Students Doing Stuff: English major publishes vampire novel, except for grownups

Mechelle Hankerson
Assistant Spectrum Editor

Two weeks before his high school graduation in 2005, VCU English major Jake Ziemba began writing his now-published novel, “The Yukon Glory.”

“I started working on (it), and I got to page seven or eight, and it was getting bigger … I just kept working on it and around page 50 or 60, I realized I was writing a novel,” Ziemba said.

Ziemba’s novel was published through the local independent publishing company, Sink/Swim Press, who released a limited 50 copies of the novel.

Ziemba, who was also recognized in the English department with the Undergraduate Fiction award, said he didn’t have a hard time deciding what his novel should be about or the progression of the plot.

“I didn’t outline anything in this book until the last three chapters, so I would have ideas and chase them down and write them and ended up writing myself into corners a couple times,” Ziemba said. “That’s the risk you run when you don’t outline, but it made for a much freer … more innovative book than if I planned it all out.”

Ziemba’s novel began as a simple vampire story and progressed into a more complicated story about traveling vampires in 1979 in a post-apocalyptic world.

Unlike most works dealing with a post-apocalyptic world, Ziemba didn’t want to use a nuclear crisis to wipe out his fictional population.

“A nuclear apocalypse destroys the land, and there’s the radiation,” Ziemba said. Instead, he did some research on large pandemic illnesses, something which already interested him.

“Pandemic illnesses tend to occur every 60 years, and the last major one was in 1918; we were due to have another large scale global health crisis about 1978 or so at the same time the energy crisis was happening,” Ziemba said.

Ziemba chose to use these things to create his apocalypse, reasoning that with a health and energy crisis, there would still be a physical land to serve as the backdrop to his story.

Despite small details (like adding bonus chapters and revising the cover design) that Ziemba had to work out, he was able to bring “The Yukon Glory” to Sink/Swim basically complete.

“I started working on the book right before I personally got really sick,” he said. “That took me out of school, and I couldn’t work so when I was house-bound for a while, I just worked on this book.”

Ziemba suffered from paroxysmal nocturnal hemoglobinuria, a disease that affects the blood. For Ziemba, his bone marrow failed when he was 17, which means his blood cell production was irregular.

Luckily, Ziemba recovered by taking part in an experimental stem cell transplant.

“The hospital gets really boring,” Ziemba said.

“It took a long time, but I felt myself getting healthier and stronger every day, and there were times when I wanted to work on the book, but I just couldn’t – I was just too sick.”

Ziemba began wrapping up his novel in the early summer and helped him return to full health.

“When you’re getting your health back and wrapping up your first novel, those two things kind of fed each other, and I kind of rode that momentum,” he said. “That was a really powerful thing for me.”

Ziemba will present “The Yukon Glory” April 8 at One Tribe Organics and the event will feature other local artists, including Ziemba’s friend and fellow VCU English major, John Reeves.

Reeves will be reading his contribution to Sink/Swim’s 2010 release, “The Great Richmond Zombie Book.” Ziemba will be reading an excerpt from his novel and will be discussing the process of his writing.