Life changes make staying consistent incredibly difficult. Something dire occurred at the end of last week. I eeked out last week’s edition and almost, almost decided to take this week off to process the fallout.

But I did not. I chose instead to throw myself into the work that is this literary endeavor and damn be the changing of the tides … for now. What I found is interesting: I was able to complete my work and still have time to process process process.

Not that any of this finished. The edition for this week is complete, yes, as you have it in your inbox and can enjoy it at your leisure. The processing, however, continues. IT WILL CONTINUE UNTIL MORALE IMPROVES. But that is the way of heavy life changes. You process and process and process and learn your lessons and develop those boundaries to help avoid you falling into the same trouble in the future and then morale improves when all of that is in place.

Thus do I present to you a trauma-driven narrative in Treachery in the Alley, the potential next story in the Odds ‘n’ Endings universe. There is trauma-driven action in Bus Driver, though I have a sneaking suspicion this will be resolved in next edition’s installment. There madness and murder in this edition’s classic horror feature, The Accusing Voice. And finally, not trauma-driven yet still wild to consume, Isabelle undergoes a rather interesting transformation in A Vampire’s Vengeance.

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 →

What did I work on this week? Not a goddamned thing outside of the content created for you to enjoy in this edition. The problem with shit hitting the fan is that you have to clean it up, otherwise you’ll never be free of it. So, life changes fuck me up, I move to address it while handling whatever it is I must handle, which in my case included getting this edition off the ground and shipped. Hopefully next week will prove to be more productive.