I use AI. And I’m a writer — Gasp! But I’ve told you that before. It’s a useful tool when you’re broke and can’t afford an editor. When you’re a hermit. When you’re obsessed with making sure all of your ideas are captured and organized the way you want them, because you’re commanding the “machine.” I’m done with obsessively editing. I do my own revisions. I prompt my developmental edits. I make my own stylistic choices. The words and ideas are all mine. But I prompt “the machine” to tell me where I need improvement. Using my own criteria.

Do I take every suggestion? No. Is it extremely useful? Yes.

I learned how to use Claude to my benefit as a writer. I credit Claude with pushing me to become a better writer. I credit Substack and my readers for making me want to be a better writer. And I still use ProWritingAid before I publish.

So if you wanna judge, go ahead. Block, unsub — whatever. You do you, I’m gonna do me.

Lee

Copyright © 2026 by Lee D. Gibbs

I write everything by hand before I type it. Like many other writers, I’m a perfectionist. I used to be a revisionist during active writing. Found it was detrimental to finishing. Anything.

So I stopped — completely. Out of frustration. And other distractions like work, family, addictions… But I digress.

I went through a phase where I thought I had to type everything. It didn’t work. The creative disconnect needed a reconnect. The switch didn’t flip the same when I freehand wrote as when I typed.

Anyway, through my process the last few years, I’ve learned my best work is written by hand. My best revisions are done on the computer screen.

I’ve already admitted to using Claude for marketing and as a virtual assistant. I also use it for editing now. I’d never be able to track all of my characters across 21 novels without the character Compendium I created with Claude. The Canons created as I planned each novel. The Universe Bible I refer to for publication schedules, series continuity.

I’m not a programmer. I don’t write AI slop. I graduated from a reputable school as a writer with a BA in English twenty-five years before any of this AI shit existed, and those stories I’m writing now have been festering since then. Got beef with my assistant or my editor? GFY. I’m going to keep writing anyway.

Lee

Copyright © 2026 by Lee D. Gibbs

Twelve days ago, the finale of Leeds Devil went out: chapter seventeen, an epilogue, and an author’s note to close the run. If you followed the whole serial, thank you. If you arrived somewhere in the middle and read forward without ever looking back, thank you too. You taught me something, and this dispatch is about what.

I want to be honest about what serializing a novel actually does to a writer, because the brochure version and the lived version are different animals.

The brochure version says a serial builds an audience while you write. The lived version says a serial is a clock with teeth. Twice a week, a chapter went out whether I felt ready or, more often, whether the chapter felt ready. A drop date does something a private deadline never managed for me: it makes the work real before I can talk myself into another month of polishing. I finished this book because a couple hundred people were standing on the platform waiting for the next train, and trains run on time.

Second lesson. The live page is a merciless proofreader. I found errors in published chapters that had survived pass after private pass, sitting there in public with their shoes off, chilling. There is a real sense of satisfaction that comes with fixing a typo the whole room has already seen. I recommend it.

Third, the numbers taught me how readers actually move. Short fiction brings people through the door. The serial keeps them. A stranger will take a chance on a two-thousand-word story; chapter eleven of anything is a harder sell. But the readers who ride a serial stay longest and read deepest. So this publication runs on both engines now, with the stories out front and the long work in the back room. That architecture came straight from watching the readers cues.

And the hardest lesson, the one I will carry into every serial after this one: never again will I serialize a book that is still moving under me. Leeds Devil ran while the manuscript was still being revised beneath it, which meant chapters were being tightened after they had already met the public. It worked, but it worked the way crossing a river on floating logs works. The next serial, The Induration, is finished and fully edited, polished down to the last line. The clock with teeth is a fine motivator. It is a poor editor.

What happens now. The book arrives in October, revised in full before it goes to print, sharper than the serial that previewed it. Lost Grounds continues its Wednesday run on the Slow Drip side of the house. And the desk stays busy behind the curtain, because the third lesson cuts both ways: you keep showing up, so I keep the trains running.

To everyone who read a devil’s story twice a week and came back for more: the grave is quiet now, but the pines remember. See you in October.

More from the desk soon.

Lee

Give me a detail. A name, a fear, an object you can’t explain, the thing your grandmother said once and never repeated. I’ll take it into the Demons lane and write you a piece of flash fiction built around it. Five hundred to a thousand words, yours, and I’ve never offered anything like it anywhere.

That’s the headline of something I’ve wanted to fix for a while: how supporting this publication actually works. So here’s the whole of it, plainly.

Nothing here is paywalled, and nothing ever will be. Every chapter, short, and dispatch stays free to everyone. What’s changed is that paying now gives something back.

Monthly subscribers read every new chapter and short a few days ahead of the rest of the world. Go annual and you keep that early window and you get the personalized story, one a year, written by hand for you. Founding Truth Keepers get all of it, plus their name on the launch of Book One this October, because they’re the ones putting it into print.

The story is the pull, so here’s how it works. Any annual or founding subscriber can request one per year. Reply to any email from me, or send a direct message here on Substack, with your detail or your idea. I write one or two of these a month, in the order they arrive, and I take the time each one needs, so there’s no promised date. When it’s finished it lands in your inbox. Want it shared? I’ll post it with your name on the dedication. Want it kept? It stays between you and the demons.

Two honest ground rules. These stories live beside the Demons anthology, in its shadow; they visit that world without moving into it, so nothing you request will bend the books. And the caps are there because every one is written by hand, by me, at the same desk where the novels get built. The writing comes first. Your subscription is what makes the writing the job, and the perk only works if that stays true.

If you’ve been reading free and waiting for a reason, this is the one with teeth. Go annual, and the Slow Drip writes back.

Thank you for your support however you choose to show it!

Lee

The Two Shelves

Every writer is a haunted house. Walk through mine and you find two shelves, one older than the other, and every book on them left a fingerprint somewhere on the page you are reading now.

The old shelf first.

William Blake taught me that a cosmology can be handmade. He engraved his own heavens and hells, bound them by hand, and never once asked permission to believe the world had a hidden architecture under its skin. That belief is the foundation everything else in my work stands on. Milton gave me the devil I keep rewriting: the one who mourns even as he reigns, cast down and grand and sorry for none of it, presiding over a Pandemonium of his own making. When the Leeds Devil grieves at a grave it can no longer name, that is Milton’s blood in the ink. Goethe handed me the bargain, the oldest deal in the trade, a soul across a table and a clock already running. Every pact in the Demons work is a candle lit off Faust.

