It gets easy to become enraptured with busy work. You set up a series of menial tasks that need doing, start doing them, and before you know it, you are mechanical in your approach and your brain has gone on vacation. Sometimes you need that, particularly when the work you must do requires a great amount of mental and emotional energy. However, not all busy work requires the mechanical approach. As much of what goes on behind the scenes deals with properly documenting all the changes occurring in each and every project, including data entry and analysis, and much of it is repetitive, we’ve gone and built systems to automate the lot of it. Now, only the work which absolutely must be done by hand is done by hand and not by a python script.

Mind you, none of the writing itself is included in the “menial work.” This is far from menial. This is the meat and bones of our production! The building of our attractions, the very heart of our Carnival of Calamity, this is done by hand with great pleasure! We work to automate everything else so we can focus on the attractions themselves.

Speaking of attractions, our current attractions are taking interesting turns. Edgar spends some time observing the Beings from his little hidey hole high up in one of the skyscrapers. You can find out what he determines—if he determines anything at all—in this edition’s installment of A Vampire’s Vengeance. Solomon has been warned time after time he is meddling in something he knows little to nothing about, and those warnings may come calling in this edition’s installment of House. For our guest attraction, a concerned sister watches as her brother devolves, but in what way? This is up to you to discover, in The Novel of the White Powder. And Griselda wraps up her tale in our installment of Bus Driver.

Let’s get into it →

House may be the first of attractions out of the trio in this volume to see a polished version go live. While all three attractions—A Vampire’s Vengeance, House, and Bus Driver—have been migrated to the new editing workflow and are being reassembled into chapter themes after each installment is published, House is currently moving well ahead of the others. It helps that House will end up being substantially shorter than A Vampire’s Vengeance and slightly shorter than Bus Driver. Still, it is exciting to consider how quickly it is being set up for a complete editing pass once its serial of installments has run its course here, Backstage.

In other news, more time has been in study and research for other attractions half-finished. Rise of the Warlock Queen surfaced briefly, and the Conglomerate continues to receive attention, though this has slowed some as we are focused on migrating all attractions, research libraries, etc etc to the new system we’ve devised. While there is not yet a date set for the release of those attractions waiting in the wings, we are steadfast in our approach to working on each one. They will come to light soon enough.

In the meantime, please enjoy the attractions we have to offer you here, and now, Backstage, below ↓