Seven Nights at the Afterlight is, perhaps tied with the Pirate Fantasy Standalone, the project that I've been chewing on for the longest. I began it back when I still wrote my first drafts by hand. I filled notebooks with hastily written chapters that I never looked at again after I started over for the tenth time. I've shown early chapters to my dad, my best friends, and more...and then scrapped them and started over again.
It's been through changes in cast, changes in setting, and many, many changes in plot. It's been a book, a Monster of the Week(ish) campaign, and now a serial. Along the way, I nearly gave up several times. There were points that I announced to my friends, "I'm shelving this. I can't make it what it needs to be." Part of me fears that I'll still give up now, with dozens of readers who have already expressed interest in reading it.
But I don't think so. I think once it's out there in the world, I'll probably be too anxious to quit halfway through. I would want to follow through for all of you, but most of all for myself. Because I think it's finally time. This story is what it needs to be, and it's ready to be shared.
So now, a week and a half before I release chapter one (and chapter two to my Ko-fi members), I want to talk about everything it took to get here.
Seeds of Inspiration
Usually, you need a seed to plant a tree. In the case of Seven Nights at the Afterlight, I needed four.
I remember sitting in the living room of my first apartment when the first came. I was twenty-two years old, seated on old red couch I had gotten for free from my aunt and uncle, in front of a large bay window half-obscured by overgrown bushes that the landlords never bothered to trim. My pen hovered over my notebook, the page dotted with a few lines of ideas, but nothing solid. A year ago, I had moved out of my small town with hopes of becoming a writer. Now, I realized that all my past projects had more or less fizzled out and I needed something new to work on.
I asked my friends for prompts. The one that stuck with me came from my friend. "Write about a vampire and a werewolf who are dating and keep arguing over the thermostat because one of them gets too cold and the other gets too hot." The mental image made me smile, not least of all because Sam had just moved in with the love of her life (eventually her wife) and I couldn't help but wonder if there was some real life inspiration behind the idea.
At the time, it was a short story, just a silly little thing based around those two characters. But it wasn't quite enough, and I stalled in starting it.
The next seed came from a phone call with a friend as we talked about Twilight and the genre of YA vampire books that had come out in its wake. "What I don't get," I said, "is how these vampires are able to go back to high school fifty times? Like who's making their fake high school transcripts?"
That joke spun out into the idea of a business - maybe a bar or a dance club - that served as a front for a fake transcripts business...specifically catering to supernatural creatures. Maybe they did doctor's notes for werewolves or connected them with potions made by local witches that could help with their transformation. The owner couldn't be a vampire or a werewolf. Someone neutral. A fae, maybe. Oh, and my vampire and werewolf girlfriends - they would fit in that world so well! And the story started to blossom from there.
The third seed moved in with the hipster pizza joint that opened up on the corner of my street, right next to the dive bar. It was open late, and even when I walked home from the bus stop after a night shift, the lights would still be on and people would still be seated outside with their pizzas. I went there a couple times when I didn't have anything at home and I could afford it. Once, I remember the words popping into my head, "Vampires love pizza."
At the time, I was really into webseries, so that was what I imagined: a YouTube series about a little pizza place that got a lot of vampire customers late at night. Wait, how would vampires eat human food? Wasn't that sort of the thing, that they could only drink blood? Okay, but what if part of their curse was that they could eat food, but it would never fill them? And even blood wouldn't fill them, it just came closer? What if the torture of being a vampire was constant, unending hunger?
Anyway, that's how Laurel came to love pizza and how I came to understand my creatures of the night a little better.
The final seed came after I had been working on the story for a couple years. I went to visit a friend in Philadelphia, and I decided I wanted to stay at a hostel for the first time. The hostel that I stayed at was such a vibrant, welcoming place where I met people from so many different places. It was a wonderful, and incredibly cramped experience that will always be a little rose-colored in my mind.
At the time, I had grown dissatisfied with the bar setting for Fake Transcripts for Vampires, as I called it then. It felt so cliche, but I couldn't think of what else to do for it. Until those four days in a hostel. It was a perfect solution. All different types of people crammed into one space? Check. Potential front for a fake ID business? Check. And it offered a sense of home that the bar setting didn't.
The Changing Cast of Characters
Sam is the oldest character in the story and has stayed relatively the same: a genderfluid fae who left an important role in the Summer Court behind them to live in the mortal world, even if it would kill them. A passionate musician who couldn't share their music with most of the people around them. A tragic character with a smile on their face. Probably my favorite, too, which makes sense as I've had them for so long.
Laurel and Phoenix came next. Both were sprung from textbased RPs that I had played in, but neither were exactly as they appeared in the RP. Laurel came from a "what if they were vampires" AU that a friend and I had of one of our ships. Phoenix is based on Pace, a character I made for a fairytale-inspired RP site who was meant to be based on Peter Pan. (Fun fact: Pace's full name was Pace Amery Nichols. Because Pan. Get it? Okay, thank you for indulging me.) I already had in mind that Phoenix and Sam would get along pretty well, but when I realized that Sam being a fairy added to the Peter Pan allusions, it just sealed them as best friends.
