Amber Benson & Raven Belasco Discussing Everything: WORLD DRACULA DAY VIDEOS 🧛‍♀️

To celebrate World Dracula Day 2026 a series of interview segments will be posted to YouTube starting today and running for the next seven Tuesdays. The interview was recorded after Amber and I finished recording Blood Eternal in the studio, and covers such topics as Amber’s favorite character in the series, her favorite scene to narrate, how she relates to Noosh’s journey, and that one sex scene that got her spontaneously singing in the studio. (I talk, too, but we all know that’s of secondary interest at best… 😉)

Amber’s thoughts on the series are fascinating and we also laugh a lot about silly behind-the-scenes stuff, and I am really excited about sharing these. The videos will go live at noon each Tuesday through the first week of July. Shorter clips will be posted to IG/Threads/FB, but the full gloriousness of Amber’s and my discussion is only up on YouTube. So follow me there and turn the settings to let you know when my videos go live, so you don’t miss any.

For IndieLife this week, let me talk a bit about making videos...

Because my fame as an author has not hit the point where I can pay others to do this, so I make all these videos myself.

I try to do the most professional job I can with this, and so that means I have learned a lot of esoterism and the arcane arts (sometimes outright thaumaturgy!) of Adobe Premiere Pro.

I have bitched here before about Adobe InDesign. (And I will do so again! It’s a horrible monstrosity of a program!) And I am glad to say that Premiere Pro is more intuitive (although it would be honestly difficult to be less intuitive than InDesign!) But there is a lot of learning you need to do to make best use of the program, and unlike Photoshop, I’ve never had formal classes in it. And, of course, everything I do is always on a “you have a billion other vital things you need to be doing right now, so this must take the least amount of time from those” deadline. This means that all of my video editing has been learned by dropping the clips into Premiere, trying to figure it out myself, failing, looking up a tutorial online, watching enough to sort it out, doing that, and then rinse-and-repeat for the rest of the video.

It would be tedious as fuck to recount all the stuff I’ve had to figure out and then implement on the go for my marketing and promotional videos…but that’s actually the point I’m making. Being an indie author means learning a whole lot of shit that might not be in your natural wheelhouse, and almost always under time-pressure. So when you see marketing from indie authors, take a moment to appreciate the work they put into it. They have not paid someone to make that graphic or video. They have taught themselves how to do it, tried to create stuff at a standard that rivals the paid professionals, and put it out into the world with a quiet desperation that it will move the dial on sales. You should respect that as much as you respect the books they write.

More exciting news: Dracula's Terrible, Horrible, No-Good, Very Bad Christmas has finally got its real cover and is available in both ebook and for the first time, paperback!

If you didn’t grab your copy over the holidays, well, Xmas in May seems like a good idea!

I will be at Hellmouth again this year!

Amber and I will be talking about the making of Blood Eternal, and sharing some treats with the audience. (And those treats will include some free copies of the paperback of Dracula's Terrible, Horrible, No-Good, Very Bad Christmas!) I love this convention so much. If you can be there, you should be! It’s June 13-14 in Torrence, CA.

Today’s RavenLife is a question from Patrick Califia, who is interested in women who write about M-M spice ♂️♂️🌶️

Since my am’r are bi+ (a term I love so much more than “pan”!) it gives me the opportunity to explore passion between all combinations of genders, which is a “perfect world” scenario for me 🎉

As for my own sexuality and what my attraction to all genders means, I like to think of myself as “purely queer.” When I am with a woman, no one questions the queerness of that. When I’m with a guy, the world perceives me as suddenly het. Nobody asks how I feel about it, but the answer is: I really feel like a gay man, when I am with a man. I might not have all the required equipment (not that I couldn’t strap it on!) but I really identify with gay male sexuality in a way I just don’t with actual heterosexuality. When I suck a dick, I have more in common with a twink in a bathhouse than a wifey behind a white picket fence. (Which I think means I’m probably better at it! 😉)

I think if having the option of being non-binary had been around when I was a kid, I would have grabbed it with both hands and never let go. When I was a little kid, I was a complete tomboy. I refused to wear pink and demanded to wear brown or blue. In nursery school, I rang a gang of boys I called “The Jaguars.” I had formed this gang, and I was the only girl allowed in it.

