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Out of curiosity and also guilt over my own coffee intake. I wanna ask:

Now I'm not talking about when you're studying and so you drink 3x the usual amount or something like that. This isn't me asking what your record is. I'm talking about the most basic, average day, how many coffees you drink?

#i used to drink a ton #like 4-5 8oz cups a day #but uh #having anxiety disorders mean that ive cut down to one 10oz cup a day usually

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#😈

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Being as Dracula Daily is starting up again in about three days, I think this is a perfect opportunity, as we follow along this year, to play the PG-13 game.

For the unfamiliar, the PG-13 game is as follows: you are allowed to insert one and only one instance of the word "fuck" into the text as written. For maximum impact, where do you put it?

#dracula daily #mina harker #mina murray #so true!

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ok im really curious do you guys have books you consider your "white whale"? as in books you keep telling yourself oh yeah i really want to read that, but you keep not reading it?

#the terror #i keep thinking “maybe i should read it” #and then i dont

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every autistic person watching this episode of dungeon meshi:

#dungeon meshi #shout out to the girls in high-school gym class #who were definitely trying to bully me #and i DID not read the room then #and i guess came off unfazed but in fact just did not pick up on the signs #this scene made me think of that incident 🙃

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The way that Dracula started subtly at first but he's been slowly and lovingly stripping the agency away from Jonathan every single day for weeks and weeks taking away his sleep his personal space his privacy destroying his belongings gaslighting him making him isolate himself from loved ones making him seek refuge from danger in Dracula's mercy and now taking away not just his means of communication but his very identification. The way that everything that once made him Jonathan Harker now belongs to Count Dracula. The way that his name isn't even his own anymore so he might as well forget it

#dracula #cw abuse #once more unto the queue dear friends

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dracula is defeated by 1) autism, 2) true love, and 3) incredible violence, and the fact that this isn’t the mainstream understanding of dracula in pop culture is a fucking travesty

#its really disappointing #one day the people will know

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y'all, my friend is going on a work trip next month. A train trip. Through mountains. living my dream this guy is. he has to leave his gf behind, and she loves trains, so he's living her dream as well, but STILL. He said he'll write super often, and I know he bout like 10 notebooks, and I'm excited to read about his adventures.

#dracula daily #jonathan harker #once more unto the queue dear friends

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Our good friend Jonathan Harker is getting ready to leave for his business trip, Mina Murray is picking out a new journal, Lucy Westenra is charming a gaggle of smitten suitors, Abraham van Helsing is wrapping up his lectures, and Castle Dracula is prepping the guest room for a very long stay.

Which must mean that Dracula Season is here again!

 ‘Dracula Season’ being a catchall term for the voracious reading, memeing, writing, illustrating, analyzing, and general fun-having that’s ensued since Matt Kirkland’s project, Dracula Daily, caught on with us back in 2022. The Substack had already been running before then, but it sparked a conflagration as time went on and readers old and new to Bram Stoker’s Dracula—the actual novel, not Coppola’s fanfiction—devoured it in a way that scratched an itch none of us knew we had. Stoker wrote the book in epistolary fashion, clumping sections together as needed for the pacing without perfect adherence to chronological order. Matt went ahead and put all the events in order and proceeded to set up a lovely chain of emails that delivered entries on those correlating dates.

This style of organization and pacing turned out to not only make the virtual book club that much easier to engage with, but left space in-between to stew on the story and relate with the characters themselves. Every day of waiting in the book feels weightier when you have to pace and sweat and worry in tandem with poor Jonathan trapped in the castle or Lucy wasting away or Mina running out the clock before she loses the fight for her own humanity. And while we sat with the story or the lulls between Dracula Seasons, some of us found ourselves craving more of that ghastly gothic horror goodness to the point that we figured:

“Well. Why don’t I make something?”

And then we did! Tons of creative works have been churned out in the wake of Dracula Daily’s high. I figured that while we’ve still got a bit of time to wait for May 3rd, we should check out all this new stuff in the meantime. (Plus a handful of neat stuff that just clicks with the Dracula itch overall.)

