Year: 2025

As always, rather than waiting until the end of the month, you could subscribe to The Uncanny Cosmic Horror Zombie Almanac and get the newsletter delivered to your inbox on the 15th. Or, y’know, close to the fifteenth. Within a day or two…
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Well, here we are in the far flung sci-fi future year of 2025.

The year of Pacific Rim. No, seriously. If you go off all the dates in the film, the main story is set in 2025. Seems kind of silly, in retrospect, doesn’t it? The idea the whole world would overcome differences and join together to fight a major threat. Ha ha ha ha haaa genre stories are so funny…

<<sobs>>

Anyway…

I hope you had a good holiday season and a peaceful New Year. Wasn’t quite as restful here as I’d hoped, but I’m feeling a bit more recharged and ready to deal with things.

And, wow, there’s already so much to deal with.

Let’s start with one of the easier (ha!) ones. Social media. Yeah, social media again.

I deleted my Facebook account seven years ago. It was getting harder and harder to do anything work-related there, and even social interactions were suffering because of the all-mighty engagement algorithm. A friend of mine died in a car crash and I didn’t know about it for almost six months because Facebook decided to hide all those posts from me. I figured she was just taking a social media break after the election, and then found out her family had been begging for help to pay for her funeral. But who wants to see downer stuff like that, right? Thanks, Zuck!

So, Facebook, gone. Elon made it very easy to delete everything I could and lock down Twitter… wow, like 20 months ago now. Almost two years. There was absolutely no way I was getting on Threads. And holy crap, with these new Meta-wide policies that are just bad for… well, 90% of people? With those in place there’s a good chance I’ll be deleting Instagram in the near future, too.

And on one level… yeah, so what. It’s just social media. It’s not like it’s something important. It’s like getting worked up about signing someone’s yearbook. Is it really worth getting so worked up over something so small?

But I think it’s important to note that. It is a small thing. And if I’m not willing to do the right thing over something so small, especially over something as minor and unimportant as social media, am I really going to do the big things? If I can talk myself out of going for a walk around the block, there’s no way I’m going to the gym. If I can’t write a few pages, there’s no way I’m writing a book. And if I’m not willing to stop using Instagram over their parent company’s absolutely horrible policies… well, what am I willing to do to protest horrible policies?

Anything at all?

And I get it. I’ve talked at length about how much of a pain it can be to start over somewhere new. My friends and family are all “here,” and so are my favorite artists and sports teams and pundits and toy companies (okay, that last one might just be me). Will they follow me? Will they find me somewhere new? Will I find them?

And the answer is, yeah, probably. Heck, if you explain why you’re doing it, a few folks might even join you. And then it’s all of you moving somewhere new together.

Plus, let’s face it. Sometimes starting over is good. It’s a chance to change how we do things and look at things. To shake off all sorts of bad behaviors and mindsets and form new habits. And isn’t that the big goal? To be better people than we were before?

It’s my goal, anyway.

This is probably where I remind you I’m currently on Bluesky and Cara. I also just opened a Pixelfed account, so we’ll see how that goes.

What else do I have for you…?

Just before everyone went home for the holidays. my editor, Toni, and I worked on some marketing material for God’s Junk Drawer. Well, she did most of the work and I offered maybe half a page of suggestions/ edits/ corrections. I haven’t heard anything different from anyone, so I believe the book is in copyedits now.

I’ve also been planning out a (currently very tentative) signing tour for when the book comes out. Probably up and down the west coast. Maybe five or six stops in New England. Again, all very bare-bones right now because I can’t really schedule anything quite yet. But if you’ve got a favorite bookstore in that area, let me know. Or let them know and they can let me know.

As for TOS, I think this editing draft is almost done. I have maybe a page and a half of notes to myself left to tweak/ double check/ fact check. Maybe another week of work? This weekend I was going to be nudging the usual suspects and seeing if they’d be interested in reading it.

No, you’d know if you were one of the usual suspects. Let’s not make this awkward for both of us.

And then I’m going to do some serious work on the comic project I swore I was going to do, ha ha ha, almost exactly a year ago.

But seriously… there’s a ton of stuff I want to get done this year. My birthday’s in May and the goal is to have TOS done and out making the rounds by then, the comic book project done and making the rounds, and me… well, either second-book deep into the huge potential project I mentioned last time or working on another thing I’m going to be bouncing off my agent in the next week or two. And all that will decide how the second half of the year goes.

We’ll talk more about all that next time.

Oh, also– Combat Monsters is out in a little less than a month and you can preorder it from your favorite local bookery. It’s got my new Carter & Kraft story, “The Night Crew,” and if you live in southern California I’ll remind you that a few contributors (including me) are going to do a sort of mini signing tour. We’re going to be at- Mysterious Galaxy in San Diego (1pm, Feb 15), Dark Delicacies in Burbank (3pm, Feb 22), and Artifact Books in Encinitas (3pm, March 1). Preorder the book through one of them and get it signed by us. Or you could be there and talk with us about it. And if you’re a few hundred miles away and can’t make it, I’m pretty sure they all deliver.

What else do I have for you…?

Cool Stuff I’ve Been Watching
Wallace & Gromit: Vengeance Most Fowl has to be one of the absolute best movie-watching experiences I’ve had in ages. My beloved and I were laughing and excited and giddy through the whole thing. It’s just fantastic. I also binged all of Dan Da Dan in about two days, and it’s the best kind of complete, ludicrous madness—like someone jammed fifty genre tropes in a blender—but somehow it works and it’s so much fun. Skeleton Crew was delightful—good for kids, some fun deep-cut references for hardcore Star Wars fans.

