I’m hardly the first person to say this…

(brave start, eh? now I’m sure you’re eager to read more…)

…but social media’s become a pretty rough place. It’s like your favorite mug got dropped and broke into a dozen pieces and you’re trying to figure out if you can fix it and if you maybe cut your foot on a shard when it broke and also crap you’re probably going to have to go mug shopping now. And meanwhile that one friend who doesn’t even drink coffee is standing there going “I don’t see what the big deal is. Looks pretty much the same to me.” Which leaves you wondering, wait, am I getting really worked up over a mug? Is this silly?

I could talk a lot about how awful Twitter and Meta have gotten. Honestly, I did. I wrote out a bunch of paragraphs with a ton of recent examples and then said ugh, who wants to read through that? So… deleted. I told you this newsletter would never be spammy, so why go over stuff you already know?

Okay, I will share one bit I was proud of. I think for a lot of folks, posting on Twitter’s essentially become phantom limb syndrome. They’ve lost an arm but don’t want to admit it’s gone and are convinced they can still feel something in it.

Metaphor!

Anyway, this is really rough on artistic-types like myself because for the past decade social media’s sort of been our one big marketing tool, and to see it fracture and crumble is… well, it’s scary. I lost about 90% of my followers when Twitter went down the tubes–

(In all fairness, they’re still there, it’s just impossible to reach any of them and I feel dirty being there)

–and it’s just left me wondering if I’m going to be able to tell anyone about anything anymore. I mean, hell, at this point Instagram is my “big” account and even there I’m barely reaching… 5% of my followers?

Anyway… with all of this going on, I just wanted to say thanks for signing up here. At this point the newsletter feels like the only place I can be semi-sure I’m getting information out to folks, so I’m very grateful you signed up. And that you’ve read this far.

So, let me give you some updates on a couple things…

TOS passed 100K words last week and we’ve just hit the “everything goes wild” phase. Lots of action. Lots of death. Some scary reveals. Some (hopefully) Holy #@$% -worthy twists. i think this draft’ll be done next time you get one of these.

All the little tweaks got done on GJD and my agent and I are going to talk about some ideas and strategies for it probably later this week. One big thing is maybe if we want to wait a little bit longer and try to make someone a two-book offer with GJD and TOS. I see pluses and minuses to this but… that’s why we talk about stuff.

And, I’ve been trying to do some work on the comics pitch. It’s still kind of weird to me, but I’m breaking things down and trying to think a lot more visually (which is a bit more like film work) and I’m hoping to have this done before my birthday.

Okay, let me fill you in on some other fun things from the past month.

Cool Stuff I’ve Been Watching
A few years back at DragonCon I spent the night blissfully alone in my hotel room watching a few hours of My Hero Academia and I decided last week to sit down and actually watch the whole thing. I’m almost at the end of season two and loving it. Moon Girl and Devil Dinosaur has had a couple amazing episodes. We’re three episodes into Fallout and its fantastic so far.

Cool Stuff I’ve Been Reading
I’ve read… well, a few things I can’t actually talk about yet, but I enjoyed a lot. But I also read Chronicles of the Lazarene by Charles Soule and I alllllllmost think I enjoyed it more than The Endless Vessel, the book it’s spun off from. I also just finished The Grand Dark by Richard Kadrey, which has been sitting in my TBR pile for… jeeez, a year now, and I wish I’d read it sooner because it reminds me so much of old, classic sci-fi, in all the good ways.

Cool New Toys
I stumbled across a classic, X-Men Binary online for a nice price, and I figured she’d go well with my Starjammers. My Cosmic Legions Wal-Torr showed up and it’s just freaking fantastic. I’ve also poured waaaaay too much money into the Animal Warriors of the Kingdom Kickstarter, which—if steampunk/fantasy animal people appeal to you—probably has a few hours left if you opened this right away.