January 28, 2025

January Newsletter

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…
>>>>>>>>>>>>>

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.

December 30, 2024

December Newsletter

As always, a reminder that you could just subscribe to the newsletter and get it in your hands two weeks earlier. Some of these notes would be a bit more relevant. Just sayin’.
>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>

Okay, this one’s running a little late. I had this week’s schedule all worked out with the newsletter and book edits and seeing my parents and then… raccoons. Every couple of months a group of them traveling through the canyon will discover our back yard (and the garden) and then we’re up for a couple nights in a row making sure they don’t, y’know, destroy everything in their glee at finding this little oasis of food and water and safety. So that’s how this pre-holiday week began. Weirdly enough, it can get really exhausting shooing raccoons away until three thirty in the morning.

But enough excuses…

Wow. It’s the last newsletter of the year. Holy hell, how’d we get here so fast? I mean, for me it was four sick cats and covid and editing two books and politics. That’s enough to eat up many months of the year. And it did. If you’ve been reading the newsletter for any amount of time, you’ve probably seen me talk about some of this already.

On a related note, because I dared to brush up against politics in the last newsletter half a dozen people unsubscribed. No, seriously. One even sent a weird email that sounded more like a cut-and-paste wiseass twitter reply.

Look, I totally get it if you don’t want to hear about politics. I don’t want to hear about politics. I really just want a functioning government I can not think about, one that isn’t actively threatening to wreck my livelihood, my health, or otherwise trying actively to destroy the lives of me or my friends and family and even, yeah, a bunch of strangers I don’t know but who still deserve to be treated like human beings. But unfortunately, that’s almost certainly not what the next couple years are going to be like, and it’s only natural that people are going to say something about it now and then. Yes, including people with newsletters about “what’s going on in my head this month.” If me mentioning politics once in two dozen newsletters is enough to make someone unsubscribe, well… I’ve got to warn you, there’s a decent chance it’ll happen again sometime in the next four years.

Random other thing, speaking of the newsletter. Buttondown (the company that hosts said fine ongoing peek into my head), recently sent out one of their newsletters and it brought up the principle of least inbox interruption. It’s the idea that the more times a newsletter shows up in your inbox, the more likely you are to ignore it—no matter how much it’s tailored to your needs and interests. I’d never heard the term before, but that was basically my thinking when I decided this would only be monthly at most. I don’t know about you, but for a while I was subscribed to a few newsletters that were… well, flooding my inbox sounds excessive, but these folks were definitely putting out newsletters and updates faster than I got around to reading them. Which usually just meant I didn’t read them.

So, heading into the new year, my goal here is still going to be just showing up now and then to let you know how things are going. Maybe share some book recommendations or toy photos. And maybe squeeze in one extra newsletter if there’s actually something important going on. Again, least inbox interruption.

Which, hey… let me tell you how things are going.

As hinted at above, I just handed in my revised edits on God’s Junk Drawer. It was a tiny bit more tightening, some clarifying, and overall I’m feeling really good about it. Barring any last minute tweaks, next stop will be the copy editor, which will probably happen… well, next year right around the time you get the next newsletter. Guess we’ll see where things are then. And hopefully by then I’ll also have some preorder news for you.

I’m also still doing my own initial edits on TOS. It’s also going well. This stage is just lots of little cuts, a word here and there. Basically it’s me trimming all the obvious fat from my initial drafts, but that’s already knocked over a thousand words off this and I’m maybe halfway through. Plus there’s a few larger cuts I already know I have to make. The goal is to have all of this done by the start of the next year. Like, first or second week of January. Again.

I’m also working on some stuff I want to pitch to my agent. One small project, one kinda big one we keep circling around. I think it might finally be time to pull the trigger and say, yeah, we’re doing this. It’ll be a lot of work but I think it could really be worth it, from a storytelling point of view.

And hey, speaking of next year… you may have heard that a few contributors (including me) are going to do a sort of mini signing tour for Combat Monsters, the upcoming anthology that has my latest Carter & Kraft story, “The Night Crew.” 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, get it signed by us. Or 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.

Also, Weird Tales #370 is out right now with my story “Straw Man.” Go grab a copy! You can even get an audio version of it, in which case you can listen to it read by the amazing Ray Porter. See, no excuses!

What else do I have for you…?

Cool Stuff I’ve Been Watching
My beloved and I Transformers One and it was surprisingly solid. So many Transformers movies just devolve into story/ visual chaos and this one was kind of fun and a little emotional and well done. We also watched Hot Frosty, which was fairly goofy and harmless and competently made and hey, for a holiday romance movie that’s 3/4 of the battle right there. Also watched one of my own seasonal favorites, A Prince For Christmas. Yes, it’s one of those, and yes, I really like it. It’s by a director I worked with years ago, Fred Olen Ray, and it’s remarkably good for a movie about a secret prince finding love with a diner owner in middle America. I’ve also found myself watching a YouTube channel called Wheelie Yellow, about a sort of… well, yellow puppet racing around in a little delivery van and offering some honestly nice thoughts on life.

