My puppy of some 17-18 years has not been doing well. So between watching over him and caring for him and giving him his meds, and then managing my own emotional rollercoaster in dealing with the trauma of watching his health decline, I have been hard-pressed to put words down. What you are reading before you is the effort of a committed writer while his whole world is coming apart.

The vampires and the bus driver have new installments, to take you further into their stories. Broken Toys was a struggle to ideate, but it got written. Another short story in the books. And the classic horror feature, The Parlor Cemetery, was selected more out of convenience than anything else. It’s stupid, but does have some elements of weird, so it kind of belongs. I don’t know how the next few editions will turn out; I’m doing the best I can to hold it together while supporting puppy as well as I can.

I hope you enjoy the stories, features, attractions here, Backstage. As challenging as this week has been, I’m still happy to see you coming around and diving in.

^{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 →

I really wish I had more to share here, but this week has been rough. This edition was the priority, and very little of anything else got done, including more infrastructure development. I explain in detail why in the editorial above. Maybe next week will bring greater productivity. I do not know. I can only hope.