A major character has been disowned by their family. It is primarily motivated by greed over inheritance, but not entirely unrelated to the character’s gender and sexuality. This situation comes up repeatedly throughout the book.

A major character changes their name as part of a gender transition, and their deadname occurs a few times in the text—when they strategically choose to say it, and not when it is weaponized against them by others.

A major character has lost their mother to a long illness, years prior to the book. It is mentioned several times.

A major character has been groomed and emotionally abused by an adult when they were a teenager.

A major character is groped without their consent while they are magically stupefied, also without their consent.

There is violence (stabbing and blood) and murder. There is also discussion of drinking blood and a brief discussion of antisemitic blood libel.

A supporting character is in an abusive marriage. (She’ll get a happy ending in book two.)

There is sex in this book. Most of the scenes are explicit with regard to genitalia. Both main characters are nonbinary. One of them can shapeshift with magic; the other cannot. Nonbinary gender exists independent of what kind of body a person has. Though I have not always followed all of their advice, I am indebted to Xan West/Corey Alexander and their writings on trans and nonbinary erotica. May their memory be a blessing.

Some of the sex scenes feature power exchange. There is some other light kink, namely roleplay (including some play with gender) and consensual bondage.

The main characters in this book use multiple pronouns (he/she/they for one of them, for instance). Singular they is perfectly correct in English. In contemporary French, there is now the corresponding nonbinary pronoun “iel,” among several other options. Though nonbinary people existed in early 19th century France when this book is set, “iel” is a later innovation. French typically genders its nouns and adjectives as masculine or feminine, but the convention when referring to a nonbinary person is to write, for instance, “étudiant.e” (instead of ”étudiant” or ”étudiante”) or “grand.e” so the word is both and neither. This convention didn’t come up in the book I wrote in English, but it’s cool, so I wanted to tell you about it.

The magic in this book breaks the laws of the universe as we know them in our own world. Since I had already flagrantly disregarded physics, history and prescriptivist grammar were trivial to me. Language is whatever we want it to be.

(This project ran from February 15, 2023 to May 8, 2023 and is now concluded. It was a lot of fun!)

Because The Scandalous Letters of V and J is an epistolary novel, meaning it’s primarily composed of letters and diary entries, I thought it might be fun to send it as letters (electronically, that is—sadly I don’t have the funds to mail you all actual paper letters!).

I saw how much fun people were having with Dracula Daily, which sends the letters from the novel Dracula by their dates, and I’ve also been enjoying the romance novel that Alexis Hall has been sending, chapter by chapter, to his newsletter subscribers, so I thought I would try something similar. Scandalous Letters is also set in the 1820s, just a few years before the explosion in popularity of print newspapers. Most 1830s newspapers had serialized novels below the fold on the front page, which is a nice little nineteenth-century connection for this digital project.

The daily emails will usually contain a few short letters or diary entries. I imagine the emails will be a quick read on most days, with just an occasional longer read where something really juicy happens.