So, in the interest of Dracula Season pregaming, let’s take a look at…

FICTION

Blood of My Blood – A recent addition to the Dracula Bad Ending AU pile, and definitely one of the most harrowing and addictive group-produced narratives I’ve ever come across, Blood of My Blood is the dramatically gothic currently-WIP work of @ibrithir-was-here and @animate-mush’s devious design. Give or take a heap of other fascinated folks (hello!) adding ideas to put more Horror into the Horrors that our cast has to face. The premise:

The Transylvanian climax went fatally sour and the Harkers were forced to shelter with Dracula himself, including their half-vampire son, Quincey. Cut to two decades later, and Quincey finds himself out in modern London, smitten with Lu, adopted daughter of Arthur and Jack, and diving into certain bloodstained old documents that detail the real history of how his parents came to live in the castle. Said revelations coming not a moment too soon, as a storm is coming for him straight from the Carpathians…

Dracula Daily Sketch Collection – An array of illustrations that captures every entry beat by beat, the Dracula Daily Sketch Collection by Georgia Cook, alias @georgiacooked was dished out over the course of the last Dracula Season. Some of the most fun character designs out there.

Fanfiction Spotlight: BlueCatWriter – With a whopping 99 works devoted to the novel Dracula (so far, the number may have gone up since I blinked), @bluecatwriter is one of the most prolific and talented fanfiction scribblers out there. Romances, nightmares, and overlaps between the two seem to crop up the most, give or take a crossover. Seems fitting that those blue paw prints have contributed to BoMB too.

The League of Extraordinary Gentlefolk – An ongoing comic in which all your favorite characters from the Classics section get together and tackle some perils ranging from the mundane to the monstrous. Started by the amazing @mayhemchicken and posted on @lxgentlefolkcomic, this series is a love letter to beloved Victorian era lit, with a spotlight on the two couples leading the League. Namely, the Harkers, ala Dracula, and the Nortons, ala Sherlock Holmes,’ “A Scandal in Bohemia.” Mina and Irene are the driving investigative and steering forces here, and still deeply in love with their likewise-infatuated husbands, just like in their canons! What a concept! Alan.

Without spoiling the full character list, just know there are going to be a ton of familiar faces roaming around before you finish reading the first arc. Said arc having conveniently wrapped up just a few days ago! Give the comic and its bonus silliness a look if you’re in the mood for a new comfort-adventure epic.

Re: Dracula – Probably the most well-known and incredible thing to come out of the initial Dracula Daily wave. This podcast is a full audio drama that follows the same format as the Substack, with episodes coming out in time with the entries themselves. And it has an unfairly cool soundtrack. They have a Tumblr with @re-dracula, a site and a Patreon to check out before the series kicks up again on May 3rd. (Also, keep an eye out for their next work, an audio drama in the same style with Carmilla.)

The Soldier and the Solicitor – Another treat from @ibrithir-was-here, this one involves a bit of time travel trouble. Quincey Harker has stumbled out of World War I and into the same dark forest where his father once fled for his life…then runs into the man himself, on that same night. Jonathan Harker, young and starved and lost, who has no choice but to trust this stranger while the Weird Sisters are at his heels…despite said stranger having no shadow. It’s a tasty emotional trek, already complete on Tumblr, but now it’s turning into a Webtoon. While Ibrithir is juggling a number of other stories, she’ll be redrawing spruced up versions of the comic and adding a few new scenes as things unfold.

Substack Stack – You know what’s better than one emailed-out public domain book club? A mountain of them. Just. So, so many of them. You’ll see that a lot of these are finished, but some are still ticking along. Either way, they’re all great picks if you’re craving some more old school lit to fill the void between undead emails.

