Welcome! I am L.S. Johnson, award-nominated author of dark fantasy and weird fiction, and this is the repository for all things related to Prima Materia. An author friend described PM as “the vampire War & Peace” ... and honestly I still haven’t come up with a better logline for it, so thank you again, Cath. 😊 Prima Materia is about warring vampires, the alchemists who want their blood, and maybe—just maybe—the return of a serpent god; it’s about the ethics of violence and the nature of faith; it’s got found families, dry wit, and an awful lot of blood and biting; it’s set in a diverse, queer, grubby, bawdy Enlightenment Europe both like and unlike our own, where “science” and “reason” are often in the eye of the beholder and beings not quite human walk among us. Every writer, I think, has a passion project, the one where we throw every trope and element we love into a story and run with it. Prima Materia is mine.
I wrote the first words of this series in 2011; it was the story that brought me back to writing, and it has helped me navigate a lot of dark periods in my life since. But what started as a single novella began to sprawl—I think the phrase for it is “project creep”—and soon I had scenes, research, and notes across a half-dozen notebooks and three different word processing programs. This website, then, began after many other attempts to organize this information. Wikis, story bibles, even good old-fashioned ring binders … this is the format that stuck.
For a while I tried serializing the story here as well ... but every attempt to keep at that writing schedule inevitably imploded, either from my own health or from a series of family crises in 2022-2023. So I circled back to the original intent, no deadlines attached: a place to store the choicest bits of research, galleries of art, the character and conlang guides, notes on craft, the soundtrack I’m working with ... in short, consolidating all those files and notebooks into a single reference point for both writer and reader.
All I ask from you is to sign up before you dive in. I won’t use your email for anything save to send the occasional update on the project. I’m hoping in the future to offer subscribers some perks: shorts available exclusively here (perhaps as chapbooks, I loooove making homemade chapbooks), preorder discounts, that sort of thing. First crack, if you will. But that won’t be for a while yet; 2022-23 really flattened me, and recovery—from burnout, from crisis—is never as quick or as linear as we would like.
Questions? Thoughts? Please feel free to reach out. If you want to keep up with my work in general, I have a monthly newsletter. You can sign up for it here.
And if you do sign up for this site? Thank you. This may be my passion project, but it’s also a passion I want to share. Your support helps to keep me going.
❤️ LSJ