Writing is a whole lot of thinking and dreaming. It is kicking around ideas. It is trying on different characters in different roles. It is finding those few who can provide quality feedback, and trusting them to point out how to make your stories stronger. It is taking copious notes. Recording snippets of dialogue. Crafting mood boards and character palettes. And then organizing everything so you know where to look when you want to follow through on an idea.

While the core act of writing is the writing itself, there is so much more that goes into the craft. While some stories are written off-the-cuff, many require countless hours and days and weeks of preparation. Even for those written off-the-cuff, an author will have already put in countless hours and days and weeks of writing in general, to be able to produce a coherent idea and execute on that idea in a single sitting.

As you peruse the selections we have prepared for you here, Backstage, I hope you come to appreciate the sheer amount of effort it has taken to bring these stories to life, and to present them to you. Enjoy your excursion!

_{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 was spent riding the energy from having written 🗿Lost to Trouble's Cairn. There has been a good amount of work done in establishing The Conglomerate, though much of it has gone stale as I’ve been working on other projects. Thus did I task myself to bring everything in the Conglomerate to current. This has been no small job either. The Conglomerate consists of CANOPY, the umbrella corporation, BALTHAZAR, CASPAR, and MELCHIOR, the research arm, paramilitary training division, and financial operations, respectively. The Miskatonic Archive and PLEROMA—each managed by BALTHAZAR—play major roles in the development of this universe. Every one of these divisions, archives, and catalogs required updating.

PLEROMA specifically requires a substantial amount of work. This is catalog of documentation for the entire conglomerate. When PLEROMA is ready, the whole of it will be published to a super duper secret site which I will only share here, Backstage. So stay tuned!