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Hello from out here on the Thames Delta. This is the second time I’m writing this newsletter because the Beehiiv editor randomly deleted most of it and I do not have the strength to regenerate it. So please accept a short edition, I’ll get to my winter reading next week.

In this letter:

• on working from home and hot time

• sound and vision

• vampires have tails

• yeah you heard me

This is the opening of a piece on working from home, and that paragraph completely nails it. When I’m on deadline, and herself is away (which is often), I can go four or five days without even the opportunity of speaking out loud to another human being.

This week I came across the term “thermal time hypothesis.” Carlo Rovelli.

(Notes on Rovelli’s book HELGOLAND. Also, Rovelli on how eyes actually work)

I don’t think I know anyone who’s had a great start to 2026. I dragged myself through early January like a zombie, was (still?) exhausted by three weeks into the month, and then I caught this omni-mange that is sitting on my lungs like a weighted plague blanket. I have a novelette to write for a publisher and a prose series to write in partnership with a very unusual company and I can’t stay at the desk long enough to get started on either of them, or any of the other things I have to do.

When I’m not working enough, I dream more. Which is weird, I know. But it always seems as if I don’t empty all the creative petrol out of my head during the day, the fumes come up at night. Last night, I dreamed of watching some video which had clips of a new Star Trek show in which the ship’s counsellor was played by Werner Herzog, and he got to write his own dialogue for those scenes. How dare my brain taunt me with such a perfect thing?

Also the theme music was Sibelius’ Intermezzo 1 from the Karelia.

• New AAASMR ambient music radio show from Angela Winter. I look forward to this every month. And if you liked something on that episode, here’s the track listing for purchase links.

• CONSCIOUS STREAM, an online comic by Jerome Eyquem and Mark Bertolini - gorgeous.

• I was gifted a digital copy of the English translation of the graphic novel MAYA DEREN: THE VERTIGO OF EXISTENCE by Stefano Alghisi and Marco Madoglio. I’m a big fan of Deren, and this is a lovely biography, committed and quirky. Here’s the publisher page - presumably your local store can order a copy.

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RAVEN BELASCO’S BIZARRERIES

This week’s bizarrerie is a new and thrilling discovery for this vampire writer: vampires have TAILS!

You would think that after a lifetime of being a goth, and over five years writing vampire stories, there would not be anything I didn’t already know about vampire myths. But I was re-reading The Vampire: A Casebook by Alan Dundes this past October in preparation to talk about obscure vampire myths on a podcast, and I found this little snippet from Romanian myth, just tossed casually in:

“The moment any vampire wets its tail, there is rain.”

That short little line brings me so much delight. The way it’s written, it seems to assume we all know that vampires have tails—of course, silly! Now, this is a more obscure Romanian myth, and the vampires we know and love now are a mélange of ideas from ancient myth, folklore that is almost entirely forgotten, Victorian repression, and brand new concepts of “the sexiest monster.”

Clearly, the tail fell off the vampire at some point in its evolution and was replaced with tuxedo tails, but I think it’s important to remember that vampires rise out of deep myth, and those more antediluvian undead are stranger than we now remember.

I actually find it very frustrating when people try to tell me that the vampire story is “dead.” Of course I immediately shoot back that, no, it’s undead…but more than that, there is so much more waiting in dusty tomes of folklore to show that most vampire writers are only scratching the surface, and the vampire is weirder than we guess, and has been done a disservice by forcing them into the sexy monster box. (Now the idea that some vampires have vestigial tails won’t leave my mind.)

Raven Belasco is the author of the BLOOD & ANCIENT SCROLLS series of novels and the novelette THAT LESBIAN VAMPIRE PIRATE STORY. Her website is at ravenbelas.co and her regular newsletter is at https://ancientscrolls.beehiiv.com/ .

GOT MORE TIME?

LTD

I keep a digital writer’s notebook and you’re invited to read over my shoulder.

I do one big daily post, and if you click through on one of those and scroll to the bottom, you’ll see you can subscribe to those by email, and it’s a bit like getting a scruffy, linkier and more personal newsletter from me every day. At least, it is when I’m not sick. Bear with me.

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And that’s me. I am crawling away, defeated by technology and the internet once again. If you’ve read this far, go and sit by the light and turn everything off for five minutes. Take care of yourself.

W