Then the shelf turns American, and it turns inward. Poe showed me that the worst room in the house sits behind the ribs, that a man will confess to the floorboards before he confesses to himself. Hawthorne showed me the town. A whole village keeping a secret, a sin folded into the founding and handed down like a family name, the past refusing to stay in the ground where they buried it. I grew up on the edge of that map, in a New Jersey older than it lets on, and Hawthorne is the reason my settlers carry what they did into the third generation and the fourth. And Blackwood, quiet Blackwood, taught me the last of the old lessons: the land is awake. The Pine Barrens in my books are not backdrop. They watch. That is “The Willows” running cold under the cedar water.

The newer shelf is louder.

Stephen King is the floor I stand on. The small town rendered so true you can smell the diner, so that when the ordinary tilts, you go over with it. Joe Hill took that inheritance and made it his own, heart first, and reminded me that a horror novel can break you and still love you on the way down. Dean Koontz taught propulsion, the sentence engineered so you cannot set the book on the nightstand. Clive Barker opened the body and found the sublime waiting inside it, the sacred and the ruined sharing a single wound, which is the whole engine of a Keeper becoming a Devil.

Whitley Strieber gave me the intruder at the foot of the bed and the four most frightening words in the language: this really happened. Half of my worst ideas start there, in the true story that will not sit still and let itself be fiction. Andrew Pyper proved you could take Milton down off the shelf and use him as a murder weapon, literature as grimoire, a trick I fully intend to keep stealing. And Wes Craven, the only filmmaker among my ghosts, taught me that a legend is a loaded thing, that the dream is the room where we stand least defended, and that a story can know it is a story and be scarier for the knowing.

And Neil Gaiman. (Gasp.) Yes. The old gods walking a highway rest stop, myth still breathing in the present tense, the sense that the sacred never left us, it only changed its coat. The man is complicated now, and I will not pretend otherwise. But the work got into me young, and honesty about a haunted house means naming every ghost in it, including the ones you would rather leave off the tour.

Put the two shelves together and you get what I am building. Blake’s hidden architecture. Milton’s grief and Goethe’s bargain. Poe’s guilty heart and Hawthorne’s guilty town. Blackwood’s waking land, and the moderns who taught me how to make all of it move. A New Jersey gothic where the truth gets buried and refuses to stay down, where the devil turns out to be somebody’s mourned and ruined god, where the pines keep their own long memory.

That is the company I keep in the dark. I am grateful to every one of them, and a little afraid of a few. If you have read this far, you already knew that about me.

More from the desk soon.

Lee

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Copyright © 2026 by Lee D. Gibbs

Slow Drip Universe Update

July 6, 2026

Remember me? I’m the guy who created a 17 book universe on my phone. It’s been a few months now. I’m no longer bound to my phone. I always start out writing longhand (or on the phone) and end up revising and editing on the laptop. The universe grew to 20 books.

If you’ve been reading along, you already know how things are shaping up: a single haunted geography in Monmouth County, New Jersey, with a coffee shop at the dead center of it, and a web of stories that keep circling back to the same ground. The following is the foundational map of what I’m building: the books in your “hands” now, the ones in final edits, and the ones still sitting in the dark.

Here’s how it all fits together: Tales of Convergence is the spine, with two linked series about the same colonial wound: the Jersey Devil Saga and the Plague Trilogy. Demons is a newer, separate lane that runs on its own cosmology of bone courts and forgotten dead. Tales from the Slow Drip is everything orbiting the Slow Drip Café itself: a trilogy, a sub-series, and a handful of standalones, all pulled toward the same gravity. And then there are the outliers co-created years ago with James Meholic: The Twilight Ghosts, a standalone cosmic-horror novel, and Y2K, a conspiracy thriller set at the turn of the millennium.

Some of these are nearly ready for you. Some are barely more than a logline and a locked ending I already know I can’t talk about. Here’s where each one stands.

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Tales of Convergence

The founding lane. Two linked series about one long colonial reckoning: how a guardian became a monster, and what it cost across three centuries.

The Jersey Devil Saga

In final edits / near print

Leeds Devil: The Legend Begins (Book 1) Editorially complete and moving toward print, with early chapters already serializing on Substack. The Jersey Devil legend told the way it actually happened: how sixty years of colonial certainty turned a Lenape guardian spirit into a monster, and how the man who spent his life feeding that certainty carried it to an unspeakable end. The land remembers. The truth outlives the lie.

On the drawing board

Monmouth Devil (Book 2) Across two colonial centuries in Monmouth County, three broken guardians (Lenape, Scottish, and Dutch) rot into a single thing. And the devil that rises from their ruin does what the Pine Barrens devil never would: it kills.

Jersey Devil: The Legend Grows (Book 3) The devil the Pine Barrens made, the watcher that never touched anyone, curdles across two centuries into something lethal, until the night it meets its match from the north and two horrors become one.

The Truth Lives (Book 4, the Saga finale) Generations after belief turned a guardian into a monster, a documentary reawakens that same force at scale, and this time it’s aimed at the thing the lie built. Past and present collide.

The Plague Trilogy

Coming January 2027

The Induration (Book 1) Editorially complete and ready to serialize; the whole pipeline is done. This one serializes next, and arrives in January 2027. A man born in Whitlock House on the hundredth anniversary of a murder no one told him about becomes the vessel for three ancient hungers, and for something the land has been waiting a century to birth.

On the drawing board

The Plague (Book 2) The entity is born. The hunger finally has a name. A man walks the long century with three voices in his head and a body that will not age, and everywhere he goes, the land remembers.

Eternal Winter (Book 3, the trilogy finale) A man who has been a plague for over a century reaches for redemption, returns to the town of his birth, and finds something older, colder, and more patient than he ever was waiting for him there.

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Demons

A distinct lane under the Slow Drip Universe umbrella, running on its own cosmology: a Goetic hierarchy of demon-dukes, a bone court that keeps the ledger of the dead. No convergence here. Just the reckoning.

