Newsletter · August 2026
Twenty-eight drops in thirty-one days
Welcome friends, to the brrr months, not that we really have brrr months here in Cochise County, Arizona; but for those of you above the Mason-Dixon, brrr is a real thing.
August was the heaviest month the site has run since it went live. Two books serializing on their own nights, one Notes series finishing, another one starting five days later. Here is the whole ledger.
Chapters 5, 6, 7, 8, and 9 went up on August 2, 9, 16, 23, and 30. Five straight Sundays, no gaps, no slipped weeks. Nine chapters in, Babydoll is past the point where anybody still gets to pretend they have a clean exit.
Chapter 3 landed August 5 and Chapter 4 on August 19. The whole run is open to everyone now, prologue through Chapter 4, no membership needed.
Marigold's fifteen-part backstory series ended August 7. Notes 11 through 15 ran that first week, closing out the arc of Ixchel before the road. If you came in halfway, you can read the whole thing in one sitting now. It is short. It is not gentle.
Then Betsy Bishop took the floor. The Constant is the Elder of Tucson telling her own story in first person, starting as Sarah Bishop in Salem in 1684 and walking forward three centuries to the woman who currently decides who is allowed to hunt in this city. Twenty notes ran on weekdays from August 10 through September 4.
If you have only met Betsy as the authority the other characters are careful around, this is the series that explains why she is like that. All twenty are up now, so her three centuries read straight through in one sitting.
All long form content, articles, chapters, anything not a note, has been moved from Substack onto one of my own sites. Vampires of Tucson, the ELFrederick author site, The Writing Room, or Articles.
The pieces about how this world actually works now live on the site instead of scattered elsewhere. Sonoran Gothic, which defines the genre. Room Temperature Bodies Are Not Sexy, on why human and vampire romance does not survive contact with its own arithmetic. The Survival Narratives, The Five Modes, What the Desert Does, and four more. There is a characters page and a series page too, so you can look somebody up mid-chapter instead of scrolling back.
Read the articles › · Characters ›
Book 1 came back from Kris Buckel, and I am working through her notes now. Rocket has been free and complete on the site for a while, but there is a difference between finished and finished. Closing that gap is where my desk time goes next. Perhaps at some point I will release her as an ebook.
If you write, you should know who she is. Kris has an MFA, a master's in mental health counseling, and her own published horror and speculative fiction, so she reads a manuscript from the other side of the desk instead of off a craft checklist. She caught what I could no longer see, as I was too close to the writing. Specific and actionable every time, and never a note that rewrote the book into hers.
She takes clients in fantasy, romantasy, romance, dark romance, horror, and YA. If your manuscript is sitting in a drawer waiting for a real read: kristibuckel.com/editing
In the last week of August I started making character intro videos, one a day. Six are up: Rocket, Babydoll, Blondie, Marigold, Betsy, and Mireya. Each one is short, each is in her own voice, and each one attaches a face and a way of speaking to a name you have only ever read.
If you are starting Mireya on Monday, watch hers first. Twenty notes land differently when you already know how she sounds.
In the last days of August I started adapting Cactusflower. Not only a trailer, not just a proof of concept, but plans for a full length feature. It is now the project eating most of my hours.
Where it stands: the screenplay is a complete first draft, 109 pages and 68 scenes. All 15 character and location plates are built and approved. The storyboard is 36 panels into 153 and generates itself from the script, so the two can never drift apart. Locked phases, nothing generated until the phase before it signs off.
Here is the strange part. Cactusflower picks up after a book I have not written yet. The one that carries the girls out of Sierra Vista and into Tucson does not exist as prose, and neither do the two that follow it. What does exist is the story bible, 401,000 words of source that knows what happens in that gap. So the film is being built out of continuity instead of out of chapters, which is either reckless or exactly what the bible was always for.
Watch the Cactusflower Concept ›
Three ARC reader spots are open. If you want to read the Cactusflower screenplay before anything gets generated from it, let me know you are interested. First three. There is a short NDA, because it is unpublished.
Thanks for reading in August. There is more coming than there was.
ELF
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This is the archived web copy of the August 2026 newsletter, sent to Vampires of Tucson subscribers. Manage your subscription from the membership page.
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