Newsletter · September 2026
Forty-five drops in thirty days
Welcome to SpookTober, friends. Pull up a chair.
September was busy. Babydoll kept every one of her Sundays, Betsy Bishop finished telling her three centuries, Mireya started on her five, Copal's whole series got written, and two short stories came out of the tabletop game. Here is the ledger.
Chapters 10, 11, 12, and 13 went up on September 6, 13, 20, and 27. Another clean month, no slipped weeks. We are past the middle of the book now and into the stretch where every chapter costs somebody something.
The back half is on the calendar: Chapter 14 on October 4, then every Sunday through Chapter 19 on November 8. That is the end of Book 2.
Betsy's series closed on September 4 with the last four notes, ending on “The Coin.” All twenty are up, Salem in 1684 to the woman who decides who hunts in Tucson now, and it reads straight through in an evening.
Mireya's series started September 7 and ran every weekday through the month: eighteen notes in September, the nineteenth on October 1, and the last one on October 2. Tenochtitlan to Tucson, five hundred years, in her own voice. If you have been saving it to read all at once, the whole series is up now.
Read The Bone and the Shadow ›
This month I wrote two short stories that are not part of Vampires of Tucson. They come from a Vampire: The Masquerade game I play in, run by Joshua Bader, and they follow my character from that table, Father Tomás Serrano.
The Sacristy is how he became what he is: one night in Chicago in 2001, a young priest who has just found out something the Church knew and kept teaching anyway, and the prayer he does not get to finish. The Vestibule is twenty-five years later, when a frightened classmate from seminary tries to perform an exorcism on him, and the vampire is the one hoping it works.
They are short. Read The Sacristy first, even though I wrote it second.
Read The Sacristy › · Read The Vestibule ›
I was not the only one at that table writing. Kris Buckel wrote her character's story too, Elise DeLuca's Last Night, and Steffie wrote one for hers, Dr. Julia Vance, as a Substack Note. Read all three and you get the same game from three chairs.
Read Elise DeLuca's Last Night › · Read Steffie's Dr. Julia Vance ›
On the articles side, the big piece of work was a six-part series called Against the Record. I took six of the women in these books, Rocket, Blondie, Copal, Babydoll, Marigold, and the household as a whole, and held each of them up against what the research actually says about trafficking survivors. Where the fiction matches the record, where it does not, and where the record has nothing to say at all.
It came out of six research briefs I built first, on the border corridor, the routes north, how victims are marked and identified, the psychology, the economics, and debt slavery. Those are up too, under Briefs, for anyone who wants the sources underneath the fiction. Fair warning, they are long.
Also new: Every Hat But One, which is as close as I have come to a manifesto on how these books get made, and He Who Controls the Information Controls the Future. Over at The Writing Room, The Room Has Two Chairs and The Editing Interface.
Start Against the Record › · The Briefs › · All articles ›
Kris Buckel sent back both Babydoll and Blondie this month, Blondie in mid-September and Babydoll on the last day of it. They join Rocket, which came back in August. That puts all three of the first books in final review at once, and I am working through her notes one at a time. After final review, I have to decide when to publish them as books, and I haven't yet. The editions you can read on the site are the ones I serialized months ago, and they're staying as they are. They aren't perfect, but they're good enough, and I'm not going to let perfect be the enemy of good enough.
Kris Buckel, my awesome editor, still has slots open for editing. She will help you excavate the awesomeness of your prose, not bury it under her own voice. She is worth far more than any of us can pay her.
Copal's intro video went up September 27, on her character page. Seventy-four seconds, in her voice, from Morazán to the brush where she woke up wrapped in foil. It ends on the line that sets up the whole series:
If you have only met her as the quiet one in the house, watch it before Monday.
Watch Copal › · Copal's page ›
The film is still the project that takes most of my time. Last month I said the storyboard was 36 panels into 153. It is at 157 now, across 71 scenes, still generated from the script so the two cannot drift apart. And at the end of September the first footage started coming together.
Draft 4 of the concept opening is up now, about four minutes: a bike with purple streamers through a desert neighborhood in daylight, a girl leaving a house at night with a backpack, hitchhiking among the Joshua trees, a sedan, a motel, and a truck stop at the end of the night. Kris is in the credits as script editor and mental health consultant, because she is.
The ARC reader spots are still open. If you want to read the Cactusflower screenplay before anything else gets generated from it, let me know you are interested. First three. There is a short NDA, because it is unpublished.
I also made a three-minute PSA on human trafficking, and it is not shaped like one. Rocket and Cactusflower play themselves: two actresses in their chairs on the Veridian Studios backlot between setups, coffee in hand, talking about the movie. Cactusflower asks the question a lot of people ask, whether any of this happens in real life. Rocket tells her it happens every night. Truck stops, bus stations, anywhere a girl is alone and broke. And when Cactusflower asks why anyone would tell a story like this, Rocket answers for all of us:
Then they turn to the camera, Rocket in Spanish and Cactusflower in English, and give you the number:
National Human Trafficking Hotline: 1-888-373-7888
Text 233733. 24/7, confidential, more than 200 languages, se habla español.
humantraffickinghotline.org
And for anyone else who plays Vampire: The Masquerade, I built The Chronicle this month, a free site for running a game: character sheets, a character builder, shared dice the whole table can see, and a rules assistant that answers from the books with page numbers. It is in beta and it is unofficial fan content, made under Paradox's Dark Pack licence. If you play, come break it, but let me know how you broke it, so I can fix it.
Every site you have read this on, I built. Veridian Studios, my studio, builds them for other writers too: author websites, brands and newsletter integration, with the domain, hosting and email set up for you. One desk, end to end, so the person who designs your site is the person who builds it and ships it. Kris's site is one of ours, and there are eight ready-made author themes to start from, literary to gothic to cozy to spicy romance.
See the themes › · Start a project ›
Thanks for reading in September. Forty-five drops is a lot to keep up with, so if you fell behind, nothing goes anywhere. It is all still there.
ELF
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This is the archived web copy of the September 2026 newsletter, sent to Vampires of Tucson subscribers. Manage your subscription from the membership page.
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