Frankenstein Weekly – Frankenstein

Jekyll and Hyde Weekly – The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde

Voyage of the Nautilus – Twenty-Thousand Leagues Under the Sea

Letters from Watson – Sherlock Holmes

The Invisible Mail – The Invisible Man

Letters from Bunny – E.W. Hornung’s short stories of the eponymous Bunny and Raffles

Letters Regarding Jeeves - P. G. Wodehouse’s Bertie Wooster short stories, including the novel, Right Ho, Jeeves

…

……

………

…The Beetle Weekly – The Beetle (NOTE: Do Not Read This.)

The Vampyres – A novella I finally wrenched through the gears of self-publication as of March this year. Starring a petite but powerful paranormal cast, The Vampyres, centers on an unscrupulous undead fellow who finds that the revenants of the world are being mowed down by an entity known only as ‘Quinn Morse.’ Between trying to save his neck and figure out where the shadowy bastard came from, the Vampyre in question crosses paths with a new paramour and handy human shield in the form of a grieving Good Samaritan. He’s even polite enough to invite the Vampyre into his home while he’s in dire straits! Surely this will end well. All the info is available here and a little author site is over here.

What Manner of Man – This is the one made for everyone who started out hoping there’d be a real love story with our good friend Jonathan Harker and the Count when he was at his most charismatic. Where that sea of wonders dried up into a mire of horror, What Manner of Man by @stjohnstarling keeps things firmly on the romantic tracks. This Substack stars the letter-writing priest Father Victor E. Ardelian as he finds himself meeting with one enigmatic Lord Alistair Vane. It isn’t long before interest turns into intrigue and intrigue into undead intimacies.

The entire novel has been completed—along with multiple epilogues in the author’s Patreon, allowing readers to choose for themselves just how the uncanny romance plays out in the end—and the Substack now has a number of other gothic goodies piling up in the meantime.  

NONFICTION

Dracula Daily: A Unique Reading Experience: This one comes courtesy of @realwomenofgaming. It’s a short and sweet piece that amounts to a fun snapshot of the entire Dracula Daily ride. A cozy couple-minute read.

‘Dracula Daily’ is the One Substack You Need a Subscription To: Features my favorite Matt Kirkland interview. @mattkirkland, if you’re still floating around on here, thank you for dispatching our vampire newsletter again this year.

Dracula Daily is Tumblr’s hottest new book club: Alright, the ‘new’ part is worn out by now, but this one is still a delightful article to swing back around to. Two years on, this Polygon piece is a time capsule of those early months when people outside our bookworm bubble realized we were all happily receiving letters from our favorite classic gothic horror blorbos.  

“How Mina Murray Became Dracula’s Girlfriend” – Princess Weekes, if you ever read this, thank you, thank you, thank you. I am sending oceans of love and millions of rewatches to your video essay. If you haven’t seen it yet, “How Mina Murray Became Dracula’s Girlfriend” is one of the most refreshing and well-made breakdowns of both the title subject and numerous other issues that have proliferated in the public view of Dracula’s cast and plot as adaptations endlessly warp or outright bastardize the actual novel. An incredibly cathartic watch.  

Literary play gone viral: delight, intertextuality, and challenges to normative interpretations through the digital serialization of Dracula: A mouthful of a title for an even more elaborate article about the Dracula Daily phenomenon. This one is a full-on study that analyzes just what happened within the big bloodsucker book club surge and how its ‘wandering reading practices’ enriched the experience for participants.

 “The Undying Undead: An analysis of the Dracula Daily community for a theory of online community formation and interaction” – We have a thesis on here! Look at that! @sirangelothebestest’s MA thesis used our vampiric book club as the bones for a massive brick of an academic piece that definitely deserves a look.

…And I think I’ll go ahead and cap things here.

This isn’t everything I got recommended, but if I had squashed all of it in here, I think folks’ eyes would start to fall out of their head. I hope you can find something cool to comb through here. Or, if there’s something great I overlooked, tack it onto the list! We’ve got just two weeks to go until we’re off with Mr. Harker. Let’s enjoy our respite before those castle doors close behind us.

