I. Editor’s Note
II. Civic Brutality
III. The Auterati
IV. Libri
V. Munera
VI. Oblatio
VII. Acta Diurna
VIII. Carmina
I
I’ll open with my entry for the community collab at Substack—the Day of the _____ Writer—as my editor’s note. I don’t remember who spurred this on—Trevor, maybe Tyler something—trivial in the end; these are the names that come first for whatever reason. (I was right, it is Trevor Cohen; however, I will not tag, as I don’t expect this long and arduous newsletter to mar the face of his Mosaic piece.)
Editor’s Note:
Day of the Waning Writer | by Dylan Bosworth
Day. It’s come too soon. If that is indeed daylight. Long ornate drapes stitched with Celtic patterns and Germanic insistence thinly veil a cold indigo sky. I want it black. I want my eyes to open to nothing, not even the faint lines drawn over accumulated things—the inane reminders this is an affected place. My purpose has purpose for others, and that is to acquire semblances of life to stick in my domicile, providing an air of breeding worldliness on obfuscant shelves bending under belles-lettres. I close my eyes to the slow departure of precious night.
Thundering steps batter down the hallway, jarring me from another stolen moment in another world. My dreams come on like infections. Hot and painful and lingering. Lingering, even as Rowan, this boy of two years, almost three, who stands with an albus clout and not a sense of cruel shame, gently touches my face and tells me that it is time to wake up.
“I’m awake, baby boy. I’m awake.”
He chirps, then makes an excited hop, a twittering bird dancing on the perch of a marble bath. He patters off and makes his way around the corner, where I hear him rifling through plastic wrappers and Pop-Tart boxes. I will my legs to move, then wince in fulgurating misery. My spine vibrates with crackling fire. To this morning, I curse her every ray.
My baby girl, all of eight and eternal, already practicing the arts of wisdom and instinctual ruin, she skips down the pebble-strewn drive with the grave frivolity of a monarch or empress in pink tennis shoes. The bus arrives each morning in a hysterical blaze of harbinger yellow, a metal flower yawning open to swallow its exuberant bees. She glances back once, a small, studying glance, and in that flash of charred sienna hair, azurous eyes which cut like diamonds, I meet my own face deterged of fatigue, rinsed of creeping gray, and restored to the careless symmetry that once stole puerile hearts. The neighbors have remarked on it—our twinship—though theirs is the sort of compare that does not survive the clutch of age. They do not see the fine cracks already threading her composure, nor the faint, anticipatory irony in her smile. She slips into that aperture, into that waiting rotten floret—black inside, black, my heart.
When I weigh myself, I find I am lighter still. My doctor’s lilting voice comes to mind, plush and muted, the thought of it stilling my fingers while they search for her number. My faithful PCP, confident and aloof as Rowan who spins in a circle with his shirt pulled over his eyes. Instead, I resign myself to another day.
There are no luring blinks decorating the horizon of my useless phone. None that matter. No overdesigned Titan shield protecting waiting emails. Some wish. No Discordant faces to seduce me there either. I admire optimistic projection. The keys spread before me lie dead, plush with bouncy rot; my fingers press upon them in quiet pleading—they move graceless and stiff, as if the cold itself has filled my joints with a frost, and venomous, heartless, winter. I place my hands together. I pray to nothing.
Move, damn you.
Type the cursed words for the waiting throng.
In my instability, in my feigned ferocity, I burn precious synapses staring at the cursor’s intolerable blink.
-
DB
P.S.
If you want to read writing like that (did you guys forget I’m a writer first, editor second?) march to my new papiliō:
Patreon
I’ve only put one story on Patreon so far, and you can read it for free. Eventually, all stories will be there—some free, some you’ll need to cough up some coin.
Also
Because the faceless hate it so very much, let’s get purple for the rest of this one. You, who pen your anonymous guttings: Pray, pray the nameless many will suckle at the impotent drip of your cold and boring tears. Lecturers at lecterns, priests at pulpits, professors on pedestals; you prophets at Delphi pawing your drugged Pythia—allow me to thoroughly wax.
The rest of you:
You know my preferences. How the fiction I write differs so violently from my general essay, article, and newsletter voice. Bear with me as I depart from the sign-carrying armageddon-repentist-pressing-your-participation style of bark you’re used to. Spring is in the air, and spring demands flowers and rain.
To the business:
II
Civic Brutality | fine, a response
For those of you reading this on Substack, as I expect the majority of you are doing, you may have noticed that, like the decency of would-be rulers of modern empires (rage, rage at the dying of the light!), I have left. This newsletter, where it is sometimes thin and egregious, and other times, boisterous and seductive—more catcall than appurtenant invite—is all I have to give there in that breathless place. Better than knives, I say.
You’ve read my outro—my summations—and scoffed or cheered at these scrawlings of exegesis. My way out. To rehash would waste precious time, when gathering jeerers, jurors, and jokers sit within that electric colosseum, an echo of cleared throats waiting for a turn to wag their furry tongues.
Our fabled hippodrome of grandeur, so fond of its own mirrors, so delighted by its echo. This, our former home, gathers an impressive number of people capable of producing immediate certainty on nearly any subject. Declare your love! Your hate. The collective intellect of stalwart screams. We all must stop to admire the efficiency with which the cognoscenti there, no, not here, declare their conclusions before even the dawning of a point.
You’ve seen what these eyes have crossed. Perhaps, felt too, how rarely trolls (if you can forgive the term), and lowly constitutions (those having them), produce sentences which manage to stir the embers within our listless souls. Mere pageantry. Drawn lines through blowing sand; the shouting; and the sui-dictus pretense—that lions roam this dirt.