In progress

Zen Demonio The novel at the heart of this lane, in active development. Its opening desert sequence, the preview The Search for Reina de Luna, is live as Demons #9 on Substack. An exiled, nameless half-demon collects the world’s forgotten dead, burning a bitter herb to see past the veil, and the unreadable sentence he carries may end with his own name.

The Demons Anthology Flash fiction drawn from a demon-duke’s hierarchy: brief, sharp descents into the Goetic register. A different victim or morsel each week, an anthology-in-progress. Early threads (Aurora, Bune) are taking shape, with more of the roster to come.

On the drawing board

Washington’s Advance: A girl who lives at the end of a street named for Washington’s Revolutionary march dreams the battle itself (gory, close, and far too real) and wakes to a lone soldier walking up her road. If she’s waking at all.

Rex versus Drago: A dog named Rex narrates his one great mission: free the captive red orb from Drago, the purple-and-green dragon who holds it. Weird, absurd, and gleefully, gorily savage.

Underneath the Fall: A title and an instinct, for now. More soon.

Tales from the Slow Drip

Everything that orbits the Café. Same haunted county, same tangled bloodlines, but these stories run on grief, memory, and hunger rather than the convergence engine. Everything comes back to the Slow Drip, one way or another.

The Slow Drip Trilogy

In active revision / serializing now

Lost Grounds (Book 1) In active revision. Currently serializing on Substack. New chapters land Wednesday evenings. Six months after his wife’s death, a hollow man drifts back to a coffee shop he barely remembers (with his best friend trying to keep him tethered) and finds the place has been waiting for him since long before he was born.

Saturation (Book 2) The developmental revision is complete; this one’s in the final stretch before serialization. Where the first book was the slow pull, this is the soak. As one man’s grip on what’s real wears thin, his best friend (investigating the café’s dead) can’t stay outside what he’s uncovering, and a woman who is two women begins to come apart.

On the drawing board

Deliverance (Book 3, the trilogy finale) A grieving man, the best friend whose investigation won’t stop digging, two women who are one woman, and a building that has fed on all of them, until the bonds between them become the one thing strong enough to walk them out.

The Billy Barnes Sub-Series (The Priest Trilogy)

On the drawing board

The Priest (Book 1) A journalist inherits his father’s notebooks, his father’s unfinished questions, and the trail of an entity that has been making deals at the crossroads since long before there was a name for it.

In the Pines (Book 2) The crossroads trail leads into the Pine Barrens, where the cosmology of the deal predates the music that made it famous, and the thing that calls itself nothing has been doing business in those trees for centuries.

The Prophet (Book 3, the trilogy finale) The investigation reaches its end. The entity takes a final form. And a journalist has to decide what kind of reporter, and what kind of son, he really is.

Slow Drip Standalones

In active development

Fresh Cut Daisies (a standalone) Early sections are drafted and the full structure is mapped. This one’s actively taking shape. A boy grows up obsessed with a colonial painting in his family’s house, and learns, in his twenties, through psychedelics and his own bloodline, that the painting has been showing him doors all along.

On the drawing board

Spectral Visions (a Slow Drip and Robert Barnes book) A burned-out psychedelic-rock casualty, bound to the Slow Drip, tells journalist Robert Barnes the story of his life the way he remembers it, and the deeper it goes, the harder it is to say whether he’s recounting a career or a descent he never climbed back out of.

Righteous and the Wretched: Between the Lakes Two adjacent shore towns (one a Methodist camp meeting governed by silence, the other a Beaux-Arts resort built on racial covenants) and the people caught between them across fifteen years that bend toward something neither town survives intact. A Saga.

The Twilight Ghosts

A standalone. Not part of the universe: no Café, no crossroads, no convergence. Just the cosmos, and one man who came back from it.

In active revision, coming Spring 2027

Deep in a standalone revision, a spiritual offshoot of Close Encounters of the Third Kind, in a voice all its own. The last survivor of a classified alien-exchange program finally tells what really happened to the twelve operatives who boarded an extraterrestrial craft in 1965, and what it cost the one who returned.

Y2K

A bio-terror/conspiracy thriller: universe-adjacent, no supernatural, all human. Set at the exact seam of the millennium..

In revision, coming June 2027

All but fully written, now in a style-and-voice revision pass, with a screenplay version underway alongside it. After his homeless father dies in the Y2K bioterrorism attack, an investigative journalist uncovers evidence that the national hero credited with stopping the outbreak actually orchestrated it, and is already planning the next one.

On the drawing board

Robert Barnes Prequel Three years before Y2K, a young journalist takes down a city official, wins a Pulitzer, loses everything to drink, and walks the spiral that ends at a father he hasn’t spoken to in years.

The Roadmap

The plan as it currently stands, aggressive and subject to shift, but this is what I’m aiming for. Six finished novels, two months apart:

• September 2026: Leeds Devil: The Legend Begins

• November 2026: Lost Grounds

• January 2027: The Induration

• March 2027: The Twilight Ghosts

• May 2027: Saturation

• July 2027: Y2K

From there, the rest of the series, Monmouth Devil and beyond, arrives at a steadier four-to-six-month cadence, with standalones and universe-adjacent books peppered in between.

Where to follow along

New chapters are serializing now on Substack: Leeds Devil: The Legend Begins wraps soon, and Lost Grounds is live. The Induration arrives as a late Summer 2026 serial and publishes in January 2027. More of the universe rolls out on a steady cadence from there. Subscribe to get every dispatch, every new chapter, and the occasional dark corner of the map I haven’t shown anyone yet.

The drip is slow. That’s the point.

Lee

Share Lee D. Gibbs: Cosmic & Supernatural Horror

Copyright © 2026 by Lee D. Gibbs

June 30, 2026

The Slow Drip Trilogy’s Lost Grounds has extremely specific content warnings. The next Tales of Convergence serial release, The Plague Trilogy Book One: The Induration, is full of gore and brutality.

I’ve written some disturbing scenes. If you’re reading Leeds Devil tonight, you’ll read one of them.

Writing the infanticide scene was the biggest challenge I’ve encountered so far as a writer. And I can be pretty morbid.

