Be an Early Supporter
Vesper is still small and mostly undiscovered. The first short film hasn't released yet. The stories are still finding their first readers. This is the stage where every new supporter that lands in my inbox makes me celebrate. Every new supporter is one more person finding their way to this world and helping it grow.
Every night, my alarm goes off at 3:30 AM and I get up to create the world of Vesper. My wife and three children are still asleep. The small Romanian city where we live is quiet except for the songs of the blackbirds. For the next four hours, I find a new small piece of Vesper and try to bring it to life — a story, a painting, a scene of the first short film now in production.
The characters and the emotional heart of their stories come from my own life. From my wounds, my grief, my ongoing work to love and to heal.
Vesper works at two levels for me. At one level, the world itself is about people struggling to stay present, to find real connection, to resist the pull of a seductive facsimile of life that is in fact a slow death. The parallels to our own world are there.
But at another level, these stories are not meant as entertainment. They are meant to break us open. To help us feel the grief, tenderness, and love that the numbness tries to steal away. Their purpose is to leave us more alive on the other side. More present to our actual life and the people we’re trying to love.
For me, they help me love my wife more and my kids more. They help me cry tears I needed to cry for my own healing. My hope is that they do the same for you.
I still work a full-time job and would love nothing more than to give Vesper my days, not just the hours before dawn. Anything you can give helps. Monthly support helps the most.
Thank you for any help you can give. It’s what keeps this world alive and growing.
— Derek
Brașov, Romania
Be an early supporter
Pick an amount that feels right:
Larger Support
If you'd like to talk about supporting Vesper at a larger scale — whether as a patron, a partner, or something else, please reach out to me here.
Get in touchIf you’d like be an early supporter of Vesper, thank you! Your name goes on The Holdouts and we keep growing this world for everyone.
A note on how I work
The world of Vesper, the stories, the characters, the craft, and the editorial judgment are mine. The sentence-level drafting, the watercolor artwork, and the film production happen in collaboration with AI. For some people this matters, and it should. I’ve written a full account of how the collaboration actually works — what I bring, what AI does, what it can’t do, and why the work exists at all because of both.