I DO NOT CONSENT TO MY CONTENT BEING USED TO TRAIN ARTIFICIAL INTELLIGENCE
BOOK TEASERS
First, here is the book teaser I made for Instagram. At some point I should reformat it for YouTube...
AND a book trailer (the first fan art anybody ever made for me!) created by my friend sulkytae - check it out. Her work is fantastic. (If you want her to make you a book trailer, message her. I have tried several times to get her name to embed with a hyperlink here, the way it did on the soundbite edition, to no avail, so I'm going to ask people who want to approach her for trailers to please do a Wattpad search. Sorry! Really!)
TRANSLATIONS
Translations of the Homeric Greek words "Magister" utters can be found at the very end of this book. Eventually, I may put translations of all the Latin passages as well, although rough, loose, abbreviated translations are embedded in the chapters that make use of quotes (Binah contains a short, rather famous one from Catullus; Chesed contains excerpts of the writings of Heloise and Abelard). Readers who want to know what is being said may want to keep the translation "chapter" open in a separate tab.
⚠️ CONTENT WARNINGS ⚠️
While the depictions of sexual activity in Ancilla are not exactly raunchy or smutty, this is still an extremely sexually explicit book. The protagonist and her mentor/dom/husband do not make love behind closed doors, and they are BDSM edge players. Adults only!
The needles and blades used in the section of the Gevurah chapter will probably be triggering to anybody afraid of sharp things and/or blood. Also, the description of bloodplay might trigger people who fight an urge to self-harm. (Wattpadians, our platform does not have page numbers, or I would provide page numbers here).
There is brief mention of choking in the Netzach chapter; the Chokmah chapter has an Air working that involves breath control used as a method of vampirism, which might trigger memories or flashbacks of smothering for some readers.
From what I have read in Jenny Trout's "Jealous Haters Book Club" book reviews, it is common for descriptions of starvation or dieting to trigger people who have had eating disorders into relapse, so I should disclose that my protagonist spends more than half of the book starving due to food insecurity.
Chronic pain, vampiric starvation that closely mimics symptoms of clinical depression, and being generally emotionally overwhelmed make her contemplate suicide near the end of the book, and I have been warned that this could trigger some people who tend to self-harm.
There is discussion and depiction of homophobia because my protagonist is bisexual, and the book is set in the late 1980s to mid-1990s in Ohio. Anybody who is old enough to have survived that place and time knows how bad things were back then.
Beyond that... I'm sorry, but I have a hard time with content warnings because I haven't the foggiest idea what triggers people. Everyone is different. There are some things, some commonly encountered in real life, some not, that I find triggering. And to the best of my knowledge, there is no etiquette book for confused writers like me, so here I am, playing guessing games and hoping I don't cause somebody massive trauma just by writing words. If I have accidentally hit a trigger or a sore nerve or memory, put the book down, take a deep breath, do whatever you need to do to calm and ground yourself, and then, if you still want to keep reading, skim past the section that triggered you, and start reading again when you seem to have reached a safer part of the prose. Unfortunately, I can't come up with any advice more constructive than that, and I apologize from the bottom of my heart.
CZYTASZ
Ancilla
RomansA shy public reference librarian, and a college dropout who was disowned when she refused to submit to conversion therapy, encounter each other in a bookstore. He's been waiting his whole life for her. Meanwhile, she's starting her whole life over...