The challenge was not because it’s the murder of a newborn, which is horrible enough to begin with, but because I had to think like someone who could do that. Mercy killing or not.

As a father of three, I know I would have cherished whatever time I had with my son were I put in that spot. My thought process would have been completely different. But I’m not Titan. So I really tried to get inside of Titan’s head. What thoughts would he have, how would he rationalize and justify the deed? Sure, it’s mercy. That’s the easy way out. I did it out of love. Blah, blah. So much more was at stake. Then it dawned on me: Stupid men make stupid decisions when they feel cornered, whether it’s metaphorical or literal. And they’ll ramble to themselves about how right they were while they dig their own graves.

I hope everyone knows that this story is 100% fictional. I’ve take major creative liberties in creating this origin story. I also hope you enjoy the rest of the book!

Lee

Copyright © 2026 by Lee D. Gibbs

June 22, 2026

I love writing long, winding, descriptive and flowing sentences. Then juxtapose with a helluva lot of fragments and short sentences. If you’re reading Jersey Devil: The Legend Begins, you already know that.

Speaking of craft, in order to craft the voices of the characters in Jersey Devil: The Legend Begins, I had to make several strange stylistic decisions. Maintaining these distinct voices throughout the novel was my biggest challenge. I experimented with stylized dialogue and syntax in order to do so. I think I pulled it off successfully. I never could have done it without first building and writing a Universe Bible and Character Compendium. These two documents proved invaluable reference tools while crafting and writing not only this book, but four others so far in the Slow Drip Universe. I’m fortunate to have these tools moving forward—it’s a big universe with tons of characters in different generations across a lot of books.

Subscribe now

With the Jersey Devil: The Legend Begins serial finishing up in a few weeks and heading to publication, I’ve been putting things into perspective about writing and publishing my debut here on Substack before print or e-pub.

The bloody surgery I performed on the manuscript over the past few months, trimming the manuscript’s bloated 74k word count down to 63k.

Three full chapter re-writes.

This crazy idea spawned from a young writer’s weird dream about the Pine Barrens. Now a middle-aged man with a lifelong obsession with the Jersey Devil, research on another project re-ignited my interest in writing a story about the Jersey Devil. Not a Blair Witch style rip-off—I had to abandon that horrible script. Performing dual duty, I researched family genealogy and local Lenape bands for future release The Induration. Learning about Mesingw rekindled my interest in writing about JD and inspired the Jersey Devil Trilogy. I wrote both books together. I decided to go the full nine with Jersey Devil first.

So now I’m left revising or possibly re-writing The Induration next, after Lost Grounds and Leeds Devil publish. I’m currently focusing on Demons and other short horror while I write a new Tales of Convergence standalone, The Legend of Zen Diablo.

The best part about all of this? I get feedback here. And that matters to me. Readers may not realize it. The writers do; at least the honest ones looking for real feedback and honest constructive criticism, rather than just blowing smoke up each others asses. It helps.

And I get to share the whole thing with you. Thanks for hopping on the bus. It’s gonna be a wild ride!

Stay tuned for more about Zen Diablo.

Lee

Copyright © 2026 by Lee D. Gibbs

Good morning dear readers and Happy Friday!

Here’s an update on my progress:

I finally finished editing book one of The Jersey Devil Trilogy. Refreshed chapters 1-7 went up the other day. The rest of the serial has been scheduled. Finale drops July 14th. Polishing will continue as I transition to working in Atticus, formatting for publication.

I also re-titled and redesigned the cover of book one of Tales from the Slow Drip. After one more light polish, this novella is ready for publishing too. Lost is now Lost Grounds.

Did I mention Lost Grounds is part of a trilogy too? Saturation (book two) continues the trilogy, adding a hint of noir to horror in the continuing story of Xander’s fragmented and exploited memory and the predatory Slow Drip Cafe. Deliverance (book three) will be the Slow Drip Trilogy’s conclusion. Tales from the Slow Drip continues with other trilogies and standalone novels, like Fresh Cut Daisies, set in 1980s and 1990s and taking place at the Slow Drip Cafe, in and around Whitlock Junction.

Tales of Convergence’s Jersey Devil: The Legend Begins received a cover tweak. We're on schedule for October's publishing. The Tales of Convergence serial version concludes in July. You’ll also notice a slightly altered title:

It fits the series architecture better.

In other news: I’m planning a re-write of The Induration, book one of The Plague Trilogy. I’ll get into that in more detail in a future article; that’s the crazy super cryptid saga. But first, acknowledgments go out to : I’m developing my old moniker and alter-ego Zen Diablo into a novel. Details to follow.

Otherwise, my previous publication schedule holds firm with the possibility of publishing Leeds Devil: The Legend Begins and Lost Grounds together in September rather than October and December, respectively. That all depends on a Kickstarter, which I am seriously considering for funding both books artwork and a professional editor. What are your thoughts? Don’t be shy!

Demons and 3:00 AM Horror both have new material headed your way this weekend!

Chapter Ten of Leeds Devil: The Legend Begins drops tonight at 7:00 PM ET.

Chapter Three of Lost is live now!

Happy reading!

Lee

P.S. Any questions? Thoughts? Feedback? Don’t be shy.

Copyright © 2026 by Lee D. Gibbs

From the desk of Lee D. Gibbs, Jr.

June 6, 2026

The Slow Drip Cafe.

The first time I wrote those words together I was in college, somewhere around 1998. One mention, in a short story for a class. “The Wave,” it was called. Flash forward to 2002: I finally graduated, having taken the extended eight-year plan, a story for another article. My final piece for my last undergrad class, an independent study in creative writing, was a quirky stoner short I’d titled “Saturation.” Mason trips on LSD in his apartment. His dog stands up and starts talking, his dragon-shaped bong comes to life, and, well, you’ll just have to read it here. I retitled it “Mason’s Trip,” because I pillaged Saturation for something else.

That something else: a sequel to my novel, Lost. The novel that would take me almost twenty-four years to finish.

I started Lost that same summer, on my honeymoon. I married my wife, my best friend, in May of 2002. When we picked the date a year earlier, we had no idea it would land the same week as my college commencement. They mailed me the degree.

