s OK. I chose this life when my subconscious presented me with a dream that would become the first words I wrote in Blood Ex Libris, and I chose it again when I pushed myself to write the whole book, no matter how hard it was (it was not the first novel I started writing, but it was the first novel I finished), and I chose it every day, because it would be vastly easier to get a normal day job that pays the bills, not trying to make it as an indie author in this cold and uncaring world.

Since I chose it every day—“Every day is Halloween”—here I am at the rewarding end of an intense and exhausting … well, let’s call it a “crucible,” in honor of the play about the Salem Witch Trials, and thus stay on theme 😉

I have a lot to get to in this newsletter, so let’s dive into the open top of the jack-o-lantern, shall we?

First Off Is Poll Results & This Year’s Halloween Costume Pictures!

The results of the “What book would you like to go on sale for Halloween?” poll was hands-down That Lesbian Vampire Pirate Story 🏴‍☠️🎉

So Archie and I both dressed in pirate garb, to celebrate That Lesbian Vampire Pirate Story. (He and I are both more pansexual than “lesbian,” but we hopefully got the “vampire pirate” part down 😁)

On the ultimate nerdy level, these images were shot at an SCA event, which provided a lovely wooden building that was reasonably a pirate ship. Of course, this did also mean that the attendees of the event were affectionately teasing me about being a pirate the rest of the day 😂 Here, for your enjoyment, are the results…

https://a.co/d/4xQgOMV

https://a.co/d/4xQgOMV

https://a.co/d/4xQgOMV

https://a.co/d/4xQgOMV

https://a.co/d/4xQgOMV

https://a.co/d/4xQgOMV

As you see, I saved the best for last, as Archie is really stepping up his role as “author’s dog” by now being the most compelling part of the marketing 😁 And as per your request, That Lesbian Vampire Pirate Story (in ebook) is dropped to ONLY 99c until midnight on October 31^st! I’m not planning to do this sale ever again, so if you do not already have your ebook copy, avast ye and grab yer plunder!

(If you want a paperback copy and think it’s unfair that only the ebook is on sale, email me and tell me you demand a sale on the paperback in the grand piratical tradition. I will send along a coupon code, because one must respect the Pirate Code!)

 Last Sunday was Pandemonium’s Spooky Geek Faire…

and let’s just say it reaffirmed that Pandemonium Books & Games is one of the best places in the world to vend. I love the staff at Pandy, and I love the people who frequent the store. “Freaks, Nerds, and Weirdos” was an MTV program back in the ‘90s, and it’s the people who I feel most comfortable around (being all three of those things, myself) and it pretty well describes the fabulous people who come through Pandy’s doors. So I knew that the people walking past the my table would enjoy all the elements of my books: the dark fantasy/horror genre to start, and then the working in of historical characters with nerdy Easter Eggs, my method of creating the am’r using both myth and science, the fantasy language I created for the series, and of course, Noosh being a librarian and loving books so much! (Also the queerness—there is much intersection of the queer communities and the geeky communities 🩷❤️🧡💛💛💚🩵💙💜🤎🖤)

My bestie came out to sit with me (and sell my books better than I can) and while I had intended to take a bunch of pictures, we ended up with only this selfie—but what more did we need?

Caffeined-up vampire pirates ready to sell you books!

The Art of Writing Vampires, with Paulette Kennedy

Last week I had a treat I’d been waiting for all spooky season, to discuss the art and science of writing vampires. If you missed it, click below for the whole discussion, in which I explain my “Build-A-Vampire Workshop” theory and bring up an old Romanian myth where vampires had tails…

Instagram post

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What’s next?

First and most important, the rest of the newsletters for this year will go back to having regular updates of my progress in the next novel. Yay yay yay! You don’t know how frustrating it’s been not to be working on that 🫤

But besides that, there are about to be two Very Big Announcements that I think will have you all very excited. I’ve been working on some stuff behind the scenes and not able to mention it (which is also frustrating 😂 ) so keep watching this space for more‼️

For those of you who have read this far, have an amazing Hallowe’en and please send me pictures of you in costume or your decorations! 🎃 Until two weeks from now, be good or be good at it!😘

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

💞 Enjoying this newsletter? Forward to a friend! They can sign up here.

SHOP PAPERBACKS:

Blood Ex Libris

Blood Demands

Blood Eternal

Blood Triad

GET SOME SHORT STORY ACTION:

Interview with the Vagabond King

That Lesbian Vampire Pirate Story

SHOP EBOOKS & AUDIOBOOKS:

Grab the whole series in Amazon’s KU

Listen to the series as you do other stuff