Vera's Guide to Being a Drag Queen: The Complete Beginner's Handbook to Persona, Makeup, Wigs, Costume, Lip-Sync and Your First Booking (Notions & Albis)

Everything nobody hands you before your first eight minutes onstage. From a hostess who has done sixteen years of them.

Vera Notions has spent sixteen years hosting Friday nights at Belfast's Velvet Yard, working out in public and by trial most of what is in this book. She wrote down the whole of it: how to build a persona from nothing, paint a face that reads from the back wall, wrestle a wig into behaving, put a costume together without remortgaging anything, get through a lip-sync like you mean it, survive a heckler, and ask a promoter for your first booking without it reading like a hostage note.

This is not a book about one narrow idea of drag. It covers camp, glamour, pageant, horror, club kid and gender-expansive styles, with honest starter budgets, real troubleshooting, and safety guidance written to be followed rather than skipped.

Inside this book:

• A full persona-to-first-booking curriculum across 38 chapters, with checklists and a 30-day starter plan
• A beginner makeup kit you can actually afford, and real technique for foundation, contour, eyes, lashes and brows
• Wigs, padding, tucking, binding and corsetry explained with clear safety limits, never treated as compulsory
• Stagecraft, lip-syncing, crowd work and hosting, built from real dressing-room experience
• The unglamorous parts: money, boundaries, burnout, drag families and staying bookable
• A full glossary and Vera's Ultimate Drag Bag packing list

For anyone who has ever thought about it, and for the beginner standing exactly where Vera once stood: no plan, no training, and a want stronger than any qualification for having it.

Pick a name. Pick a song. Put something on your face. Get out there.