In 2003 we had our first son. Family life started, long work weeks bought comfortable living, and I barely wrote between 2003 and 2010. We welcomed a daughter in 2006 and another son in 2010. I worked in seafood, in advertising, as a substitute teacher. I went back for an MA in English and Secondary Education, then fell back to fish mongering, always longing for more.

A good friend of mine is a creative too, and back in the early 2000s he was my biggest cheerleader and collaborator. We brainstormed, spit-balled, and landed on three decent ideas. They became two incomplete treatments and an almost-finished screenplay draft. Which is to say we had nothing. We never finished. Because of me. I owe James Meholic a debt of gratitude for putting up with my bullshit; I never once hit a deadline between 2010 and 2015. But that material became the foundation for three finished novels: The Induration (Tales of Convergence), Y2K (a bioterror psychological thriller), and The Twilight Ghosts (an alien-exchange-program, Serpo-lore sci-fi novel). All three need revision and editing. All three will be serialized here.

Then came the years I won’t dress up. Between 2015 and 2019 I produced nothing but journal entries and poetry. Self-indulgent, self-loathing, addiction-addled, a depressive and OCD stretch where the occasional idea surfaced and went nowhere. When I moved back to New Jersey around 2019 it got worse before it got better: homelessness, addiction and alcoholism, mental illness, estrangement from my family. Brief stretches of sobriety would hand writing back to me. Covid, for everything it took, also gave me long quiet hours to read, research, and tinker with old material. Then 2021 to 2024, the Amazon years, the downward spiral.

For years I kept writing and rewriting scenes pulled from a recurring dream. The dream itself is insignificant; the feeling it left behind was not. The girl in it burned into my memory. Think Fairuza Balk in The Craft, but cyberpunk. Raven. She has lived in my head since I was eighteen. Back then she had another name and another life, and her name was Emily.

Back to the Slow Drip Cafe, which is itself the product of a college writing exercise. A sensory prompt: describe a place in full, put your reader inside it through every sense. I chose a local haunt, a coffee house the counter-culture and the college crowd frequented, called The Inkwell, and changed the name. I invented Xander, a Slow Drip regular. His first entrance in Lost came straight off that prompt.

The premise of Lost came to me on that honeymoon. We took a nine-day Caribbean cruise. We had a blast: excursions, sun, breathtaking vistas, an unforgettable trip. The first day on the ship overwhelmed me. The first time I used the bathroom I think I had an anxiety attack. The interior of my head runs irregular, and when I’m having fun my thoughts turn dark. I still feel the fun. But inside I’m building and running alternate versions of the moment, cause-and-reaction what-ifs, Final Destination shit. Maybe they’re glimpses into other timelines. This is where the zipline comes in. On a tram ride through the Costa Rican rainforest canopy, my irregular head switched on. I wrote the scene that night. The setting changed for the story years later.

Somewhere around Covid I came back to Lost. I decided to make it a two-part novel, with Saturation as the conclusion. I couldn’t nail the second part down, so I shifted to that unfinished Windigoo project James and I had started years before. The research pulled me back into the Jersey Devil, and the idea for two cryptid-based trilogies became Tales of Convergence.

Many names across both series come from my own genealogy. I’ve always wanted to honor my ancestors, and I can’t think of a better way. I’ve taken so many liberties with the actual history that it reads more as speculation, so box me into whatever genre you want. The Spy House in Middletown, New Jersey is a real place, the same way the Inkwell was real in West Long Branch. Look it up: the Seabrook-Wilson House, the first permanent structure built in Monmouth County. It becomes the Whitlock House in Tales of Convergence. Keep that name in mind.

I won’t spoil anything else. Below is the shape of how it all came together, and everything you can expect from both series and the Slow Drip universe as a whole.

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The Evolution

1998. The Wave. Xander walks onto the page for the first time. I got engaged.

1999. Rehab, 12-steps, lots of therapy. Sobriety attempt #1 begins.

2002. Mason’s Trip, first written as “Saturation.” College ends on the eight-year plan.

2002–2003. Lost begins on my honeymoon, as a short story, a novella, a screenplay. It can’t decide what it is. Neither can I.

2003–2010. Lost in pieces. A daughter in 2006, a son in 2010. After 10 years of sobriety, relapse. Benders. Seafood, advertising, teaching, an MA, back to fish mongering. Too dark to finish.

2010–2015. A writing partnership yields three unfinished projects that would sit a decade. The seeds of The Induration, Y2K, and The Twilight Ghosts. Binge drinking.

2015–2019. Journals and poetry, nothing else. Self-loathing, addiction, a depressive and OCD stretch.

2019–2020. Back to New Jersey. Homelessness, addiction and alcoholism, mental illness, estrangement. Brief sobriety hands writing back. Covid: read, research, tinker.

2021–2024. The Amazon years. The downward spiral. I hated Amazon almost as much as I hated myself.

2024–2026. The universe takes shape. Two cryptid trilogies become Tales of Convergence. The Slow Drip stories find their shelf. Now I write as Lee D. Gibbs, and it all gets told here.

The Roadmap

Tales of Convergence

Jersey Devil Trilogy

The Legend Begins. Pine Barrens slow-burn origin. 1677–1735.

The Legend Grows. Two arcs, a new twist on the myth. 1677–1910.

The Truth Lives. The Jersey Devil convergence. 1935 to the present.

Plague Trilogy

The Induration. Daniel Stout transformed by Mhuwe, Windigoo, and Chenoo into the super-cryptid, the Plague. 1835–1880.

The Plague. When Daniel leaves Halifax. 1880–1935.

Eternal Winter. Daniel’s confessions. 1935 to the present.

Tales from the Slow Drip

The Slow Drip Trilogy

Lost. Grief-stricken Xander wrestles with reality, memory, and the choice between life and oblivion. Actively editing.

Saturation. Mason vows to find Xander, but the Slow Drip has other plans. Under revision.

Deliverance. Mason digs into how Dawn really died, and whether the Slow Drip wins. Outlined.

Spectral Visions. The biography of a fictional musician in the Slow Drip universe, inspired by Syd Barrett. 1960s to the present. Also a Robert Barnes novel. Half written.

Fresh Cut Daisies. Psychological and supernatural horror in suburban Whitlock Township. 1980 to the present. Outlined, first three chapters drafted.

