Wallachia

Chapter thirteen of Wallachia should be out tomorrow or Monday. Some things I researched while writing it: Romanian peasant fashion, European bison, ciorbe (sour soup), types of horse-drawn carriages, Wallachian horses, ancient Dacia and its religion.

14. Wallachia Chapter 8: Goings and Comings

The castle learns of Marley’s disappearance.

Dracula Beats the Communists

Bram Stoker’s novel was a mixed blessing for Romania. It attracted tourists, but the legend was at odds with communist ideals and made a villain of a national hero.

Chapter 12: The Farmer’s Afterlife

Chapter twelve of Wallachia is out. Get it from the App Store and read it for free (then leave a tip, if you please).

Abraham deals with the body he discovered in chapter nine.


For those keeping track at home, it’s Monday, 19 June (old style dates). The moon will be a 🌒waxing crescent. Marley got back home last night (ch 11). Around the time Abraham is riding back the village, Eugen is transferred to the village jail from the castle dungeon (assuming that all happens).


There’s no chance anyone will notice, but in chapter one I said there was a fountain in the middle of the town square. As I was writing Abraham passing by it, I realized this probably isn’t historically accurate. Fountains require either pumps to move the water or an elevated water source. So, I changed it. If you go back and read chapter one, it now says:

The carriage pulled up to the csárda. The village inn, tavern, and meeting place sat at the back of the town square. In the center of the square stood a statue of a boy and a girl looking up at the sky just above the mountains across the river. A large display of flowers were planted at their feet. Surrounding the statue were a number of shops, including the bakery above which Marley’s family lived.


As I say in the news section, this chapter includes a brief recap of Carmilla. I was a little worried I’d have to fudge the timeline, but it turns out Bram Stoker already did that for me.

Carmilla never establishes what year it’s set in. It appeared in a collection called In a Glass Darkly, which opens with a brief framing device. The stories therein are supposed to have been compiled by the assistant of Dr. Martin Hesselius, a paranormal investigator. Dr. Hessellius corresponded with a Professor Van Loo of Leyden. After the professor’s death in 1819, the assistant collected the interesting cases from their letters and included them in what we’re reading as In a Glass Darkly. So, everything in the book must have occurred at least a few years prior to 1819 when the professor died.

In Carmilla, the characters come across a portrait of Countess Mircalla painted when she was still alive in 1698. Later, when they discover that Carmilla is actually the Vampire Mircalla, Laura’s father says, “Why, she has been dead more than a century!” If we assume she died not long after it was painted, the story has to be set after 1798 to be “more than a century” later.

In Dracula’s Guest, a traveller comes across a grave intended to be that of Carmilla from Le Fanu’s story. It’s dated 1801. And there we have it! (Why the characters of that story would have erected a tomb for her, I’m not sure.)


Lastly, because I’m certain I mispronounced it in the audiobook, a short note on Romanian greetings. Now, bear in mind that I don’t actually speak Romanian. As with a load of things, I’m faking it here and hoping people won’t notice (except of course that I’m pointing it out).

Buna dimineata: Good morning
Buna ziua: Good day (“zee-wah”) Buna seara: Good evening
Noapte buna: Good night, but literally said when one is going to sleep

The characters are obviously speaking Wallachian Romanian all the time that we’re reading as English, but I like to toss in a word here and there just to make the book more annoying to read.

Rereading each entry to set up @live_dracula will add up to be (I think) my 13th time reading the book.

13. Wallachia Chapter 7: An Imbalance of Humours

Marley visits the castle’s dungeon.

I relish every new Fangs strip. Check it out.

Here’s a stream of the National Theater’s production of Frankenstein, directed by Danny Boyle and starring Jonny Lee Miller as Victor Frankenstein and Benedict Cumberbatch as the creature. Tomorrow they’ll swap roles at this link.

Version 1.2.1 of the Wallachia app should be in the store soon. It adds a bit of mouse and trackpad support for iPadOS and fixes the most embarrassing typo I can imagine. Like, picture you misspelled your own name on the cover of your book. Worse than that.

Dracula Live 2020

My Dracula Live project will be starting up again on the 3rd. I’m moving it over to @live_dracula on Twitter. If you want to read along, follow that account.

To recap: Bram Stoker’s novel Dracula is written in the epistolary format, meaning it’s a collection of letters, journal entries, telegrams, etc. I’ve broken up the text into individual entires and will be tweeting out links to them in real time based on when they happened in the plot in 1893.

For fun I’m also including frame grabs from several different movie adaptations. Francis Ford Coppola’s 1992 is one of the most faithful to the novel, so I’ll be leaning on it a good deal. For the sake of variety, I’ll be working in the Hammer films version with Christopher Lee, Tod Browning’s 1931 film with Bela Legosi, and F.W Murnau’s Nosferatu with Max Schreck.

12. Wallachia Chapter 6: The Proud Blood of the Wallachian

Father Abraham attends the speech by Count Dracula and Negrescu Radu at the castle.

Wikipedia on Wayside Shrines that can be found throughout parts of Europe (and the forthcoming chapter 12). Here’s a photo of one in northern Romania.

11. Wallachia Chapter 5: How to Borrow a Book

With the town all at Radu’s speech, Marley and friends “borrow” a book from the church.

