Wallachia

Chapter fifteen of Wallachia should be out tomorrow. I’ve said before that one of the hardest parts of getting a chapter ready is thinking up the reader poll question. When I started this project, I pictured the polls working in a few different ways. One, they’d be a way to get me out of a jam. If I couldn’t decide on which direction to take the story, I’d have the readers vote. Fun! Two, they’d keep me on my toes, forcing me to never write too far ahead, since upcoming events would depend on how the votes went.

Naturally I expected that sometimes there would be things I wouldn’t want to put up to a vote. The story is planned out all the way to the end. There’s stuff I don’t know yet—that’s what writing is—but the big stuff, I know. So whenever I get to the end of a chapter, I usually know where the next ones are going, at least generally. Chapter sixteen, for example, doesn’t have a lot of action in it. There’s just some stuff that happens in it that follows from where we’ve been and sets up where we’re going. It’s not like it has a place where you get to vote which character dies.

As I was writing fifteen, though, I came up with something great. It was going to end on a cliffhanger. A decision was going to be put before a character, and you, the reader, were going to vote on what that character decided. The consequences would matter and really would change a few things about what’s coming up. But then as I was writing it, I realized that one of the parties involved in that decision had *absolutely no motivation*—no reason to be in the situation I was setting up. I agonized over it. I sketched out the scene longhand. I typed it, deleted it, rewrote it, and ultimately just couldn’t make it work. So I scrapped it and rewrote the whole thing, which left me—again—with no idea what to put up for the reader poll.

If this were a different book, maybe I’d have every chapter end on a big cliffhanger for you to vote on, but it’s not. I’ve said before how I think often about what Stephen King says about how you have to let the story tell itself. It’s in charge, not you. So for me, that means pacing around the house for the better part of a day trying to clear my mind until the answer comes to me—which I liked doing more when I had the house to myself and not a whole quarantined family trying to get their own stuff done. Alas.

Happy new year!

Today we start publishing a “new” serial, 1845’s Varney the Vampire or, The Feast of Blood, A Romance.

Chapters will hit the app Fridays—Vineri in Romanian—so check back each week for a new spine-tingling, bodace-ripping #VarneyVineri.

Chapter six of Carmilla, “A Very Strange Agony,” is in the app now.

If you didn’t get a push notification this morning (and you’ve been reading Carmilla), please open the app manually. This should make it resume notifications. Yesterday’s 2.0.2 update should make sure this doesn’t happen going forward. 🤞🏻

Very small application update coming to the App Store today.

In previous versions, fi you had the table of contents page open and tapped the chapter you were currently reading, the table of contents would close and take you back to the page you were reading. Now, it takes you back to the first page of the chapter. If you want to stay on your current page, the “Resume” button at the top of the screen will do that. I like this behavior better because it gives you a quick way to go back to the start of a chapter if you do want to.

Toggling the buttons when you tap the screen should be speedier now.

Changed the way notifications are handled by the system.

My own little side project, Dracula Live, is in the home stretch now. The story concludes in early November.

Dracula: A Radio Play, “An adaption of the Bram Stoker novel, written and directed by Cruz Flores,” comes out twice weekly in October.

A new version of the Wallachia app should be in the App Store shortly. It requires iOS 14, but the previous version should keep working fine until you upgrade. 🤞🏻

Get it now on the App Store.

Before I run down the features, I want to thank everyone who’s been reading and supporting me this past year. It’s been a ton of work but it’s been incredibly fulfilling. With this version finished, I’m looking forward to getting back to writing. (Though I’m sure there will be some bug fixes to do.)

New in 2.0, roughly in order of importance:

🎧Audiobooks have been removed from the app. This removes a lot of programming complexity for me. I don’t think a ton of people were using the audiobooks in the app, but if you subscribe to the podcast you’ll get the audio chapters the same day the prose versions go up.

📚The app now includes a library of “Essential Vampire Classics“: Lord Byron’s fragment of a novel, John William Polidori’s The Vampyre, J. Sheridan Le Fanu’s Carmilla, and Bram Stoker’s Dracula. There are many more pre-Dracula stories I could include, but this will get you started.

The books are from Project Gutenberg with a lot of formatting applied. I think they look fantastic but please let me know if you run across, say, a Latin word that hasn’t been italicized or a paragraph that’s not indented.

🆕Serialized classics. Starting with Carmilla, I’ll be releasing new chapters of classic books every week (assuming I can keep that schedule). Carmilla will run for a few months, then I’ll set up a new one.