The Billy Barnes Sub-Series. The crossroads myth, Papa Legba, and the 27 Club.

The Priest. Book One. In development.

In the Pines. Book Two. Outlined.

The Prophet. Book Three. Outlined.

Untitled Henry Hudson disappearance project. Concept; more research needed. It may land inside Tales of Convergence.

Robert Barnes

Y2K. A bioterror psychological thriller. A New York City journalist chases the truth behind his father’s death and an epidemic. Slow Drip universe-adjacent. Screenplay written; needs editing.

Untitled Robert Barnes prequel. Reworked from material cut out of Y2K.

Standalone

The Twilight Ghosts. The alien exchange program that never happened, told first-hand, interview style. Speculative science fiction built on Serpo lore. Screenplay written; needs editing.

Screen Projects

The Righteous and the Wretched. A fictionalized Asbury Park and Ocean Grove from inception to the present, set in the Slow Drip universe and built as a tele-series, each season covering roughly twenty-five years. Pilot and first season written, eight episodes at about fifty minutes each.

Between the Lakes, Book One. To be adapted from The Righteous and the Wretched.

Lenapehoking, Book One / Season One: Sinkholes. Concept.

Y2K. Screenplay adaptation of the Robert Barnes novel. Written; needs editing.

The Twilight Ghosts. Screenplay adaptation of the standalone novel. Written; needs editing.

So, to be blunt: I’ve got a lot of work to do. Shorts, poetry, and ramblings too. This is not a hobby for me. In the coming weeks some of it becomes paid subscriber content. Stick around for the journey. There’s a lot coming.

Lee

Copyright © 2026 by Lee D. Gibbs

I love writing so much that my initial drafts are always very long winded. Subsequently, I find solace in revising and editing. It’s a bloody mess.

My former career as a fish monger started when I was a freshman in college, as a fish cutter. Yes, I filleted fish for a living. And I compare it to sculpting. You start out with raw media, then chisel or mold it into something beautiful. I did it this with fish. A whole fish became something new, carved into fillets, steaks, loins, or medallions.

First you fillet or remove the best parts of the fish, then you refine the fillets or steaks by portioning for cooking. I used to do this daily. Six days a week. Ten to twelve hour shifts. The same motions, repeated over and over. Repetition led to effortless perfection. I genuinely loved this career—until I didn’t want to smell like gutted fish anymore (that’s a story for a different article).

Writing is like filleting fish. Show up every day. Type or write enough original words and eventually you’ll be a honed professional. I started morning pages, the original 750 words, nearly thirty years ago. I never made every day. So I never got any real results… Until I showed up every day, writing those three pages. Sometime I wrote trash. Sometimes I complained on the screen. Other times I actually brainstormed characters or stories. Then something weird happened: I started making connections to the stories and characters.

Editing is also like filleting fish. Line editing Chapter Five of my current WIP took me two sessions: Eight hours Sunday, five on Tuesday morning. Three passes. Thirteen hours of surgical cuts, light revisions, and a final polish. I hacked away at it until it was bare bones with nicks exposing marrow. That made me feel more like a surgeon than an artist. The lyrics from an old song parody popped into my head while I edited.

I’m the Weird Al Fucking Editor.

Then I noticed Al looks very close to AI, which led to this transition.

Those who care about their craft won’t use AI for editing. We spend hours honing our craft. Searching for a different word. Making sure the grammar is right, or just wrong enough to break the right rules with finesse. I could have taken the easy way out and used Claude or Gemini to line edit with a prompt and been done in seconds, output with remaining errors and the possibility of gibberish added.

Integrity gets in my way every time I consider it.

I won’t bash anyone that uses AI. I know that there are those with limitations that use AI as a creative lifeline. I use Claude Co work as a virtual assistant. I’m upfront about it. I don’t use it for writing or editing.

I do use Pro Writing Aid. Go ahead: Come at me. IDGAF that it uses AI. So does integrated spellcheck in every word processing app for decades now.

I have also played with prompting stories. I’ve learned the ins and outs of how LLMs create. I’m not going into the details—plenty of other writers here copy-paste their AI conversations and chats.

Rather than preaching, I’ll simply state my reasoning in a weird Q and A.

Question: Would you subcontract creativity to AI?

The Opportunist Answer: Absolutely. Constantly automated content output? You bet.

My Answer: Hard no as explained below.

Anyone involved in the craft of creative writing who uses AI to write is seriously limiting their creativity and potential. It may be tempting, but you can’t automate and/or outsource creative tasks to an AI and expect a masterpiece. It just doesn’t work that way. There are worlds inside of us that AI can’t conjure up.

Writing proves exponentially more rewarding than to me than prompting a story to an AI. The act of writing exercises the brain, helps keep the brain sharp. The best part? You wrote it. You get to claim authentic ownership.

Lee

Next week we’ll take a journey into the Slow Drip and Convergence Universe. This now 18 book project consists of Tales of Convergence, Zen Diablo’s Tales from the Slow Drip, two spec screenplays, one standalone novel, and a finished spec pilot and treatment for its limited series. It’s a big vision. I can’t wait to share it with you!

Copyright ©2026 by Lee Douglas

Most histories of the Lenape end the same way. Forced removal in the 1750s. The long walk west. The community dispersed into Ohio, then Indiana, then Oklahoma, then Ontario. Past tense. The histories are wrong, or at least incomplete. Not every Lenape left.

The ones who stayed in Monmouth County, New Jersey, became known as the Sand Hill people. The name is geographic. The sand hills around Eatontown and Tinton Falls, the moraine country where the coastal plain meets the inland scrub. They lived there. They worked there. They are still there.

If you grew up in Monmouth County, you definitely walked past their work without knowing it.

What the histories miss

The Sand Hill people did what unrecognized communities everywhere do to survive. They blended in. They took English surnames. They married into Black communities, mixed with white communities and into other Indigenous communities that had also stayed. And they worked.

In the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, they worked construction. They were on the crews that built the Victorian summer cottages of Long Branch, the Asbury Park boardwalk, the grand hotels along the shore. They cut the lumber. They mixed the mortar. They laid the brick.

