Frequently Asked Questions

Vesper is a fictional European city in the year 2066. Half of the population has drifted into permanent virtual reality called The Bright. Almost everyone still left in Vesper has lost a wife or a husband, a parent, a child, or their neighbors to the Bright. Most of the stories are about the people who stayed, their grief, and their struggle to find love and connection in a city going dark.

The immersive virtual reality platform built by Bliss Technologies — the corporation at the center of Vesper’s quiet collapse. The Bright isn’t dystopian in the obvious way. It’s beautiful. It’s pleasurable. People choose it. But it’s also highly addictive and fatal over the long-term. Life expectancy after full immersion is 8-15 years.

Someone who has never drifted. They’re still in the city, still choosing reality — with all its rain and grief and small consolations. Most of the stories are about Holdouts. Some are about the people they’ve lost.

Eight. Old Town, the Meridian, Neon Row, the Warrens, Driftwood, Greenvale, Ashfield, and the Underbelly. Each has its own atmosphere, its own people, and its own relationship to the drift. The Explore page lets you discover stories by the district they are in.

If a story’s tagline catches you, start there. If you want a guided way in, the Collections page groups related pieces by character, family, or theme. The Lamplighter Collection is the longest sequence so far and a good entry point. The Long Way Home is the gentlest if you’re sharing with a younger reader.

Technically yes — Vesper is set in the future, with technology that doesn’t exist. But it reads as literary fiction. The stories are about marriages, grief, children, loneliness, work, and what it means to stay present. The sci-fi premise is the context, not the content. I also love other genres, so you’ll find stories strongly influenced by other genres like thrillers (quite a few), romance (Lamplighter’s Daughter), heist (the Extraction), and young adult fiction (Long Way Home), but with the same literary fiction heart as the other stories.

A bio-augmented child — the result of unsanctioned experimentation by Bliss Technologies. They were raised in the lab as part of the Whisper program but have escaped and now live in the tunnels of the Underbelly. Love and care helps them heal and become more fully human.

Vesper is a literary world told through short stories, novellas, short film, and artwork. It’s a one-person project. It’s free for everyone.

I wanted to create a world that feels like you can live in it, full of characters with deep emotional lives and real struggles that resonate with our own.

The sci-fi frame is an allegory for both where we are and where we’re headed. Seductive technologies that pull us away from the real world, from wonder, and from each other. Powerful corporations getting us hooked on addictive entertainment, industrialized food, and pharmaceutical cascades that are a slow death dressed up as a better life. The ordinary daily work to be with each other, grieve what needs to be grieved, and build and protect love where we can.

My name is Derek Ellerman. I live in Brasov, Romania, with my wife and three children. I grew up loving D&D, Asimov, Studio Ghibli, Tolkien, and plays like Death of a Salesman, and all of them helped inspire Vesper. In my previous life, I co-founded and ran an anti-trafficking organization until I burned out. Now I’m a husband and a dad and write stories that make me cry before I start work in the morning.

A lot of influences have gone into Vesper:

World-building: D&D, Tolkien, Asimov, Brandon Sanderson, GOT
Short stories: The Things We Carried and many other early short stories I read and was floored by the emotional punch a 10 minute read can produce.
Chamber dramas: I love stripped down stories with just a few people, a simple setting, loaded dialogue, building to eruption. Death of a Salesman, Raisin in the Sun, Streetcar Named Desire, Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf – these probably are the biggest influence on my stories.
Slow Contemplative Films: Princess Mononoke; My Neighbor Totoro; Dreams; Spring, Summer, Fall, Winter… and Spring. A child’s perspective. Wonder. A slow pacing that allow room for beauty and quiet grief.
Genre fiction: I also love genre fiction of all different kinds, so will keep weaving in genre elements like mystery, thriller, romance, heist, etc, into my stories.

Yes. All stories are free and will stay free. The project is supported by contributions from readers and fans. If the work has meant something to you, you can support it on the Support page. Thank you in advance!

There’s no fixed schedule, but I generally aim for a few new stories each month. You can join the email list, Letters from Vesper, for updates.

Yes, I work in collaboration with AI. For every story I write a comprehensive creative brief (usually as long or longer than the finished story) detailing out the characters, the conflicts, the scenes, the emotional architecture, what’s on the surface and what stays in subtext, and so on. The AI then drafts the initial prose based on this creative brief and a fifteen-page Vesper writing guide I’ve developed over the last year. From there, every story goes through multiple rounds of editing, with key scenes rewritten by hand. The world, the stories, the craft, and the editorial judgment are all mine. The sentence-level prose work is a real collaboration.

Most AI-assisted writing is slop. I’d be the first to say so. Vesper is an example of something different and I’ve written a full piece on how it actually works: What Breaks You Open.

I’m currently working on producing short films based on the Vesper stories, beginning with The Small One. I’m a one-person team so there’s a real learning curve, but I’ll post clips as I make progress.

The most helpful thing is monthly support — even a few dollars a month helps me dedicate more time to this work. You can also leave a one-time gift, or just share a story with someone who might feel something reading it. The Support page has everything. If you’d like to support the work at a higher level or spotlight it to your audience, please feel free to email me at derek@thelastlamp.com.

The Holdouts page lists the names of early supporters — people who chose to back this world when it is still small and mostly undiscovered. Thank you so much!