I like to joke that Eli essentially kicked out her predecessor in the story. Laurel's girlfriend was originally named Catie, and she was a very stereotypical werewolf: jealous and protective, a bit grumpy, and not very well fleshed out at all. She was more or less a stock character of a lesbian werewolf. It also didn't sit right with me for the main conflict of their relationship to be jealousy, especially towards a different gender ex of her bisexual girlfriend.
Eli was the younger sister of yet another beloved OC from my text-based RP days: a character that I had a habit of killing off. One day, while musing about that character's death, I began to think about his quieter, more reserved little sister and what her life would look like. She began to take shape and carve out a space in my mind on the bus ride to work: this smart, independent girl whose parents more or less ignored her because "she's always been able to take care of herself." A little prickly, stubborn, and deeply interior, but an excellent eavesdropper. That night, as I sorted mail, I figured out her name: Nayeli Soledad [redacted real surnames]. "Eli" for short, except for her older brother who facetiously called her "Yelly" because of her quiet nature. As I clocked out of work, I thought, "She would actually be kind of perfect for Laurel."
By the time I got on the bus home, Catie was gone from the story, replaced by Eli, who even had a backstory of how she first met Laurel.
The character who changed the most was my human character, arguably the main character of the first book in the series. First, her name was Evan, short for Evangeline. She was yet another character from the textbased RP days, a police detective who got involved with the Afterlight because of a murder that happened there. But I didn't quite like the name Evan, so she became Cambria. Then, no, Hollis.
And maybe she wasn't a police detective because the more I grew up, the less I liked or trusted cops, honestly. Maybe she was a...private eye. No, maybe I could go the YA route and make her more of a teen sleuth? Well, okay, maybe NA. She could be a nosy college student not sure what to do with her life. Or no, go back to making her a cop, but maybe at the end of book one she would recognize the corruption in the police force and quit.
I couldn't connect to my main character, and most of my early readers couldn't, either. She just felt like the sort of character that readers could insert themselves into, and that wasn't what I wanted. But I didn't have a solution...until Anne-Marie.
If you know me at all, or if you've read most of this, you know that I get most of my ideas from RPs. These days it's less textbased games and more TTRPGs that I play with friends. So when a friend made a supernatural mystery game about a haunted tunnel, I made Anne-Marie Mullins. She was a enthusiast of all things paranormal, cheerfully nosy and deeply unprepared to find out about the things she fucked around with, but her quick thinking usually helped her out of situations. I had so much fun playing Anne-Marie that after the first night, I thought, "This is what I want for Hollis." And then I realized that I didn't want Hollis at all. So like Eli before, Anne-Marie kicked Hollis to the curb and took up her own space at the Afterlight.
A Decade of False Starts
I can't tell you how many times I've started this story only to scrap it and start over. There have been countless outlines, first chapters, and once I think I even got to chapter eighteen. But at some point, something kept niggling at me. "This isn't right. It's not ready."
Much of that came down to characters not being right. Some of it was the fact that I have changed considerably from 22 to 33, and so the types of stories I've wanted to tell has also changed. And some of it has been sharing a brain with so many other stories that I also wanted to work on.
I remember once sitting in the cafe at a Barnes & Noble with my writing group, staring in frustration at my outline and saying, "I think I need to shelve Fake Transcripts. Indefinitely. It's just not working and I'm not sure if it ever will."
But as many times as I've nearly given up, I've always come back. I think I started playing with this story about two weeks after that declaration. It has always remained on my roster of WIPs.
Becoming a Serial and What to Expect
I've always loved the idea of serial fiction, of classic Victorian authors who published their chapters weekly in newspapers and magazines before binding them up as full novels. And fortunately, the current landscape of newsletters and mailing lists has allowed serials to come back in fashion.
Most of the modern serials I knew about were web comics, and I'm not an artist by any means. But then I found my friend Tabby's web serial, Aurora Hearts. It's a gorgeous magical girl story for adult women with a lot of, well, heart. And it's completely text. That was what finally inspired me to dive into the medium myself. As soon as I knew I wanted to write a serial, I thought of Seven Nights at the Afterlight. In my mind, it's meant to be read in an episodic kind of way. I still want to publish them as books when they're finished, but I think a serial makes the most sense.
So that brings me to what comes next: for now, I'm grounding myself in the present, mostly because writing and publishing two chapters a month is new for me. But I do have plans to publish the first book after it's gone out to everyone in serial format. And yes, I said first book. My hope is for this to be at least five books worth. Who knows how many chapters that's going to add up to, but the point is, I will have content for you all for some time. I hope you're ready!
Also, if you're interested in supporting this endeavor further, I also have a Ko-fi membership tier! For just $3 per month, you can get access to chapters one month early, special bonus content, and a chance to create your own hostel guests. It also really helps me to focus on this project and worry just a tiny bit less about bills.
