Welcome Backstage for another edition of what the fuck am I working on? The usual attractions are available for your amusement: Edgar is intent on getting Isabelle to understand the trouble she’s in, in A Vampire’s Vengeance; a beautiful femme fatale finds herself thrown into action when her client lands in trouble, in this week’s brief feature, Bubblegum Assassin; rats make their appearance in the classic terror, The Graveyard Rats; and the stranger makes it aboard the bus as … guest? … hostage? in Bus Driver.

The pendulum swings wildly in this edition, from philosophical considerations on nature and being to lustful glances and jealous actions; from the ribald feature to the claustrophobic one; from the rats to the zombies. Or, maybe not zombies, as the bus driver and his passengers are not currently in the midst of a swarm. There’s a little something for everyone! Er, excepting minors of course. This is most certainly NOT an all-ages publication!

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 →

With Fugilin and Murder City, the Children of the Damned franchise comes a little closer to seeing the light of day. ← This is a pun, considering the series is all about vampires. But I digress. Writing these two stories has given me motivation to continue to chisel away at some of the more challenging aspects of fleshing out the two main characters of Shrine of Radiance. This world is coming together one vignette at a time.

As such, I have spent some of this week placing these stories in their appropriate vaults for greater context and continuity of the larger works at hand. CVNT will be getting her own serial, thus Murder City now lives alongside all things cyberpvnkcvnt. Fugilin has the potential to find its way in Shrine of Radiance in some adapted form, and so now lives alongside all the core Children of the Damned content.

Likewise, The Maw and Dark Side of the Moon have been moved, to live alongside all of the content comprising that terrible and powerful organization, The Conglomerate.

Keeping track of this all is no small feat, hence why I have spent so much time, energy, and effort on the infrastructure underlying my writing efforts. More on the Conglomerate will arrive at a much later time, though I’m sure stories will come trickling out as The Maw and Dark Side of the Moon have. There won’t be much to be seen with regard to Children of the Damned for some time, excepting the occasional vignette; however, next volume will see the rise of The Archivist, which is an important character in the series, but whom you’ll only hear of and see very little of outside of her own serial. Stay tuned.