In Lieu of “In Lieu of Underwear”

Major Update

First of all, let me apologize to anyone who was reading ILU and looking forward to another installment:
I’M SORRY. ;~~~;
I had truly anticipated posting another chapter, and obviously, I never did. Here’s what happened:

I had the chapter written, and it went through far more revisions than any of the other chapters had been through thus far. When some things weren’t working for me, I collaborated with my co-author D.B. Graves, and we made a major overhaul to the plot.

And then I took a long time off. Longer than I meant to. And the longer I took to get out another chapter, the less confident I felt about showing my face with none of the promised chapters I was supposed to have been delivering. Eventually, I committed to creating a complete outline to ILU before really drafting. I’ve dubbed completing it as my #1 priority among a long list of other priorities. And I did it! I have a complete, but messy outline, but I have been improving on it a little at a time.

The result of reworking the plot over and over (and over and over and over) again is that… While I’m keeping a lot of the primary events of the first few chapters that were posted online… they don’t work for the overall story in their current form anymore.

I’ve probably said this before, but Lai’s story is particularly important to me. I started out writing by role playing, and Lai was created somewhere around 2008, so there it’s no coincidence that ILU takes place in 2008. He’s gone through a lot of development, and the way I think of him today is so so different from the way he was originally. I may be biased, but I feel like recreating this growth throughout my twelve years of RPing Lai is a beautiful character growth arc that I feel particularly attached to and that deserves to be told in a way that honors everything I love about writing Lai.

So with my respect for my own character and a little bit of a perfectionist attitude, I hereby retract In Lieu of Underwear: A Vampire Story in its current form. It will no longer be released in serial form. I believe in the art of mastering a story through rewrites, and I think it would be ill-advised to start releasing it again before it’s been written completely. For now at least, I will leave up the posts that do already exist. Feel free to read them over and over again and maybe guess what will change when the book is finally released. My intention is to self-publish.

Novel Rebranding

You know what I’m not attached to, though? The title In Lieu of Underwear: A Vampire Story. I’m thoroughly prepared to toss that shit out the window. Despite the cute way it can be shortened to ILU which happened by happy accident and is more apt than I ever could have designed (it is ultimately a love story after all), I just… I grabbed a random intriguing phrase out of the first chapter when I spewed it out and then I had to commit. The “A Vampire Story” part is only on there because I wanted to make sure you knew it was about vampires. I played around with new titles almost as much as I attempted to overhaul the entire plot. I’m happy to say I’ve found a title for the first book and several more that I think incorporates both the theme and the fact that it’s about vampires.

DO YOU WANT TO KNOW WHAT IT IS?

Not only have I rebranded the novel (series), but the other thing I’ve done a million times is redesign the book cover. The fact that I have invested so much of my time into multiple iterations of a book cover for this book is part of the reason I’m not even really entertaining the idea of pitching this book/series to an agent (that and the fact that the number of times the word “fuck” will show up is astronomical and I don’t know if agents or trad publishers are going to agree that they’re necessary uses).

What was I saying? OH YEAH. New title. Right right right. (; Maybe you’d like a tiny sneak peek at the most recent cover too? How about both at once? I think that’s what we want.

Well, DRUM ROLL PLEASE? From here on out, we will ONLY refer to it as…

I hope you think it’s as fitting as I do. Although, I guess you can’t really know until I get it finished! I’m working on it. I promise! <3

Release

As of now, I don’t have a release date, but I do anticipate not only finishing a first draft of this book, but also completely revising it at least once before the end of the year. It sounds a long way off, but honestly it will catch up with me way faster than it seems like it would, and I have to remind myself of that so that I don’t get too comfy with slow progress. Ideally, the whole book will be ready to publish next Summer in 2021. I feel really good about the decisions I’ve made so far, and even if my timeline is slower than I would have liked it to be, I feel really good about my pace and progress too.

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