When you walk into one of those hotels today and look at the walls, the walls were built by people whose ancestors had walked the same county for thousands of years. The hotels celebrate Victorian elegance. They do not mention the hands that built them.

Why this matters to Jersey Devil

Jersey Devil: The Legend Begins takes place mostly in the Pine Barrens, but its emotional and historical roots are in Monmouth County. The novel argues something specific. The Jersey Devil legend, as it's been told for two hundred years, is a smokescreen. The Mother Leeds story, the cursed thirteenth child, the wings and the forked tail—all of it draws attention away from what the colonial settlers actually did to the land and the people who already lived on it.

The novel proposes that the Jersey Devil is not a monster a witch-mother summoned. It's a manifestation of the Lenape Manëtu Mësingw, Keeper of the Game, Living Solid Face, custodian of the forest—corrupted by sixty years of colonial violence and Quaker accusation. Sustained collective belief that something is a demon can, in this universe, make it one.

Mësingw was not a demon. He became one because settlers needed him to be one. The Sand Hill people are some of the descendants of the people who knew Him before that happened.

The research debt I owe

Writing this novel honestly required acknowledging that a non-Indigenous author is telling a story rooted in Indigenous cosmology. Although my genealogy shows Lenape ancestors on both sides of my family, I do not own that ground. I am writing on it.

The Sand Hill Indian Historical Association is the community organization that preserves the history of the Lenape who stayed in Monmouth County. Their work is the reason any of this is recoverable. When Jersey Devil: The Legend Begins moves toward its self-published edition this October, cultural sensitivity review through the Sand Hill community is part of the process. The Substack serialization is the work-in-progress version. The book is the version that has been read by the people whose history it draws on.

What's next

Chapter Two arrives Tuesday at 7pm Eastern. The Pine Barrens widens. The sermon about demons begins to do its work. And Sarah Whitlock—seventeen years old, daughter of a Monmouth Patent merchant, taught against the conventions of her time to watch what people do rather than what they say—walks into the forest and sees something Reverend Applegate insists is a demon. She recognizes something else.

What she does with that habit over the next thirty-three years is one spine of this novel. The other runs in parallel, in Lenape voices: an elder named Nitis tells a young man named Tamakwa to remember, to teach his children to remember, for thirteen generations. Two truth-keeping traditions, written and oral, beginning the same week. Both pointing at the same buried fact. One of them is the reason a 1989 renovation crew finds something hidden in the foundation of a Monmouth County tavern.

Chapter Two is where the witnesses arrive.

If you've been with this serialization since the fragmented preview posts, thank you for staying. The new cadence is two full chapters a week, every Tuesday and Thursday at 7pm Eastern. The book serializes through July, then publishes in October.

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Everybody knows the story. A woman named Mother Leeds was pregnant with her thirteenth child. She cursed it: “Let it be the Devil!”

When the baby was born, it sprouted wings, claws, hooves, and a forked tail, screamed, and flew up the chimney into the Pine Barrens. It’s been haunting southern New Jersey ever since. Caution: Don’t go into the Pine Barrens alone at night.

It’s a good campfire story. Almost none of it is true.

The Jersey Devil wasn’t born from a curse. It was born from a political smear campaign, a family feud with the Quakers, and the greatest troll job in colonial American publishing. The proper story is stranger than the legend, and a lot less flattering to the people who created it. It starts with a man named Daniel Leeds.

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The Almanac That Started Everything

Daniel Leeds was a devout English Quaker who began publishing in Shrewsbury, New Jersey, living there from 1677-1678. He moved to Burlington and settled, putting his surveying skills to work. In Burlington, Daniel Leeds served as a surveyor, an assemblyman, and a respected community figure. In 1687, he published an almanac. It contained astrological symbols, planet names from the Greco-Roman tradition, and predictions based on the movements of the stars.

The Quakers interpretation of The American Almanack’s astrology was pagan; its imagery was idolatrous and its language was that of heathens. So they censored the Almanack. They burned the copies they found. Leeds made a public apology, and the Quaker community told him that wasn’t enough.

So Daniel Leeds did what any reasonable person would do when their religious community burns their book: he kept publishing, converted to the Anglican Church, and started writing anti-Quaker pamphlets. For the next thirty years, he and the Quakers went back and forth in print, each side escalating. The Quakers published a tract with a title that tells you everything you need to know about the tone of the debate: Satan’s Harbinger Encountered, Being Something by Way of Answer to Daniel Leeds.

Satan’s harbinger. That’s what the Quakers called him. In 1700. Thirty-five years before the legend supposedly began.

Leeds didn’t help himself. He befriended the deeply unpopular Royal Governor, Lord Cornbury. He kept publishing esoteric material that blurred the line between Christian mysticism and occultism. And he gained land on the Atlantic coast and moved his family there. The place came to be known as Leeds Point.

The Son and the Almanac Cover

Daniel Leeds died in 1720. His son, Titan, publishing The American Almanack since 1716, inherited the family business. Titan redesigned the cover to feature the Leeds family crest in 1728.

The crest included wyverns.

What’s a wyvern? A bipedal dragon-like mythical creature with wings, claws, a serpent’s tail, and a horse-like head. Sound familiar? The creature on the Leeds family almanac, printed and distributed across the colony for years, looked almost exactly like the thing people would later describe seeing in the Pine Barrens.

When a community has spent decades calling your family servants of the devil, and your almanac cover features a winged dragon-like creature, the collective imagination does the rest.

Enter Benjamin Franklin

Titan Leeds’s American Almanack had competition. A young printer from Philadelphia named Benjamin Franklin began publishing Poor Richard’s Almanack, and he wanted to eliminate his rival.

Franklin’s method was calculated. In his 1733 almanac, he published an astrological prediction: Titan Leeds would die on October 17th of that year.

Titan Leeds did not die. Benjamin Franklin made a name for himself, publicly bullying an already established publisher. And Franklin’s printing press business steadily grew.

Titan Leeds was furious. He published a response calling Franklin a fool and a liar. Franklin’s retort: he maintained that his prediction was correct; that Titan Leeds was clearly dead, and that whoever was writing these angry responses must be a ghost impersonating the deceased.