Cool Stuff I’ve Been Reading
I ended last year with The Butcher of the Forest by Premee Mohamed. I know it’s gotten tons of hype and praise, but… wow, it’s so much better than I could’ve imagined. Just seriously fantastic on so many levels. Somehow stumbled across Pixie Trix Comix online and binged all of their main strip plus Menage A 3 (a sort of spin off or shared universe strip) over two weeks. They’re basically soap operas about artists and wrestlers with some geekiness and a fair amount of sex (fair warning). Read a screenplay for a friend which was really fun and hopefully we’ll all get to see it on the screen someday. Currently in System Collapse the latest Murderbot book from Martha Wells.

Cool New Toys
Santa, my beloved, and my friends were all very kind to me. My friends gave me Road Pig, the supersized Dreadnok. My beloved gave me a Spider-Man (in his “spraypainted” suit from Into the Spiderverse), an Animal Warriors Feral Beast to join my Scavengers squad, a gorgeous sort of Mayan jaguar gladiator, plus the LEGO set for the Hoopity, Captain Marvel’s ship. And after Christmas I shamelessly took advantage of a few sales to grab myself a small squad of Chunari (more Animal Warriors) and a few other things that haven’t show up yet. Oh, and a beautiful big allosaurus (it’s actually 12” scale!) for business purposes. Really.

And I think that’s all I’ve got for you for this month. There’s all this sort of slow-trickle stuff and I’m hoping sometime soon I’ll get to hit you with two or three bigger things. Y’know, make this feel worthwhile.

See you next time. Thanks for reading.

Well, here we are in the far flung sci-fi future year of 2025. The year of Pacific Rim, as I mentioned in the newsletter the other day. What? You’re still not subbed to the newsletter? Well, there’s your first thing to do this year.

Anyway, first ranty blog post of the year (and already running late). What to write about? I’ve already planned out a lot of my year, writing-wise, and maybe so have you. Or maybe not. No worries there, either way. This is my job, so I’ve got to schedule things to some extent. You may have a lot more leeway. Heck, writing might be your zero-stress after work cool-down thing. If that’s how you like to do it, that’s great. What works for you works for you.

I’ve had a couple possible topics bouncing around in my head for two weeks now. And in that time I’ve seen a lot of other folks offering their own start-of-the-year advice nuggets. And that got me thinking even more…

So, look, some of you may be thinking of finally writing that novel. 2025 is the year we’re getting it done. Maybe we’re starting from scratch. Could be we’ve had a few false starts. Maybe some of it’s already done and this is the year we finish it.

And it’s possible, as I mentioned above, that you’re seeing all sorts of advice and encouragement from different folks.

They’ll tell you not to worry about how much you write every day. Don’t worry about how often you write. And don’t worry about spelling. Don’t worry about grammar, either. Don’t worry about structure. Don’t worry about getting the facts right. None of that matters! What matters is the writing! Which, uh, you don’t have to do today.

And it may cross your mind after some of this, well, hang on. What the heck am I doing? If none of this stuff matters… I mean, what am I supposed to do? Seriously?

This is a little tricky to understand because technically all of this is true, but it’s true at different points in the process and in different ways. If I apply all of these rules (or lack of rules, I guess) evenly throughout my whole process, I can be doing more harm than good.

For example, I’ve talked about first drafts and forward motion—just getting it done. That’s how I tend to write. I won’t worry about spelling or formatting and it’s really common for me to leave notes to myself about checking if this is correct and how that actually works. So at this point in the process… yeah, don’t worry about any of that stuff.

But this doesn’t mean I never worry about these things. It’s more a question of when I worry about them. Personally, I tend to clean most of this up in my second draft, and I’m usually still adjusting it in my third. Because these things matter. No, really, they do.

A lot of this is going to boil down to what I want to do with my writing. What are my end goals, so to speak. Is it my after-work cool down? A personal project? Maybe something I want to share on a Reddit thread or Wattpad. Am I going to self-publish it? Am I hoping a traditional press will pick this up?

Y’see Timmy, the truth is when I’m at home, the park, the office, the library, on the train, or wherever it is that I do most of my writing… I can do whatever I want. Seriously. When it’s just me and my keyboard, absolutely no rules apply. Whatever I want, however I want, for as long as I want. That’s my process, and nobody can say my process is wrong or weird or whatever.

But…

If I want to send something out into the world, to put it in front of other people’s eyes—especially people I’m hoping will give me money—I need to start seriously thinking about all of this stuff. That’s when I do need to worry about spelling. I definitely want to double check my grammar. And triple-check my facts. And if I’ve got a deadline, I absolutely need to be considering how much I’m writing and how often I’m writing. Because these things will matter to other people. They’ll matter to different degrees for different people, but they will matter.

And the more chances I give people to say “that’s wrong” are more chances they’re going to set my story aside and move on to something else.

So, yeah, write freely. Don’t be concerned about things. Just write.

But be aware we’re just deferring that concern till later. Not saying goodbye to it forever.

Next time…

Well, heck, like I was saying. Start of the year. new projects and new goals all around. Is there anything specific I could cover for anyone? Something that’s been gnawing at you, a topic where you’d really like some kind of advice or tips or encouragement? Let me know down in the comments and I’ll make that happen for you.

And until then… go write.