Toothless
III
The Auterati | Enter, Slayers of Lions
And these who walk the hypogeum alone, battle-hardened in their own blood—glory follows their imperial stride:
(i.e. these writers are killers, free from my gore-covered vexillum. They fly high their own flags.)
JLG Noga
Edward.Marlo.Ruiz
Zani D
Sean Thomas McDonnell
Tom Schecter
A.P. Murphy
MA Knight
Spencer D.W.
Haly, the Moonlight Bard ✒️
Nuno Pinto
Sandolore Sykes
Emil Ottoman
Edith Bow
TS
Will Boucher
Saint-Lazare
Vinny Reads
M.P. Fitzgerald
(Here’s the I-am-guilt-stricken follow-up, where I must mention that, like some sudden amnesiac, I feel wounded in the head trying to recall all whom I currently, silently, when ordained, read.)
It is true, though. My memory is a tired hag.
IV
Libri:
V.
Munera | Patrocinium:
I’m reposting the services I offer here. Remember, I aim to be fully transparent. Although I’m an adequate line and dev editor, my genuine strengths are in formatting, compiling, proofreading, and high-level notes. There are superb editors here who will dig into your story with sharper tools than I. I'm not trying to tag busy people; if you want recs, DM me.
Here’s what I offer:
Need a manuscript submission-ready?
These services are offered outside of the main sphere of crimson-spattered banners. Querying for one of the offers below is not an automatic enlistment. Your libellus, considered only on its merit.
Non-publishing Services || For all queries, email: dylanbosworth@drekdeathanddoom.com
*Willing to provide sample edits
1.
Submission Prep
Quick n easy (Litmag/Anthology/E-Zine Under 10k words) $50
cover letter help / proofreading / formatting – headers and footers, spacing, and scene breaks / Full adherence to Modern Manuscript Format
Full Submission Prep (To an Agent/Small Press) $0.02 – $0.04 / word*
*depending on length
all formatting / full manuscript proofread/ revisions
Add ons
extra revisions $25 / query letter help $25
2.
Self Publishing
Basic Starter Pack $100 – $150
simple cover design / Ready-to-upload, formatted and typeset content files for KDP, IngramSpark, etc
Advanced Package $300
basic starter pack + / multiple formats / metadata, category, and keyword help
3.
Standalone
*Proofreading ($0.01 per word)
*Short Story submission formatting $25
*Short Story Editorial Letter $50
*EPub files $75
These are queries placed upon my marble table beneath quiet colonnaded stone.
I may decline work that does not enchant.
I am one person. Capacity, my waning health; these are finite things—breath held within cold Corinthian ribs. Projects will open and close at the whims of the Gods. To stay informed about services, visit the Basilica.
Fast turnaround.
Clean, submission-ready files.
Stop struggling with formatting and trying to make your book look presentable.
Submissions are reviewed at our discretion. Accepted projects will receive payment instructions via PayPal. Work begins only after payment is received
VI
Oblatio:
1.
I am still attempting to respond with acceptances and rejections within 90 days. If you’ve had something sitting in my inbox longer than that, please reach out. I probably missed it somewhere.
2.
Drek Death and Doom and Nascent Night Press are both about to close for fiction submissions. Novellas, Novels. Collections.
For long fiction submissions, send query letter and first chapter. I will ask for the full thing if I want a closer look.
Submit at submissions@drekdeathanddoom.com.
3.
Drek Death and Doom is seeking original horror fiction that aims to inflict terror while demonstrating dangerous command of craft. We want stories written with intention and artistry, horror that walks with quiet conviction beneath the cold Roman stone.
Nascent Night is seeking boundary-breaking literary fiction that stabs beyond comfort and convention into new flesh. Voice, structure, colossal imagination—we are interested in manuscripts that carry intellectual and emotional risk, that disembowel form and expectation, that would stand unafraid in the open amphitheater among mounds of broken bones.
VII
Acta Diurna:
Remember when, in rare form, self-deprecatingly, I said there were far better editors than me? This is one, and the one I recommend first.
Coincidentally, Emil’s also in a place of hardship, being forced to move for the second time in hardly a year, and paying for movers packing up a multigenerational home, and…
He can tell you much more completely than I can. Please read below:
and here:
Take a fair gander at this new workshop. Sandolore Sykes—the one and only—founder and editor of SUM FLUX, who’s been teaching writing and other creative outlets for over fifteen years, hosts a new course in collaboration with TELEVISION SKY
In Devil in the Details, we work on the mechanics of consequence — how character generates action, how detail carries consequence, and how suspense emerges from inevitability rather than spectacle.
When a decision alters the trajectory of a scene, narrative momentum begins. When nothing changes, the prose—no matter how beautiful—sits cross-legged in the pretty grass.
This class is about making it gallop.
November, 2025: If you remember, I posted about publishing a new collection on Christmas. Then, New Year’s. Then January—sometime. Then nothing about it, nothing at all?
The stories—complicated—how they align; the threads that run through them, stitches them together straight through the guts rather than neat little strings that bind them in harmony like so many linear literary endeavors.
Haly, the very Bard aglow in moonlight, is working with me to map these tattered lengths of twine snaking through my works. A pull here, a tug there, snip snip. This book’s been buried in the cool sands mottled with spilled blood and guts under empty cavea, and Haly’s shucking out the worms and dragging this centō pannōrum back into glorious light.
Acquire her services while she offers:
VII.
Carmina:
It doesn’t have to make sense. These are the songs that will likely earn a second play right now if they happen to come over the headphones.
Anyway,
All that matters is the work.
Coming soon, we move to Sparta. From the Slums of Mount Taygetus: Apothetæ Strikes Again; the Drek Death and Doom, unofficial, sort-of style guide.
Thanks as always, so much, for reading.
Heya, Dylan. Good to hear from you--thanks for the updates.
High praise coming from you, brother. Thanks for the shout.