Franklin kept up for years. Every time Titan protested, Franklin treated him as further evidence of a haunting. What started out as a hoax and a publicity stunt turned into years of cruel rhetorical bullying. The joke became legend. The legend attached itself to the family name that had already been called Satanic by the Quakers.

Titan Leeds actually died in 1738. By then, the damage had been done. The Leeds name was permanently associated with devils, ghosts, and the occult.

What the Legend Gets Wrong

The “Mother Leeds” story didn’t appear in print until the nineteenth century. There’s no historical evidence that a woman named Mother Leeds cursed her thirteenth child. Historians Brian Regal and Frank Esposito, in their book The Secret History of the Jersey Devil, argue convincingly that the entire legend grew from the Leeds family’s political and religious conflicts, not from any supernatural birth.

Layers are missing from the legend. The enigma and allure of the Pine Barrens itself. The pre-history of Lenapehoking and its people. The compact between the land and its inhabitants.

What the popular legend erases is the context. Everything that was actually happening on that land in the 1730s. The Absegami band of Lenni Lenape, who had lived in the Pine Barrens region of Lenapehoking for thousands of years, were being displaced. Land “agreements” between the Absegami and the settlers rapidly forced them westward out of New Jersey into Pennsylvania. Colonial families expanded their landholdings, consuming acres of resources. The relationships between settlers and indigenous communities collapsed under the weight of broken agreements and the evangelical mission that threatened to erase Lenape culture, history, and spirituality.

None of that makes it into the legend. The legend gives you a mother’s curse and a baby with wings. It’s simpler. More dramatic. Easier to tell around a fire. And it fits the male-dominated narrative, always blaming the mother.

But truth twists and burns like a pitch pine. It gets manipulated and weaponized. Buried in the sandy soil of an oak grove, deep in the Pine Barrens. In the ink on the pages of newspapers as a smear campaign. Follow the hidden deer paths through the pitch pines to the oak groves. Because eventually, truth outlives lies.

Tales of Convergence starts out with my debut novel, Jersey Devil: The Legend Begins, asking a different question: What if the legend is the cover story? What if the truth hides underneath sixty years of colonial violence, a destroyed Lenape guardian spirit, and a community that needed a monster more than it needed accountability?

The real Leeds Devil isn’t a creature. It’s a consequence.

The novel will begin publishing as a serial soon, if you want to know what actually happened at Leeds Point in 1735. Or at least, if you want to know what might have happened if you follow history to its darkest logical conclusion. That’s the story I’ve spent years building.

The legend you know is a lie. The truth is worse.

— Lee

Copyright © 2026 by Lee D. Gibbs

I write on a T-Mobile Revvl 7 Pro.

That's it. That's the setup. No office, no laptop, no dual-monitor workstation with a mechanical keyboard and a candle that smells like productivity. A phone. A budget Android phone with a fake OtterBox and no screen protector.

The first question people ask when I tell them this is "how." The honest answer is that I didn't choose it. It's what I have. When I started writing seriously, the phone was the only tool available, so it became the tool. You adapt. You stop waiting for the conditions to be right and you work with the conditions you've got.

Here's what that looks like in practice.

Everything starts with pen and paper. Always. The first draft of a scene, the shape of a chapter, a line of dialogue that shows up at 3 AM and won't leave until I write it down. Pen and paper. Then the phone works its magic. Snap the photo. Transcribe and save in Google Docs. That's the workflow. Analog to digital in thirty seconds.

I do the real writing in Google Docs, thumb-typing. The phone's keyboard is terrible. I own a Chromebook, but it no longer receives updates, and typing on it is awkward. I'd rather thumb-type on my phone, like I'm doing right now. I've gotten fast enough that it doesn't feel like a limitation anymore. It felt like one for the first six months. Autocorrect and I have an ongoing war. I draft scenes in bursts, sometimes ten minutes between obligations, sometimes two hours at 1 AM when the house is quiet and the words are coming. The phone doesn't care what time it is. Neither does the work.

Editing is harder. You can't see the architecture of a chapter on a phone screen. You can see about eight sentences at a time. That means you're always working close, sentence-level, paragraph-level, without the bird's-eye view a laptop gives you. I've learned to compensate by keeping obsessive notes. Chapter summaries. Character trackers. Timeline documents. A universe bible that's currently over 40,000 words and growing. All of it on the phone.

The universe bible is the thing that makes a 17-book interconnected world possible on a device that fits in my back pocket. Every character, every bloodline, every plot thread across three trilogies, standalones, screen projects, and a web of connections spanning 1275 to 2035 is tracked in one document. When I need to know what color Brad Cornelius's fedora is, or whether Mason Smock's birthday is September 15th or 24th (it's the 24th; Xander's is the 15th), or how many times the phrase "truth outlives lies" appears across the full catalog (once per novel, maximum), I check the bible. The bible is the brain I can't keep in my head.

People romanticize the struggling artist thing. I don't. Writing on a phone is not romantic. It's a thumb cramp at 2 AM. It's losing a paragraph because your palm grazed the screen. It's the particular frustration of trying to do a find-and-replace across a 70,000-word document on a 6.5-inch display.

But here's what I've learned: the limitations force a discipline that a more comfortable setup might not. When you can only see eight sentences, you make those eight sentences count. When you can't scroll through the whole chapter at once, you learn the chapter's shape by feel instead of by sight. When your only tool is the thing in your pocket, you learn to use it the way a carpenter uses a hand saw: slower, more deliberate, and the cuts are cleaner because you can't afford to waste material.

I've written over 400,000 words this way. Pen to paper to phone. Six novels. A universe bible. Planning documents, character profiles, marketing materials, Substack posts. The first novel, Jersey Devil: The Legend Begins, comes out in October. It's 70,000 words of historical fiction and cosmic horror, and every one of those words started in a notebook and ended up typed with my thumbs.

One of the Kickstarter stretch goals is a laptop. I'm not going to pretend that won't change things. It will. But the phone is what got me here, and I don't think the work would have been the same without the constraints. The phone made me a more careful writer. I'd rather have learned that way than any other.

If you're a writer working with limited tools, limited time, limited everything: the work doesn't care about your setup. The work cares about whether you show up. Show up with whatever you have.

No pen and paper? No computer? The phone is enough.

Lee

Copyright © 2026 by Lee D. Gibbs