🔔Notifications can be configured per-book. If you grant access to the app, you’ll see a bell icon in the toolbar for each book. You won’t get notified for books you haven’t opened, and you can turn them off for any book you don’t want notifications for using that icon.

🔢Handy page counter. Ebook readers tend to have a way to tell you how many pages are left in your current chapter. The trick was designing a way to show this without resorting to junking up the page with a progress bar. I reached out to Cat City Creative for some help designing ornaments for the page and we settled on a nice solution. The bottom-right page corner now features a little design that incorporates a countdown showing you how many pages are left in the chapter.

🏛Front matter pages are now properly numbered using roman numerals, and the book’s regular page numbers start with one after the front matter ends.

Elsewhere, every single page has been redesigned in some way or another, though you may not notice. The landscape view on iPhones has been streamlined to give you an extra couple of lines of text per page. The tables of contents are popovers again. The reader poll pages should work more reliably now (I hope—these are hard to test).

Under the hood, the entire app is now written using SwiftUI. I did decide to move to a simple fade animation for page turns rather than the skeuomorphic page flip the old version had. Part of this was necessity. The animation was provided by UIPageViewController but I didn’t want to embed that, and partly also I think this is just cleaner.

Somewhere on my to-do list is the idea of doing a two-page view for landscape iPads, but it’s honestly not a high priority. I’d like to do some more work to speed up the layout/typesetting process, but it’s improved over version one at least.

Another small bug fix update should be in the App Store now.

This fixes a small bug in the Table of Contents view. It won’t actually manifest until I start the 2.0 upgrade process on the server, so I wanted to get it out now so that most everyone is updated when I do that. I’m trying very hard to future proof the app so that when 2.0 comes out people who haven’t upgraded to iOS 14 can still use the existing app without any glitches. Hopefully this covers it. 🤞🏻

Eugen stands trial.

When I read ebooks on my phone, I usually do it in landscape mode. I prefer having a wider screen so that the text doesn’t wrap every tenth word. In the Wallachia app designed a different page footer that gets shown when you’re on a phone in landscape mode. It’s a little more compact, which lets me squeeze an extra line of text on the page.

Today, when I was making tweaks to the footer for the new version of the app, I had a small design realization: I don’t need the footer at all in compact mode. The page number can just go in the upper-left corner of the screen. Right now in version 1.2.2, on an iPhone 11 in landscape mode at the default text size, you get eleven lines of text. In the new version, I can fit thirteen in. That’s 18% more text, which means fewer page flips!

I noticed a bunch of vampire movie deals on iTunes today:

• $20 Hotel Transylvania 3-Movie Collection
• $25 Underworld Ultimate Collection
• $5 Interview With the Vampire
• $5 Bram Stoker’s Dracula
• $5 Blade II
• $20 Twilight: The Complete Saga

Also $10 Addams Family Double Feature.

As I schedule the @live_dracula tweets, I’m getting to the parts of the book where much more happens in each entry. It’s quite the exercise to squeeze them into one tweet!

I’ve published a small update to the app. The next major version, 2.0, will require iOS 14. Today’s version ensures forward compatibility for those who don’t upgrade to 14 right away. You won’t get any of the new features, but the old version will still keep working just as it has.

Marley meets Dracula.

Abraham has some news to deliver.

Chapter fourteen of Wallachia is out. Get it from the App Store and read it for free.

🏛Eugen stands trial.

Notes:

• It’s 2 July, a Tuesday. The moon is at 48%. 🌓
• Județ was a “an office with administrative and judicial functions, corresponding to both judge and mayor. The word is etymologically rooted in the Latin ‘judicium.’” It’s pronounced like the first two syllables in “judiciary.”
• Otherwise I’m mostly making up how the legal system works. No juries or lawyers. It’s roughly in line with what I’ve read about how the law operated in some parts of Europe, but it works for what we need.

Lastly, I need to focus a bit on programming so I can get the new version of the app ready for iOS 14’s launch in the fall. I don’t think I’ll have no new chapters until then, but normally I’d start writing the next chapter right away; instead I’m going to be busy in Xcode.

On Twitter I posted a few thoughts on the “Log of the Demeter” sections of Dracula, which are happening now in Dracula Live.

New arrivals.

Rain cancels Ion’s oină practice.

Sarah Andersen just published the last strip of her lovely web comic, Fangs.

Blacula also seems to be free to watch with ads on Amazon Prime.

