What Manner of Man is complete! Read it for free ✨ here ✨ or buy the better, more exciting revamped edition via Amazon or (DRM-free) on Itch.io.
Hello Darlings,
The following newsletter contains an exciting announcement, updated benefits for patrons, some frivolous calligraphy, gothic heroine Father Ardelian, and my approach to the subject of worldbuilding.
Vile and malefic greetings, darling reader — and a fiendish welcome to those new readers who have begun to subscribe as word gets out about A Companion in Vice! We're still at least a couple of months away from the first chapter arriving in your inbox, but I'll have various things to tide you over with in the meantime — including, I cannot fail to mention, an entire novel which you can read for free. (If you haven't yet explored my previous serial novel — What Manner of Man — I promise you won't regret it!)
If you’ve ever wanted to know my real thoughts on things like how to build an engaged readership, conduct yourself as an author online, run a newsletter, etc. — you’re in luck!
What started as an informal series of posts on Tumblr spiraled completely out of control, and I have found myself in possession of a series of 4–5 essays (totaling somewhere around 15 000 words) outlining my entire philosophical and practical approach to the business of being an author on the internet in the hellish and godforsaken year of 2025.
I’ve been thinking obsessively about these subjects for ~3 years now and I’m honestly just really excited to finally be able to share some of my conclusions.
I’ll be publishing them in this newsletter over the coming weeks. (Patrons will get to read each essay at least a week before the public.)
With one book finished and another coming, patrons will be getting new benefits — including receiving the essays mentioned above before everyone else + more yet to be announced. I will be updating the Patreon tiers to reflect these changes soon.
Patrons have also begun to get short weekly updates on my progress with A Companion in Vice! Catch up on my recent updates and support the writing of A Companion in Vice by joining the ranks of my evil army on Patreon.
If you’d like to keep up with the nitty-gritty of the writing process as I tinker away in my lab, this is the ideal place to do it.
The one and only Shitpost Calligrapher on Tumblr has immortalized what must be one of my funniest-ever typos in beautifully-inscribed ink. I am, of course, deeply honoured.
I adore this What Manner of Man fanart from Tumblr user doing-something-unholy — finally! It’s about time someone drew Father Ardelian running around in a silk nightgown with a candelabra. It was a major oversight, as he is in every respect a gothic heroine of the nightgown-wearing Women Running From Houses school of vintage paperback covers.
A great deal of the work I've been doing recently has consisted of fleshing out the world of A Companion in Vice — its politics, mythology, science, and medicine.
I'm not sure how clearly I've communicated the fact up to now, but A Companion in Vice will take place place in an early 20th century of my own creation. (If you’ve played Disco Elysium, you’ll have an idea of the sort of thing I mean.) My goal from the beginning has been to evoke a place and time that's two degrees removed from reality. I want it to feel as if it's just barely plausible that the novel is set in a part of the world that you simply happen never to have heard of.
Worldbuilding is a practice that I never considered very deeply before I began to work on the very earliest stages of this project. My approach to writing has, up to this point, been almost entirely storytelling-focused; I've developed each of my settings to exactly the meet demands of the story I'm writing and no further. I feel, now, like I've achieved an understanding of that process such that I can afford to get a little more ambitious¹ with it.
Millions of apologies for the completely unforgivable length of time between my last newsletter and this one. Various tedious circumstances beyond my control have kept me away from these updates, but the writing is progressing smoothly, and — aforementioned tedious obstacles more or less dealt with — I intend to be in your inbox on a far more regular basis in the very near future. In advance of this, I've begun the process of redecorating everything (the newsletter landing page, etc.) to prepare for A Companion in Vice. 🧪
Finally, I’d like to encourage you to follow me on Bluesky! For reasons I described in a previous newsletter, I remain cautious about the future of Tumblr. (There have been no significant updates on the situation, but this isn’t particularly promising.) Until the website literally burns down around me, however, the blog is likely to remain my primary home on the internet.
I am, as always, your humble servant,
St John Starling
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