Okay, I’m warning you right up front, this is going to be kind of an ehhhhhh newsletter. More personal stuff than cool in-depth updates.

Why you ask…?

Well, during the week between the last newsletter and San Diego ComicCon I had two middle-of-the-night trips to the pet emergency room. With two different cats. And one of those middle of the night trips was the Wednesday of SDCC—preview night. I still went down there Thursday but holy crap was I tired.

SDCC was… okay. I managed to get the toy exclusives I wanted (for me and some other folks). I also got to hang out with a couple people you may have heard of and talk about film stuff. Yes, in the “maybe we should adapt this” way. But it’s still very early days and I don’t want to say anything more until I know there’s actually something worth saying.

Alas, despite masking the whole time, I was one of the many, many folks who caught covid at SDCC. Even the best mask has a small degree of risk, and when you’re dealing with a crowd of 70-80K people (the majority of them not masked)… well, the odds really aren’t in your favor. Yeah, I can dodge bullets 96% of the time, but when someone shoots ten thousand bullets at me… I had chills and cramps on Monday that I wrote off as mild food poisoning (because I was testing negative) and then Tuesday I slept for the whole day. I woke up, went back to bed around 10 am, then woke up again on Wednesday. And when I tested then… wow, it took that second line all of ten seconds to appear. It looked like someone drew it with a Sharpie.

I isolated in my office and my beloved aired out the whole house, but it was too late. She tested positive late the next day.

And the cats are still sick, too.

Anyway, the short version of all this is… I have not managed to get a lot of work done. Very thankfully, there also hasn’t been a pressing, scheduled need for anything, which is probably going to happen in the near future as certain things kick into gear.

So, what do I have for you?

There’s still not really anything to talk about with God’s Junk Drawer. Things are happening, but they’re all the very, very boring early things. No, I still don’t have an official release date yet. Or a preorder date. Trust me, you’ll know.

I’ve got about seventy pages left in the second draft of TOS. Again… so much kind of ground to a halt this week. I did manage to untangle a last few snarls, though, and I’m thinking this book might be… really good? Like, really good. A few things have just opened up and lined up in ways I hadn’t even considered when I first started my sketchy outline for it. So I guess we’ll see on that.

What else have I got for you…?

Cool Stuff I’ve Been Watching
Honestly… not a lot. With everything going on, we just haven’t had the time or energy to watch anything. I think we finished up season four of My Hero Academia, watched a few episodes of Gardener’s World, annnnndd… I fell like there’s something else but it clearly made a great impression

Cool Stuff I’ve Been Reading
As above, holding a book up felt like a lot of effort these past few weeks. I think I read a few more issues in my big Micronauts omnibus and… that’s it. Kinda blows my numbers for book-reading this year.

Cool New Toys
Well, I got the Marvel Legends exclusive Death’s Head at SDCC (yay…?). Got a Blight figure for Animal Warriors of the Kingdom off eBay, and then grabbed a second one to customize into a new character. And I got an amazing Arcee model kit I’m hoping to put together before the next newsletter.

And I think that’s all for now. Many thanks, as always, for reading. I’ll try to have more interesting stuff to tell you next time.