#dracula daily #re: dracula #once more unto the queue dear friends

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Pre-Dracula Vampire Literature Masterpost Part I: pre-1880s - 1849

Before 1800

“Der Vampir” (“The Vampire”) by Heinrich August Ossenfelder (1748) [Vampires.com] [University of Victoria - German]

“Lenore” by Gottfried August Bürger (1773) [GoogleBooks - Multiple Translations] [University of Tampa - Multiple Translations] (not explicitly about vampires, although it does concern the re-arisen dead)

“The Bride of Corinth” by Johann Wolfgang von Goethe (1797) [GoogleBooks] [Project Gutenberg] [Wikisource]

“The Old Woman of Berkeley” by Robert Southey (1798) [GoogleBooks] [Famouspoetsandpoems.com] (not explicitly about vampires, although it does concern the re-arisen dead)

1800-1819

Thalaba the Destroyer by Robert Southey (1801) [GoogleBooks: Vol 1. | Vol. 2] [Project Gutenberg]

“The Vampire” by John Stagg, in his Minstrel of the North (1810) [GoogleBooks] [Archive,org] [The Literary Gothic]

The Giaour by George Gordon Byron (1813) [GoogleBooks] [Archive.org] [Polish Online Literature Library] [The Literary Gothic - Excerpt]

“A Fragment of a Novel” (aka “The Burial: A Fragment”) by George Gordon Byron (1816) [GoogleBooks] [Archive.org] [Project Gutenberg] [Lesvampires.org] [SFF.net]

“Christabel” by Samuel Taylor Coleridge (1816) [GoogleBooks] [Archive.org] [Project Gutenberg] [Erudit.org] (not explicitly about vampires)

“The Vampyre” by John Polidori (1819) [GoogleBooks] [Archive.org] [Project Gutenberg] [Lesvampires.org] [SFF.net]

“The Black Vampyre” by Robert C. Sands (1819) [Google Books: Part I | Part II | Part III not Available] [Amazon.com ($)]

1820-1829

“La Belle Dame Sans Merci” by John Keats (1820) [GoogleBooks] [Archive.org] [Poetryfoundation.org] (not explicitly about vampires) 

“Lamia” by John Keats (1820) [GoogleBooks] [Archive.org] [Bartleby.com] (not explicitly about vampires)

Lord Ruthven ou les Vampires (Lord Ruthven or The Vampires) by Cyprien Berard (1820) [Archive.org - French] [Black Coat Press - English Translation ($)]

The Vampire, or The Bride of the Isles by J. R. Planché (1820) [The Literary Gothic]

Le Vampire (The Vampire) by Charles Nodier (1820) [Munseys - PDF]

“Vampirisimus” by E.T.A. Hoffman (1821), from his Die Erzählungen der Serapionsbrüder (The Serapion Brethren) [GoogleBooks] [Project Gutenburg] [National University of Central Buenos Aires - Spanish] (mentions vampires, but is ultimately about grave-robbing cannibals)

Smarra ou les Demons de la Nuit (Smarra, or the Demons of the Night) by Charles Nodier (1821) [Archive.org - French] [Project Gutenberg - French] [Rilune.org - French] [Amazon.com - English Translation ($)]

Han d'Islande (Hans of Iceland) by Victor Hugo (1821) [GoogleBooks] [Archive.org: Vol. I | Vol. 2] (not explicitly about vampires, although a major character drinks blood for the sake of revenge)

“Wake Not the Dead” by Ernst Benjamin Salomo Raupach (1823) [Project Gutenberg] [Lesvampires.org] [SFF.net]

La Vampire Ou La Vierge De Hongrie (The Vampire or The Hungarian Virgin)  by Étienne-Léon de Lamothe-Langon (1825) [Gallica.bnf.fr: Vol. 1 | Vol. 2 | Vol. 3 - French] [Black Coat Press - English Translation ($)]

Der Vampyre und seine Braut (The Vampire and his Bride) by Carl Spindler (1826) [GoogleBooks - German] [Bibliotheque-vampires.de - German]

La Guzla, ou Choix de Poesies Illyrique (The Guzla, or a Selection of Illyric Poems) by Prosper Merimee (1827) [GoogleBooks - French] [Archive.org - French] (A literary hoax that purports to be a collection of folklore)