I missed this last month when they appeared. Underworld, Underworld Evolution, and Rise of the Lycans are on Netflix now. There are also two more, Awakening and Blood Wars, that I haven’t seen. Will rectify soon.

Marley and Margareta go for a ride.

Dracula Live ’20 is nearing the end of chapter four. Still lots of time to catch up! Follow along on Twitter @live_dracula for real-time action.

In chapter one of Dracula, there’s an odd scene where the count, pretending to be his own driver, picks up Jonathan Harker in his calèche and takes him to the castle. The driver speaks “excellent German.” He addresses Jonathan as “mein Herr.” Remembering that scene, I’ve been having Dracula use German honorifics in Wallachia (”Fräulein Marley”), but I’m starting to think that’s wrong. In chapter two, Jonathan notes that the count speaks “excellent English, but with a strange intonation.” He addresses Jonathan as “Mr.,” though once he puts his names in the wrong order: “my friend Harker Jonathan, nay, pardon me. I fall into my country’s habit of putting your patronymic first.”

Stoker’s Count Dracula refers to himself as a Székely, a group of Hungarians who lived in what’s now Romania:

We Szekelys have a right to be proud, for in our veins flows the blood of many brave races who fought as the lion fights, for lordship. Here, in the whirlpool of European races, the Ugric tribe bore down from Iceland the fighting spirit which Thor and Wodin gave them, which their Berserkers displayed to such fell intent on the seaboards of Europe, aye, and of Asia and Africa too, till the peoples thought that the werewolves themselves had come. Here, too, when they came, they found the Huns, whose warlike fury had swept the earth like a living flame, till the dying peoples held that in their veins ran the blood of those old witches, who, expelled from Scythia had mated with the devils in the desert. Fools, fools! What devil or what witch was ever so great as Attila, whose blood is in these veins?” He held up his arms. “Is it a wonder that we were a conquering race, that we were proud, that when the Magyar, the Lombard, the Avar, the Bulgar, or the Turk poured his thousands on our frontiers, we drove them back?

The count, living in Transylvania, would obviously speak Romanian. By 1893 he’s learned English so that he can go to London in the novel. We know he speaks German from the text, and Transylvania had a sizable population of German settlers so that also makes historical sense. He communicates with various Slavic workers who handle his affairs before he leaves.

As I’ve covered before, the literary Dracula is not the historical Vlad III, but in chapter eighteen Van Helsing does conclude that, “he must, indeed, have been that Voivode Dracula who won his name against the Turk.” As such, my hunch would be that Dracula’s native language would have been Hungarian, or whatever version of Hungarian 15th century Székelys spoke. Historically he was a prisoner of the Turks so he would have learned their language as well.

In 1816, the setting of Wallachia, a typical peasant would have spoken their regional dialect of Romanian, and would likely have had some level of proficiency in a combination of Hungarian, German, Greek, and Turkish. So I liked the idea of having Dracula mix in a few foreign (to a Wallachian) words to show that he’s a little bit old school. Like, all languages have some number of loanwords. These will be in greater use in some areas than others. So I sort of imagine that if Wallachian Romanian might have had some percentage more Hungarian loanwords than, say, an area farther east that might swap in more Turkish, the count is going to be using all of them (and no Turkish because he’s super racist). Like in English you can say vis-à-vis or you can say “compared to” or whatever. My thinking is the count, to a Wallachian ear, would be speaking perfect Romanian but with an older air to it.

And here’s where the modern Web, for all its wonders, falls down. I can toss “mister” and “missus” into Google Translate and get the Hungarian translations for them, but that’s just the word. I’d want to know how those words are used in actual conversation. Not just talking about Hungarian or Romanian or whatever specifically here, I want to be able to know, for example, how a native speaker of language x would address a man of equal social standing to himself. Or a teenage girl. In English, for example, you’d call the man “Mr. Smith” but the girl by just her first name. Other languages/cultures have totally different rules.

Similarly, I found a handy resource on Omniglot for translating idioms. Here’s the entry for the English expression, “it’s raining cats and dogs,” (meaning, a very hard rain). From there, I learn that the Romanian phrase for that expression translates to “pouring buckets.” Great! Omniglot even has a few other phrases listed, which is helpful, but I guess I just want more.

Anyway, I think I’ll probably go back and change Dracula to have him just use Romanian honorifics (Domnule (Mr), Doamnă (Mrs), maybe domnişoară (miss) for Marley?). (Also I’m only 75% sure I’m use those correctly. The correct answer to all of this would be to find a native speaker who knows grammar pretty well.)