A cold front blew in over the weekend, so it actually feels like autumn now, just in time for Halloween … and for me to let you know what I’ve been up to all October!

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“Dusk and Dawn at Laufenden” continued to consume almost all of my attention this month. Scene 4 has moved a lot faster than Scene 3 so far, but it’s not without its own difficulties. Balancing the needs to set a horrific scene in the aftermath of the battle without also becoming too grotesque is one, and taking Arlise from “This was the lesser evil” to “This was monstrous and so am I” while also making this progression feel natural was another.

Fortunately, the start of the scene features a lot of dialogue, which made it easy to get the ball rolling. If not for my operation last week, I could’ve finished the story by now!

At the start of the month, I also wrote a fifth fantasy drabble. Entitled “Sacrifice”, this one sees Arlise reflect on herself, her love for Earc, and her role as a Watcher in the aftermath of one of their liaisons on the beach at Quiet Cove. It’s heartfelt, far more optimistic than all the other drabbles, and makes for a nice conclusion to this little micro-fiction cycle.

Once I made some final tweaks, I submitted all five drabbles to Mistletoe and Vine, the seventh volume of Hawthorn & Ash, a flash fiction anthology series from Iron Faerie Publishing. A week later, I received word all five had been accepted!

There’s no release date yet, but the drabbles should be out sometime in 2026, same as “What Good Fathers Do” in Bullet Points and “One Bitter Note” in the sword & sorcery anthology from Burial Books. It’s shaping up to be an eventful year!

The Nightmare on Story Street horror contest will announce their winners on Halloween; if “The Goatskin Codex” isn’t one of them, I’ll see if I can find some other good horror markets interested in micro-fiction. Lovecraftiana seems like an excellent fit, but I want to save it until I’ve exhausted all the ones with better rates.

Preorders for Hanging at Crosbhothar launched this month, as I’m sure those of you who follow this blog closely know by now, and it’ll be out on Halloween! After all these months working on these reprints, it feels more than a little surreal to see them come to fruition like this. Of course, there won’t be any rest for the wicked: once this first release is done, it’ll be time to lay the groundwork for the second. The Gale at Quiet Cove should be available for preorder on November 1st!

Heading into November, my main goal is to finish the rewrite of “Dusk and Dawn at Laufenden”. I doubt it will take more than a week or two, but I’ve consistently underestimated the work needed to write this accursed novelette. If I can tie a bow on the finished draft before Thanksgiving, I’ll be ecstatic!

From there, I aim to outline future stories and concentrate on promo for The Gale at Quiet Cove and The Skull in the Tree. Because I want the latter out before Christmas, I’ll be launching its preorders around mid-November so there’s a full month before its release in December.

I may also return to my erotic S&S flash fic The Throne of Ptalis. Aside from being a nice little palate cleanser, it’s about half done, and I hate to leave such an inventive tale unfinished. Hopefully it’s a good fit for Bothered Stories!

I have some fantastic ideas for several stories to be included in the collection about Arlise. One, with the tentative title “Out of Oblivion”, will offer some closure in relation to the fate of her first husband Beren. I’ve noticed that isn’t something the other stories have covered, so this one will feel the hole with a bit of an homage to the Solomon Kane ballad “The Return of Sir Richard Grenville”.

The other one covers what leads Arlise to join the Order of Watchers. I’ve only vaguely alluded to these events a handful of times, and the middle still needs a lot of work, but I’m very excited to show off the skinstealers after all these years. Until now, there just hasn’t been an opportunity to use them, but their deviousness seems like the ideal fit for a monster that would draw a someone as self-destructive as Arlise is at this time into collaboration with a Watcher. I can’t wait to write this novelette!

By and large, I’ve continued my stroll through classic horror this month. Ramsey Campbell’s The Inhabitant of the Lake & Other Unwelcome Tenants has been a fun read; my favorites so far are the titular “The Inhabitant of the Lake” and “The Plain of Sound”. The former feels like classic Lovecraft, while the latter is weird and as alien as “The Colour Out of Space”.

Speaking of which, I revisited several more of Lovecraft’s greatest hits. “The Call of Cthulhu” first, then “The Dreams in the Witch House” and “The Colour Out of Space”.

After thinking to myself there didn’t seem to be any classic werewolf tale with the same cultural cache as Dracula or Frankenstein, I did a little digging and found The Were-Wolf by Clemence Housman. It’s unfortunately obscure today, but the folkloric atmosphere made for a wonderful read. The fact the titular werewolf is female also felt novel–werewolves seem to be strongly associated with the masculine–and I’d love to see what someone like Guillermo del Toro or Robert Eggers could do with a film adaptation. It certainly deserves to be brough to a modern audience!

Meanwhile, going down the rabbit hole with Halloween music led me to Disney’s 1949 adaption of The Legend of Sleepy Hollow, which in turn gave me the nudge to read the story for myself. I was surprised to learn it’s on the short side for a novelette and even more surprised to see how few pages are dedicated to the actual horror given what an icon it made of the Headless Horseman. Nevertheless, the tension builds nicely, and the ambiguity created via unreliable narration is a layer most of the adaptations lose (Disney was actually extremely faithful to the original).

It’s now been a week since I went in for a wisdom tooth extraction. I’m very glad I was on top of things: by the time my appointment rolled around, the left one was partially erupted, which would’ve made it very difficult to keep clean. In turn, it would’ve been very easy for a cavity or abscess to form and threaten the molar in front of the wisdom tooth. The one on the right wasn’t near as dire, but we went ahead and took it out as well.

So far, my recovery has been far easier than last time around. Far less painful, far less time to get back on my feet, and far easier to keep the sockets clean. Perhaps I shouldn’t have cleared the entire week? Ah, well, nothing to be done about it now. This break has at least given me some time to think, which yielded a bunch of ideas for future stories and where to take “Dusk and Dawn at Laufenden”.

Hopefully I’ll be able to start putting those into practice in November!