Chapter 11: Nicolae at the Bat

Chapter 11 of Wallachia is out. Get it from the App Store and read it for free (then tip generously).

⚾️Nicolae plays oină and 🥬Romanian cabbage rolls are consumed.


Here is the complete tale of Manoli the mason, from E.B. Mawr’s Roumanian Fairy Tales and Legends, 1881. The monastery in question, the Curtea de Argeş Cathedral, still stands.


I actually wrote a complete sequence where they were practicing oină before realizing I had clearly established it was raining the entire day in chapter 9. Then later, I placed Dracula at the castle when, also in that same chapter, I had him a ways south at the same time. Ugh.

Chapters 9–11 all more or less overlap with one-another. I don’t think—at least I hope—it doesn’t come off as confusing. I wanted to follow each character’s journey through these days until they wind up back together. Marley goes off with Margareta, Ion is at the castle, Abraham goes to visit the farmer’s sick father, and then by the next morning they’re all back in the village. On a TV show you’d probably just cut back and forth.

There’s a new chapter of Wallachia coming later this week. You can download the app now to get caught up. wallachia.net

Coming, in chapter 11: 🌧rain, ⚾️oină, and 🥬cabbage rolls!

Here’s a nice piece about Uncle Iroh in Avatar: The Last Airbender.

(And yes, I did put a small reference to firebending in chapter 10.)

Valerian - The Complete Collection Sale

Tiny behind-the-scenes note: Laureline in Wallachia is named after the heroine in this fantastic French space opera. Seeing it on sale makes me want to get my copies off the shelf.

(Laureline not being a Romanian name, I made it a nickname for Laura Adelina. All the sisters go by nicknames—Marley is Mirela Elena and Dora is Theodora.)

An essential CD that I keep in my car and played for the kids often: David Bowie Narrates Prokofiev’s Peter and the Wolf.

Apple Music, Spotify, Amazon, Google Play

Steve Troughton-Smith is running a poll asking about SwiftUI adoption. I haven’t adopted any of it yet. There’s stuff I’d like to use, but so much of the Wallachia app is built around UITextView and all the NSLayotManager stuff that it seemed silly to host it all inside SwiftUI.

My stay-at-home listening has been this huge digital boxed set of 70s Bowie: Who Can I Be Now? (1974–1976).

While chapter 11 is off with my editor I’ve been putting together a companion app for me to use when posting new chapters. On the backend, Wallachia runs off of Apple’s CloudKit. Apple provides a webpage from which you can create and edit stuff that gets pushed out to the app, but it’s clunky. In time I’ll have my own custom iPad app that I can use to post chapters or make edits. I even made a little icon for it:

Screen Shot 2020 03 30 at 12 05 33 PM

This is all part of my “2.0” push. I’ll all take a while but it feels good to get back to coding after a break.

Benny Beck: Vampire Killer

Fun, free four-page comic.

An advantage of designing my own publishing platform is that I can make sneaky edits whenever I want to earlier chapters of the book. So, I just made a change to chapter 1 of Wallachia. Marley, her mind wandering while she’s supposed to be paying attention in church, is doing a little bit of word association. In my earlier drafts it just went on and on, so I cut it down a bit, but I’ll expand it here just for “fun.”

“Wallachia” (wool-ay-kee-uh) comes from a proto-German word Walhaz meaning “stranger.” Wales gets its name from the same word. Basically it was just their word for any foreigner. The word Wallachia is an exonym, meaning a word for a country used by non-residents. Wallachians didn’t call their land “Wallachia,” it was Țara Românească. Internally, they were Romanian, not Wallachian.

(In the book I just use Wallachia, anyway, because it’s better branding and provides some separation between modern Romania and my fictionalized version of the country from 200 years ago.)

So to themselves they were Romanians, but there’s another word, Romani, which refers to people of northern Indian origin who were treated as at best second-class citizens and at worst, slaves. A derogatory term for them is “gypsy,” which comes from the mistaken thought that they were from Egypt. Another derogatory term is țigani, which comes from a Byzantine Greek word meaning “untouchables.”

A number of Romani people live near the village in the book and interact with the townspeople frequently. They’re not treated as equals but, as the story starts, I don’t depict any direct mistreatment of them. In chapter six, I start to shift that. Radu refers to them as țigani, not Romani, which is how everyone else has referred to them up until that point. Going forward, you start to hear the derogatory term used more often, first from the “bad guys” but then more often from other characters as the term starts to take over. (Theme: vampires are bad, but so is racism.)

Anyway, I had planned this all out but in chapter one I only had Marley’s internal monologue refer to “gypsy,” so I’ve added the other word in there as well just to have it make an appearance earlier, and to maybe help readers make a connection between the three words: Romani (correct) and gypsy and țigani (derogatory).

I’ve been using Ferrite Studio Pro on my iPad with an Apple Pencil to edit the Wallachia audiobook chapters for the last month, and I highly recommend it. Editing audio in Logic was always a chore for me. Now I don’t mind. I was happy to support it via the Pro upgrade.

Enna, Bruno (script), Fabio Celoni (art), and Mirka Andolfo (colors). Dracula Starring Mickey Mouse. Dark Horse Books, 2019. Available at comiXology.