In fact, one of my earliest memories is being at the top of the jungle gym, and my gang members were climbing up behind me. I found them somewhat annoying, so I said, “Go off and catch a girl.”

They ran off, happy to do this task that was very much in their wheelhouse, and I was in glorious solitude. Eventually they returned, dragging a little girl by limbs and pigtails. She was protesting in a vigorous high pitch. I knew this would bring a teacher over, and I didn’t want that.

“OK, I guess you can let her go,” I told them. She ran off, and they started climbing back up the jungle gym, and I realized I was back where I started. That frustration with how the world works is my main part of the memory.

(I was such a little egoist as a small child. At that point, I didn’t want to be a girl, and I didn’t think very highly of boys, so if asked my gender, I would have said, “Something better than either of those!”)

Even as I headed into my teens, doing femininity has always felt performative. Not in a bad way, I just came to it with the same attitude as doing drag (and I’ve done male drag as well—with delight!) I loved make-up because it was art, and because it let me control how I presented myself to the world. But in college I regularly wore men’s clothing and felt perfectly comfortable in it, having idolized Marlene Dietrich and seeing the combination of menswear and make-up as a way to signal my bisexuality to the world.

It never occurred to me along the way that being bisexual didn’t have something to do with my own gender. I’m sure there are plenty of bi+ people out there who are happily a single gender, and nothing wrong with that. But for me, loving all the genders meant that I had all the genders inside me: I contained multitudes and could love multitudes.

So going back to the original question: I have absolutely no trouble writing queer male sex scenes because I have a man who loves men inside me. You may not see “Chaz” (the name I picked when I was exploring male drag) on the daily, but he is here, he is queer, and he is ready to tell you all about what he’d love to do to that guy over there! (If I’d had the spoons to perform as a Drag King, my full drag name would have been Chaz Ties and I would have be the most adorable little leather daddy you ever did see!)

I was able to explore that part of myself so fully because I lived in the San Francisco Bay Area for 20 years after graduating college. My then-wife Michelle and I drove as fast as we could across the country, to the magical land of rainbow flags and queer people holding hands openly as they walked around the Castro.

And the reason I knew to “fly home,” as it were, was actually the person who started this whole topic up. Patrick Califia is one of the biggest names in queer erotic and other writing, and I had gotten my hands on Macho Sluts and his other gorgeous works in college, and those words in those books one billion percent changed my life.

Macho Sluts showed me a world I wanted to go live in immediately. Patrick’s books affected my life more directly than Samuel Delany and Robert Heinlein (who made me realize that I could and should be a writer) because it took me years of fucking around with essays and articles and short stories and stuff before I ever wrote my first novel, but basically, from the moment of opening the cover of Macho Sluts, my life was set in the direction of living the queerest life in SF that I could. It didn’t matter that I had a chronic illness, no job prospects, and a huge college debt. I just packed up the car after graduation and went. When we first got together, I quoted David Bowie to Michelle: “I don't know where I'm going from here, but I promise I won’t bore you.” Implicit in that was moving to San Francisco for the queerest life possible.

The other gift from Patrick was the absolute confidence that I could write gay male sex scenes. When I first read his works, Patrick was “Pat,” and my ideal of what being a lesbian was. Since he didn’t come out as trans until years later, what I experienced was a lesbian writing about queer male desire. The story “The Spoiler” made a big impression, but then, all his stories made a huge impression—I should honestly be paying Patrick royalties because the concepts in his “The Vampire” shaped my ideas of the am’r/am’r-nafsh relationship, which is core to how the am’r work as a species.

I like to pretend that I’m totally chill with the fact that Patrick is now my friend, and I try not to bother him with my hero-worship of him as a writer, but the fact of the matter is that there is still a 20-year-old Raven inside me bouncing up and down and squeeing whenever I interact with him. I have been so lucky that meeting my heroes has never let me down: Patrick Califia and Samuel Delany and Jim Caroll were all a true pleasure to meet and interact with.

This has gone a bit longer than I meant it to, but that simple question was in no way simple! I still could write pages and pages more about all of this! But to wrap it up: I have no trouble wrapping my head around male-male desire because I feel I understand it within my own body and soul. And you all should go read Patrick Califia’s writing and have your own lives changed by it.

See you in two weeks…and as always, be good or be good at it! 😘

💭 I'd love to hear your thoughts, questions and feedback: drop me a note 📨

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