When I started writing a new short story every week I understood not every short story would be a winner. I would feel more strongly about some of them, less amiable towards others, and would likely outright hate a select few. What I had not considered was the potential of events in real life to impinge upon my writing, preventing me from getting as much written as I would like. The going rule up to this point was: set aside Wednesday to write the short story and then post it that evening. This rule was in place to prevent me from going back to edit or to write a different story if I was not happy with the first. I may have to amend this rule, as I do not want to fall back to a piece of flash should the short story not get written as expected.

In considering amending this rule, other opportunities arise, and I think I shall pursue them. Rather than set aside Wednesday for writing the short story, I will set Sunday as the boundary for the week and write up to two short stories, the best of which I will share here, Backstage. This way, a right proper short story gets published, and I have more content to work with.

I am explaining this all to you as I am not 100% pleased with having to share a piece of older work in lieu of a proper short story, or Brief Attraction. Still, what has been selected in place, Darlene and the Magical Artifact, is still quite entertaining and I enjoyed writing every word of it. I hope you enjoy reading every word of it.

Everything else is in its proper place. For classic horror, I feature a short from a previously featured author, Clark Ashton Smith. And A Vampire’s Vengeance, and Bus Driver have their share of surprises awaiting you.

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, unfortunately, went worse than last week in terms of emotional availability and time constraints for writing. The features for this publication are drawn up on tight deadlines, as you might expect, thus are they prioritized with any available time and energy to produce, create, write. As such, no other stories were touched, unfortunately, though this does help me realize I need to adjust these timelines so I can continue to faithfully produce this publication. More to come, hopefully, and soon. Please stay tuned.