Welcome backstage at the Calamity! If you’ve been keeping up with my regular features, you’ll have noticed a slight change: the classic horror feature is now being presented on Wednesdays, and the brief attractions are now arriving on Thursdays. It’s a simple change, but this will afford me more time to prepare a proper short story feature each week, as well as provide greater opportunity to dive into all the other attractions waiting in the wings.

So much scaffolding, so little time.

Anywho, you’ll find the usual vampire fare available, as Isabelle and Edgar work to figure out how to enter the crashed ship; the bus driver relocates to the nearby air traffic control tower; the classic horror feature presents a bit of a mystery; and Lights Out takes us into the ER where a nurse comes face to face with a ghost, much to his detriment.

^{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 restructuring my workflow! I know, always some bullshit about infrastructure and rarely anything about the actual fucking stories. But listen, listen, have you read 🌚 Lights Out? It’s a full blown, 5,331-word story. Not an introduction. Not a revival of some other work. Not a prologue or epilogue or vignette of another project. Nay, a full blown short story.

What I’ve done is front-loaded the writing of A Vampire’s Vengeance and Bus Driver to the beginning of the week, as well working through and processing potential stories for feature in the classic horror column. Then I moved the classic horror column to be published on Wednesdays, as mentioned above, swapping it with the short story column. These changes now allow me far more time to construct and write short stories, rather than attempt to rush some concept to the page and the post as has been happening since the ending of House.

This frees up an inordinate amount of time to work on other projects and stories as well, which you will benefit from when Volume III of the Backstage Pass launches early next year. Stay tuned for more updates!