Another thing I’m coming to discover as I write a new short story every week—shared below as a Brief Attraction, between A Vampire’s Vengeance and the classic horror feature—is that I’m beginning to really enjoy diving into cosmic horror. There is the fun in building over all the work which has come before—the Cthulhu mythos, the King in Yellow, etc—while bringing it into the 21st century. Such is what you will find in this edition’s Brief Attraction: Dark Side of the Moon. There’s more to the cosmos than what the cosmic horror authors of old would have us understand, and you don’t have to go to Mars to find it.

Writing these shorts are engaging, entertaining, and—to be quite honest—a little bit terrifying to consider. Yet they are so much fun, I find myself picking them up and finishing them off. In an earlier edition, I shared 🗿 The Gaping Maw, which I had published as an incomplete story, a part one. I loved the concept so much, I finished the story the following evening, which included an additional two parts. I will be following in its footsteps with Dark Side of the Moon; even I want to know what they discover in their desperate plight to get help.

Now, with regard to rest of what you will find in this edition, there are the usual suspects: Isabelle gets a bit of a feature in A Vampire’s Vengeance; Bill learns the cost of his joke in The Woman in Gray, our classic horror feature; and the bus driver and co deal with an oncoming swarm in Bus Driver.

As a final thought, I want to point out that not a single word of this edition—nor any prior—whether expository or narrative (read: editorial content or stories) has been written with the use of AI. I now feel it entirely necessary to state this fact since AI has become prevalent in a number of ways across society, and I want to reassure you, my dearest guest, that what you consume here is all dreamed up by a human—me—and created by hand, the old fashioned way. Enjoy it as you like, though if you are inclined to attempt to feed my work to any AI model or platform, then I curse you with coffee that will always be either not hot enough, or not cold enough, nothing but red lights when you are in a hurry, and as miserable a death as can be called down upon you. If you don’t feed my work to AI, you can ignore all of that.

Let’s get into it →

This week, I spent a good amount of time reorganizing the writing prompts I acquire from various sources. And by “prompts”, I do not mean context you feed to an AI model. I mean the fictitious anecdotes which provide a jumping off point to do a little writing. I love collecting writing prompts, as they offer excellent exercise in impromptu writing. Pull up a prompt, set a timer, and write as much as you can about it within the allotted time. Most often what is drafted is some silly story or concept or dialogue that ends up in the flash folder, rare to be seen again. Sometimes, however, what is drafted becomes the beginning a larger story. Rise of the Warlock Queen came into being with the combination of two such writing exercises.