Observed

This is one of the oldest stories I ever thought up, younger only than Lawton. But the first draft from the early 2010s was always far too rough to release, and had been outgrown by the time I began recording and releasing stories here. This month, I wiped the slate and rewrote it from the ground up, and hopefully breathed new life into it. It's a Delve story, simple and providing only a glimpse of the things from below ground, as with a lot of early Delve stories. This was mostly an exercise in trying to write a truly short (less than forty minutes or an hour) horror story again, but this version still ended up nearly twice as long as that original rough draft from over a decade ago would have been.   It was hard finding a place to record this, as I've had a lot of unexpected travel come up this month, but I think I did well enough. Due to those difficulties, there's a place near the middle where the audio goes toaster mic mode for a minute or two due to some noise removal I had to do for background sound. While regrettable, it's short and will, as ever, serve to weed out the sort of pedantic people I don't want consuming the work anyhow, so I've left it in. The first draft of the South Sea Cycle horror novel is completely finished, and while it'll likely still be a month or two tinkering on it before I'm ready to record and release it, you might want to revisit those stories in the South Sea playlist if it's been a while. You certainly won't have to have read/listened to any of those older stories to understand and enjoy it, though.