Chapter fifteen of Wallachia is out. You can read it in the app or listen to the audiobook chapter.

This one was murder to write. First, I’d taken a lot of time off to get version 2 of the app ready, and then it took me a while to get my pen wet again. (Is that an expression?) Then, I wrote it, and it was just boring. It was just a list of events. Abraham visits Eugen in jail. He and Dragos go to the farm. Eventually I figured out that what it was really about was Abraham coming to realize how much he’d changed in the 15 or so years since he travelled with his uncle. He isn’t riding around Europe fighting vampires and then moving on anymore. He’s part of a community that he cares for and wants to protect.

Anyway, I’d like to promise that sixteen will be along soon, but we’ll see. I think it will be! In trying to work this one out I made a new, handwritten outline of the current plan for the book’s plot from here to the end, and I’ll say that for the new year I’m feeling a renewed excitement about getting this story told.

Not many notes this time. Emily Gerard’s The Land Beyond the Forest provides the funerary customs, which we also saw in chapter three. Carmilla describes Baron Vordenburg’s library.