After much too long a delay—just squeaking in under seven years here—I'm glad to be able to say I've finished Turn on the News, the next chapter in the story of the Midway spiders. I'm excited to finally share it with you, and I'm grateful to those out there that have encouraged me to keep at it. Without the occasional reminder that I'm not just heaving words into the abyss Turn on the News might not exist. And if you're reading it then I'm grateful to you too, whether you're a new reader or you remember my previous stories from way back when.

One note about the content of the story: the previous installment, Lockdown, was published all the way back in 2014, long before pandemic-related lockdowns became an unfortunate reality in various polities here in the actual world. I've been working on Turn on the News for a long time; at least the first half was written before the first COVID virion ever folded its nasty little proteins. Circumstances in the story are fairly different—Midway's lockdown is a kind of travel embargo enacted because of a bombing and not a pandemic, yet an uncomfortable similarity remains. With mixed feelings, I changed a few things to leaven the story a bit (nobody wants to be reminded about a plague when reading porn, after all) but the whole thing is pretty central to the plot and, to paraphrase a wise cat, sometimes you just have to let your art live or die as it is. So I just wanted to make it clear to all concerned that nothing in the story should be read as sympathetic to anti-vaxxers, anti-maskers, COVID denialists, or any other group of atavistic yahoos.

Probably this disclaimer is unnecessary for a goofy story about spiders that turn people into their dicks, but just in case, there you are. Anyway, I hope you enjoy the story, and I'm already embarking on the next one. I'm going to try very hard not to take as long this time, and I'm going to try even harder not to write any global catastrophes into existence.

— Teddy Sloth