Wolf Interviews: Travis Blake
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Your substack is fully devoted to fiction without any non-fiction or introductory posts. I think this allows for a very clean feel to your substack, leaving the reader only your fiction to speak for itself. Was this an intentional choice to keep the focus solely on the fiction?
Yes and no. My first novel was complete when I decided to publish on Substack, so the format was dictated primarily by the content that I had on hand. However, sticking to fiction has been an intentional choice because I don’t want to get sidetracked by veering into other topics.
If you had to choose a topic to write about outside of fiction, what would it be?
If I had to write something other than fiction, it would be history. When I was seeking a publisher, I pitched the novel as a blend of horror and historical fiction because I blended the fantastical elements with real elements of history. This allowed me to cover areas that I already knew, such as the bitter struggle between Rudolf Diels and Reinhard Heydrich in the early days of Nazi Germany, while adding smaller details to color the narrative (e. g., Amy Johnson’s real history as an aviation pioneer and the Francophone nature of prewar Romania). Moreover, history may be our best teacher of human nature, because historical figures are so similar to us in many ways, while being so different in others.
What made you serialize your work on substack as opposed to Wattpad or Royal Roads or some other platform that specializes in serial storytelling?
My arrival at Substack was something of an accident, because I wasn’t a huge consumer of online fiction before I came here. I found the site in 2021 through a couple of different newsletters, and as I tried to publish my novel (I attempted the traditional publishing route without success), it gradually dawned on me that I could publish almost anything here, including a long work of fiction. I’m a huge fan of the platform because it draws in so many readers for a variety of reasons.
Did the process of serializing your novel change it at all? Since the reader experience is different (reading weekly on a screen rather than all at once in a book), was there any adaptation to this different format? I'm thinking along the lines of cliffhangers, the way you paid out reveals, etc.
The first novel was complete before I ever thought of publishing in a serial format, so cliffhangers and reveals were (mostly) not adapted to publishing on Substack. I think that serialization worked because I always tried to write each chapter with a hook to keep the reader’s attention. One exception to this – and it is a big one – is that the climax of the first book was written in a couple of very long chapters, and I had to chop those into several parts to keep the e-mails of manageable size. In that case, I tried to be selective in my breaks, so that each posting would end on a cliffhanger. With the second novel, I was more judicious to keep the chapters to a word count that I could send via e-mail.
As a lifelong vampire lover, I'm always primed for something vampire related. What was the draw of Dracula for you?
My brother and I had a series of illustrated classics when I was a kid, and my favorite was Dracula. I devoured that copy multiple times, and when the 1979 version of Dracula and Salem’s Lot were shown on television, I had to watch both. I was about ten years old, and they gave me nightmares for months! That imagery – a dead woman in an abandoned mine, a child floating outside of a bedroom window – formed much of my thinking about what is frightening.
The other puzzle piece, which fell into place in 2009, was Leslie S. Klinger’s publication of The New Annotated Dracula. Klinger’s annotations took Bram Stoker’s original work in a new direction, often with a sinister undertone, and hinted that there was more to the story than the author dared to relate. This was my starting point when I began writing, and I tried to tell a story that was largely faithful to Stoker’s original while building upon his work.
Always interesting the way things experienced in childhood have a rippling effect through our lives.
Had you attempted writing fiction before Dracula's Ghost?
When I was about nine years old, my best friend and I co-wrote about a hundred pages of a story called The Unseen Terror, in which the two of us (of course, we had to write ourselves into the story) battled a monstrous swamp creature. I have dabbled intermittently in fiction for most of my adult life, but the old stories would be discarded because the dialogue was too wooden, the characters were one-dimensional, etc. Learning to write a first draft, warts and all, and to refine that into something better made a huge difference in my writing. Having kids was another game changer, because their imagination is so rich that it fired something within my own mind. We built a sandcastle on the lakeshore, and I became so entranced with the process that I made up an entire story in my head as we worked. That story, The Castle by the Sea, sat in my computer for several years, and I liked it so much that I included an abbreviated version of the tale in Dracula’s Ghost. That combination of circumstances – youthful imagination combined with middle-aged discipline – aligned to make the last three years my most productive.
Any final thoughts?
To close things out, I’m grateful for the opportunity to publish on Substack, and I’m doubly grateful for the community that I have encountered there. Thank you again for the opportunity.
You can read Dracula’s Ghost and Dracula’s Ghost - Afterimage at Travis’ substack.
My novels, whose paperbacks are all $9.99 for the month of September:
Glossolalia - A Le Guinian fantasy novel about an anarchic community dealing with a disaster
Sing, Behemoth, Sing - Deadwood meets Neon Genesis Evangelion
Howl - Vampire Hunter D meets The Book of the New Sun in this lofi cyberpunk/solarpunk monster hunting adventure
Colony Collapse - Star Trek meets Firefly in the opening episode of this space opera
The Blood Dancers - The standalone sequel to Colony Collapse.
Iron Wolf - Sequel to Howl.
Some free books for your trouble: