So, uh, I was neck deep in Victory Asterisk when the idea for this show hit me.

After I had completed Brittle Tourniquet, I needed another project. I had just seen Dune: Part Two and it hit me – an anarchist epic. This was later scaled down to a murder mystery set in an anarchist utopia. I was going to criticize the heck out of it. (Yes, I’m technically an anarchist myself, feel free to judge me.) I wrote the scripts for all seven episodes, got my editor Tony Amato (who also edited my Lambda Literary finalist novel Supervillainz) to finish edits, and started casting voice actors and recording scenes.

Then Season 3 of Loading Ready Run’s Not a Drop to Drink happened. Blame Jacob Burgess for Blood Doll.

In one of the later Not a Drop to Drink episodes, Jacob takes the players through a gala ball where they have to navigate all kinds of social dilemmas and manipulations. But the thing that stuck out to me was a background detail he mentioned – humans called Blood Dolls wandering around the room for Kindred to feed on. I wanted to know about them. (I wanted to be them but that’s another story.)

I was thinking about what sort of perception they would have of the Kindred. From a newcomer’s perspective, these were gods. They could do god-like things. What the hell did their existence mean from a religious or philosophical perspective? And why were they so bad at being gods?

I immediately dumped all this on a lover of mine about a character I would like to play if I ever got into a VtM TTRPG. A Blood Doll with the attitude, “Why can’t you be better gods?“

(I have since been informed by every friend of mine who runs VtM TTRPGs that I am banned from their games because of my eternal unstoppable urge to dissect everything in a postmodern fashion. Blame Grant Morrison for that.)

Anyhow, this was in late December 2024. I was churning through Victory Asterisk when a major problem hit the recording cycle. Our main voice actor wasn’t available to record often enough to get through the massive amount of lines we needed. (Maybe if you haven’t noticed from my other works like The Mask of Inanna but I tend to write things epic-sized.) We had recorded about 1/3rd of the scripts while the idea for a Blood Doll show seized me. I started writing down ideas for it. I started doing research online for fundamental religious concepts that might work well to explain vampires. On a recommendation from one of my actors, I started watching episodes of Esoterica. I absolutely adored them and found that he had researched a lot of what I was looking for.

Bits of dialogue started to come to me. Characters began to emerge from the ether. I attended a VtM LARP with a friend where I tried out some of the concepts I’d researched on the participants. I’m sure I annoyed them quite a bit, although my friend said they were cool with this afterward.

In February, I worked daily on an outline for the Blood Doll show. I think it took a couple weeks to complete (17k words). I settled on eight episodes, which is pretty much the length of most Prestige Television seasons. I fought tooth and nail to chart out Cassandra’s voyage through the VtM world. I felt the urge to start writing Episode 1 before I’d finished the outline, but I’m very glad I waited until the outline was complete.

I wrote Episode 1 (18.5k words) in a week, y’all. This show fucking poured out of me. Subsequent episodes took about a week or two to get into draft state, so I could pass them off to Tony for edits and revisions. I started to consider casting the show. I think I was on Episode 4 or 5 when I asked one of my actors on Victory Asterisk, the amazing slam poet Rachel K. Zall, whether she’d be interested in the role of Cassandra. She was. Rachel and I had known each other back in Boston so performing in my show seemed a natural extension of our work back in Gendercrash (PDF).

Samael was harder to cast. I was considering asking Jacob Burgess if he wanted the role – I could hear him doing the voice. However, getting him to record synchronously with Rachel would be a challenge. I preferred all my actors to record in my private studio which wasn’t going to happen with Jacob.

So while winding down recording on Victory Asterisk, one of my voice actors, Soleil (who I had recast with Dee since Soleil had been perpetually busy), suddenly became available. I brought them into my studio to record a bit part. And while they were at my place, I figured, what the hell. I told them about the Blood Doll project and asked them to try out Samael’s lines.

Well, they fucking nailed them, and my problems were over.

A few days later, I went into the Victory Asterisk chat, gave them a cut of Episode 1 (with some scenes missing) and told them that I was going to set the project aside to work full time on Blood Doll. I was up to Blood Doll script Episode 5 when we started recording the show. I brought Rachel and Soleil over to my place to read the scripts together and their chemistry was incredible. I knew we had a winner on our hands.

Okay, I should actually get to some of the notes on Blood Doll, Episode 1 itself. Because I’m a writer and a bitch (the two are often synonymous), I wanted to start the show without Cassandra and then surprise the audience by switching over to her perspective. This was similar to how I started The Mask of Inanna halfway through one of the minisodes, and ended the episode playing the first half of the minisode to give the whole episode an uroboros effect. I like playing with perspective and expectations, what can I say.

I’ve been attending Tony Amato’s writer’s workshops on and off since the year of our Lord 2000 and I spent most of my time writing vignettes about each of the Blood Doll characters. So I had a chance to flesh them out before they showed up in the scripts. Not so with Cassandra – I played fast and loose with her. Her personality came out during the writing of Episode 1.

(Also the final Blood Doll scripts don’t especially match the outline I had written, which is for the best. The Episode 1 script remained the closest to the Episode 1 outline, but the others went in their own directions. I’m glad I wrote the outline though as it gave me a lot of plot points that I could select from and use in the subsequent episodes.)

So we start Episode 1 with what Rachel calls the “odious” techbro vampires. They are the inciting incident for the show – creating the TAM and dragging Cassandra into the Kindred world. They are also the entry point for the audience, many of whom may not understand how vampires work in the World of Darkness. So Brian and Jeffrey spell out how everything happens. Rachel later convinced me that we needed something more than just the techbros to tell the audience that the show wasn’t going to be just about them. So I wrote the “Scene 0” with Cassandra and Samael together six months later to tell the audience, “no really, this show is about a love story, not techbros.”

I’m especially pleased by our Brian and Jeffrey voice actors who were playing against type compared to their Victory Asterisk characters. Brian’s voice actor was a sweetest little trans man in V*, and we had to rehearse to turn up his smarm and asshole settings.

In my writing, I like to push things to their logical conclusions, so I came up with the idea of Embracing an AI as an investigative tool into The Beast, and ghouling an orca because, Welcome to the Pacific Northwest. I had to start the show with a bang so I frontloaded both of these. (We’ll get to the Gum Wall in Episode 3.)

Cassandra’s subsequent imprisonment in Aaralyn’s chambers was another bit of tutorialization I wanted to use to teach the audience more about the World of Darkness. I like Rachel and Peter as making the best of a not-great kidnapping situation, and I thoroughly annoyed voice actor Rachel by naming a character that she was not playing Rachel in the Episode 1 script. I could have changed Script Rachel’s name but I didn’t see a huge reason to.

I did change Amanda’s name though. She was originally “Carolyn” but the Seattle Prince was named “Aaralyn.” One of them had to change and it would not be the Prince.

I’m very proud of the work that Rachel, Soleil, and I did on the sex scene. I needed to declare exactly how erotic I was intending on taking the show, even if I never intended to have another explicit sex scene again. I’m also a bitch so I needed to sell the eroticism of the sex scene to make the cut-away to the Anarch’s warehouse that much funnier. My actors said it was a highlight of the episode.

The sex scene also establishes that consent is everything. Samael asks “Is this all right?” Cassandra has the opportunity to say anything she wants, and oh gods, does she want it.

I like using the word “cavorting.” What can I say.

Yes, Samael is basically Jared Harris; specifically his role of Anderson Dawes from The Expanse. Soleil is a big Expanse fan and knew exactly the voice to do. I regularly joke with my cast that Blood Doll is my midlife crisis Daddy dom fanfic. What do you want from me, I’m technically human.

Finally, we get to the meat of the episode. Cassandra (with her name withheld, although Samael is fully aware of it, having read her driver’s license) and Samael discussing religious topics from over a month’s of my research. I had to make it hot. Judge me if you want. I’m especially proud of the “God’s own breath” bit. These scenes were actually the first ones we recorded. It was vital to nail down exactly how Cassandra and Samael would sound together. Everything else came from that.

The raid on the Anarch’s warehouse came from one of my earliest ideas for the show. Cassandra had to be a Blood Doll for other Kindred too, of her own free will. And I was thinking about what role my Blood Doll character might have in a TTRPG, which is, when shit goes down, the other players can take a sip off of her. So that needed to happen on the show. It gives her and Samael’s coterie a moment of awesomeness, and a reason why she gets kidnapped by the Anarchs and has to retell the whole Episode to them.

One of my actors, the one who dragged me to the VtM LARP, read the Episode 1 script and kept telling me “it’s too long.” They kept saying, “there are so many points at which you could stop.” I replied, yes, but there weren’t any points at which we could start a subsequent episode. Well, once they heard the whole Episode 1, I didn’t hear a peep out of them about cutting it, so here it is, in all its hour-and-forty-five-minutes glory. Hope you enjoyed. They’re only going to get wilder from here.