New vampire novel chapter for Halloween

New writing: A delegation from Nalanda University

This is the next chapter of my serial, tantric Buddhist vampire romance novel, The Vetali’s Gift.

Content note: Nudity, gore, inadequate institutional responses to a global existential crisis, Madhyamaka metaphysics.

This chapter is a major turning point in the overall plot. It’s the one where we finally find out what the novel is actually about. (Inadequate institutional responses to a global existential crisis. Haven't I written about that somewhere else? With less nudity, gore, and metaphysics.)

The chapter after this is the giant info dump in which most of what has happened in the book so far falls into place as making sense—whereas many events and things people have said just seemed like random weirdness at the time. I’m hoping to post that one for Thanksgiving or Christmas.

Originally, in 2008, I intended the novel as crowd-pandering advertisement for my serious writing. Vampires were especially hot in popular culture, and I figured maybe they could make Buddhism sound actually interesting, whereas everyone had gotten bored with it then. I was enormously productive at the time, posting a new web page on Vividness every other day. It seemed realistic to run a new chapter of The Vetali's Gift every two weeks. Life has not worked out as expected; the novel is fifteen years delayed. It is mostly only known to fans of my "serious" writing, so the "advertising" goes in the opposite direction. At this point I write it mainly for my own enjoyment. The book does also have some fanatical fans of its own—thank you!

It was surreal writing this chapter, because the scene had seemed complete in my mind fifteen years ago. More than any other, I’ve replayed it in imagination countless times since then. I have, in a sense, lived all this time in a world I discovered in 2008—and this is the moment in which the shape of that world is finally manifest publicly.

As a technical point, it’s interesting how different writing fiction is from watching a mental movie of an extremely familiar scene. It seems like you should be able to just write down what you see… But it turned out that putting it on the page revealed all sorts of plot holes, which my mind had obliviously skipped over in the movie version. I had to fill those in, which was actual work. In fact, I had to make a spreadsheet. And then I had to go back and lightly revise some earlier chapters to retcon plot points that didn’t fit.