“Pepopukin in Corsica” by Arthur Young (1827) [GoogleBooks]

Der Vampyr (The Vampire) by Heinrich Marschner and Wilhelm August Wohlbrück (1828) [Stanford University - Libretto] [Archive.org - German Score] [Archive.org -  German Recording] [Zeno.org - German Libretto]

Der Vampyre, oder die Totenbraut (The Vampyre and the Dead Bride) by Theodor Hildebrand (1828) [GoogleBooks - German]

1830-1839

“The Eve of Ivan Kupala” (aka “St. John’s Eve”]by Nikolaj Vasilevic Gogol (1832), from his Evenings on a Farm Near Dikanka  [The University of Adelaide] (not explicitly about vampires, although it does concern blood-drinking witches)

“The Vampire Bride” by Henry Thomas Liddell (1833) [GoogleBooks]

“The Viy” by Nikolaj Vasilevic Gogol (1835), from his Mirgorod [The University of Adelaide] (not explicitly about vampires, although it does concern blood-drinking witches)

“La Morte Amoureuse” (“The Dead Lover,” aka “Clarimonde”; “The Beautiful Vampire”; “The Dead Woman in Love”; “The Dead Leman”) by Théophile Gautier (1836) [GoogleBooks] [Archive.org] [Project Gutenberg] [Lesvampires.org] [Université du Québec à Chicoutimi - French]

“Ligea” by Edgar Allan Poe (1838) [GoogleBooks] [Project Gutenberg] [Poestories.com] (not explicitly about vampires, although it does concern the re-arisen dead)

“Sem'ya Vurdalaka” (“The Family of the Vourdalak,” aka “The Curse of the Vourdalak”) by Aleksey Konstantinovich Tolstoy (1839) [Scribd] [Az.lib.eu - Russian]

1840-1849

Der tote Gast (The Dead Guest) by Heinrich Zschokke (1840) [GoogleBooks] (not explicitly about vampires, although it does concern the re-arisen dead)

Upyr (The Vampire) by Aleksey Konstantinovich Tolstoy (1841) [Az.lib.eu - Russian] [Amazon.com - English Translation ($)]

‘The Vampire" by James Clerk Maxwell (1845) [GoogleBooks] [Poemhunter.com]

Varney the Vampyre, or, The Feast of Blood by James Malcolm Rhymer (sometimes attributed to Thomas Preskett Prest) (1845-1847) [University of Virgina] [Project Gutenberg - Incomplete]

Wuthering Heights by Emily Bronte (1847) [GoogleBooks] [Archive.org] [Project Gutenberg] (not explicitly about vampires, although Heathcliff is accused of vampirsm)

“La Dame pâle” (“The Pale Lady,” aka “The Carpathian Mountains”; “The Vampire of the Carpathian Mountains”) by Alexandre Dumas and Paul Bobage, in Les mille et un fantômes (The Thousand and One Ghosts) (1849) [Project Gutenberg - French] [Wikisource - French] [Amazon.com - English Translation ($)]

More Vampire Lit: [x]

Werewolf Lit: [x]

Adapted from this forum post. Original poster has not read all works listed, but has applied descriptive/helpful notes where possible.

#dracula daily #re: dracula #more pre game reading list #once more unto the queue dear friends

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Werewolf Literature Masterpost

Fiction

“The Man Wolf” by Leitch Ritchie (1831) [GoogleBooks]

“Hughes the Wer-Wolf: A Kentish Legend of the Middle Ages” by Sutherland Menzies (1838) [Werewolfpage.com]

“The White Wolf of the Hartz Mountains” by Frederick Marryat, from his The Phantom Ship (1839) [Project Gutenberg] [Donaldcorrell.com]

Wagner the Wehr-wolf by George W. M. Reynolds (1847) [Project Gutenberg] [GoogleBooks] [Wikisource]

Le Meneur de loups (The Wolf Leader) by Alexandre Dumas (1857) [GoogleBooks] [Archive.org]

