You enter your front door to find a computer on the floor. It is old. Ancient. A filthy, clunky CRT sits on top of a bulky gray box with black grease smeared across it and floppy disk drives on its front. There are no input devices.

Also, notably, there are dozens, maybe as many as a hundred black wires flowing out the back of the box and into every outlet, phone jack, and light bulb socket in your residence. Some cords are jammed brutally into the wall, seemingly connected to nothing.

The monitor flickers to life. Green text fills it.

"It’s November 1st. A day without any magic.

Well, unless it’s your birthday, I guess. Happy birthday, Somebody.

The Wolf in the Woods finished in fourth place in the Inkshares Horror Contest. That was just one place away from winning outright and being published. For all my words tapped on all my pages, I can’t find the ones to say how thankful I am that you all got me there. Right now, fourth is a good place to be-- the judges of the competition will deliberate through the course of this week over whether any additional books should be selected, and being The Next Book Down is a great place to be for that.

In the meantime, I have a couple of new things I’d like you to see.

• Dan the Snowman, a webcomic I write that my brother Monty draws. Monty did the cover art for The Wolf in the Woods, and he’s top-notch. Dan isn’t horror, but I think you’ll find the same vein of weirdness going down its middle.
  
  
• Raised on Radio, the novel I’m working on for NaNoWriMo (and the one I worked on last year-- that’s not cheating, right?). It’s a Spielbergian ’80s sci-fi story with a summer romance thrown in. It’s LGBT+ friendly and features a pretty good female protagonist, if I do say so myself. It’s a little rough right now, as all NaNoWriMo drafts are, but maybe there’s enough there for you to get a taste of the story and vibe and warm up to some of the characters. I’m not trying to fund this right now, but if you liked The Wolf in the Woods, it’d be great if you mosied over and hit that "follow" button.

See you around. Stay weird.
--Ben"

The computer blinks off. Everything is quiet. You feel a little sad, even though you thought you’d be relieved that all these annoying shenanigans would be over. Then, you feel annoyed when you realize that the computer is not going to vanish like the mailbox, the dog, and all the other intrusive weirdness in your life over the past month.