“Hugues-le-loup” (“The Man-Wolf”) by Emile Erckmann and Alexandre Chatrian (1859) [Project Gutenberg] [GoogleBooks]

“The White Wolf of Kostopchin” by Sir Gilbert Campbell, from his Wild and Weird Tales of Imagination and Mystery (1889) [Elfinspell.com] [Unz.org]

“A Pastoral Horror” by Arthur Conan Doyle (1890) [Project Gutenberg] [The Arthur Conan Doyle Encyclopedia]

“The Mark of the Beast” by Rudyard Kipling (1891) [The Kipling Society] [Readbookonline.net]

“The Other Side: A Breton Legend” by Eric Stenbock (1893) [Gaslight]

The Were-wolf by Clarence Housman (1896) [Project Gutenberg]

“The Werewolf” by Eugene Field, from his The Second Book of Tales (1896) [Readbookonline.net]

The Werwolves" by Henry Beaugrand (1898) [Gaslight] [Gwthomas.org]

The Camp of the Dog by Algernon Blackwood (1908) [Project Gutenberg] [Librivox - Audio]

“Gabriel-Ernest” by Saki (1910) [Readbookonline.net] [Archive.org - Audio]

“The She-Wolf” by Saki (1910) [Eastoftheweb.com]

The Thing in the Woods by Margery Williams (1913) [Babel.hathitrust.org]

The Door of the Unreal by Gerald Biss (1919) [GoogleBooks] [Gothic Texts] [Donaldcorrell.com]

“Running Wolf” by Algernon Blackwood (1921) [Project Gutenberg]

“The Phantom Farmhouse” by Seabury Quinn (1923) [Nightgallery.net - .DOC]

“Wolfshead” by Robert E. Howard (1926) [Project Gutenberg]

“Tarnhelm” by Hugh Walpole (1933) [Project Gutenberg]

The Werewolf of Paris by Guy Endore (1933) [Vb-tech.co.za - PDF]

Non-Fiction

“The Life and Death of Peter Stubbe” (1590) [Werewolfpage.com]

The Book of Were-Wolves by Sabine Baring-Gould (1865) [Project Gutenberg] [GoogleBooks] [Sacred Texts]

Werewolves by Elliott O'Donnell (1912) [Project Gutenberg]

Human Animals by Frank Hammel (1915) [Project Gutenberg]

Vampire Lit: [x] [x]

#dracula daily #re: dracula #pre game reading lists #once more unto the queue dear friends

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baby snoopy this, baby clifford that, baby gromit blah blah blah. what about baby kermit???????

#once more unto the queue dear friends #*gasp*

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So I think I forgot to post about it here but I'm knitting my own wedding dress.

#omg this is one of the most beautiful things ive ever seen

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Hi I just learnt that grebe the bird existed and I am intrigued do you have any knowledge to drop on the dudes

BOY DO I! grebes are my favorite waterfowl!

they're specialist divers and fish hunters, and they're a pretty wide group with a LOT of species!

and they're all freaks. every single one of them.

they're most closely related to FLAMINGOS, of all things, which is why their feet are so weird! they evolved completely separate from other waterfowl like ducks and geese, so they did the flipper thing totally backwards.

this is going to be a theme, nothing these birds do is normal.

unlike other specialist diving birds (coughcough LOONS coughcough), they aren't totally incompetent on land! just, again. total freaks about it.

aaagh I love them so much I might actually explode

also they swim like frogs, babies can dive pretty much immediately after hatching, and adults can minutely adjust their buoyancy in the water at will like a fucking submarine. you just can't make any of this shit up.

weirdest fucking bird 100/10

#nature is weird #but beautiful #once more unto the queue dear friends

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reblog w the song lyrics in your head NOW. either stuck in yr head or what yr listening to

#omigod u guys and what you want from Legally Blonde the Musical

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I had some time to kill so

Happy Almost-Dracula-Daily

Special thanks to @akasanata for providing the internet with Dracula Manga images 🙏

#dracula daily #soooooon