Cool Stuff I’ve Been Reading
This hasn’t been a great year for reading (see above: how’d the end of the year get here so fast?) and the past month I’ve only read two books. One ARC for a blurb—the amazing Two Truths and a Lie by Cory O’Brien, out next year). One book for fun—the delightful A Brief History of Flowers by Advolly Richmond, which was so much fun it was a last minute add to my list of holiday recommendations.

Cool New Toys
In the weeks before Christmas I try not to get myself anything just so I don’t risk undercutting anyone’s Christmas gift (it happened one year and I felt awful). But I still had a few long-term preorders show up, and one or two eBay auctions for things. I’m afraid I may be slowly sinking into a Cosmic Legions collection, which is funny because for the longest time I’ve held up Four Horsemen as an example of how far I haven’t gotten into toy collecting. “Look, they’re gorgeous, yeah, but I’m not going to pay that much for an action figure, ha ha ha.” Anyway, I’ve got… nine (?) of them now (eleven since Christmas). Plus a big bear on pre-order.

And I think that’s everything I’ve got for you. I hope overall the end of the year is peaceful for you, and you’re able to spend a little time relaxing with friends and family. There’ll be enough to stress about soon enough, after all. For now, have a drink, watch some holiday specials, get some much-needed rest.

See you next year.

December 2, 2024 / 6 Comments

November Newsletter

A quick reminder that you could subscribe to the newsletter and get my random monthly thoughts and updates mailed right to your inbox two weeks before they show up here. And if you don’t want to get them, no problem. Just don’t subscribe, then throw a tantrum and write a “hurr hurr, me clever” email when I write about something you don’t like.

Not that anyone did that over this month’s newsletter…

>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>

Well, in so many ways this is not the November newsletter I originally thought about writing.

I’m guessing a lot of you, like me, are sort of in post-election shock. Some folks are kind of numb. Some are (rightfully) scared. Some are just yelling and pointing fingers. I was talking with my partner this morning, trying to figure out where the past month went, and she pointed out that we both were sort of numb for the two or three days before the election and the four or five after it. So there’s that.

Honestly… I’m not sure what else there is to say about the whole mess that hasn’t been shouted a hundred times in the past ten days. It’s going to be bad. Lots of people are going to get hurt. A lot of people are probably going to die, directly or not-so-indirectly. I’m going to keep doing everything I can to help people. I hope you will, too.

Speaking of loss and grief…

Our cat Julius died six weeks ago, not long before I sent out the last newsletter. I know people like to use euphemisms like he passed, he went to sleep, he’s at peace now. But he died. That’s what happened. He was sick. He’d been slowly wasting away for over two months (cancer sucks, especially for FIV cats), but he only knew he was getting pampered constantly with attention from everyone. His condition took a sharp dive at the end, and we were glad we did things when we did. He never suffered. He was him until the end, and he got to die at home, which was probably a lot rougher on us than on him.

I know a lot of folks share this sort of loss in the moment, and social media makes it really easy to do that, but the simple truth is I didn’t want to. I don’t like to share negative stuff in general, but I also didn’t want to dilute it. It was my grief. It was the last thing I’d ever have from Julius, and—no offense—I didn’t want to lessen it by sharing it with a bunch of strangers. It was mine, and I wanted to wallow in it all on my own. I posted one of our last pictures of him, but that was more for me than any of you. I’m only talking about it now because… well, to be honest, I wanted to point out that sometimes it’s okay not to share stuff. There’s lots of things I don’t talk about on social media, and the Peter Clines you see is the a curated, hopefully slightly better version of me (who still makes mistakes, but fewer very public mistakes).

And speaking of social media…

(wow, this newsletter’s had some great transitions)

The great Twitter eXodus seems to finally be happening. Millions of folks flowing to Bluesky over the past few days (seriously, millions). I’ve been there for a year now and highly recommend it. It’s made me very aware of how much the Twitter algorithms were shaping my online experience. And how much they’d been shaping my online reactions/ behaviors/ expectations. Feel free to come find me there and leave all those bad habits behind.

And wow… as I’m typing this out it’s just a solid page of kind of gloomy topics. Let’s get to the happier stuff you actually signed up for.

I just completed my editing pass on God’s Junk Drawer. Like, last night, as I’m writing this now. Toni, the editor, made some smart observations about a few things I’d inadvertently set up and a few places I’d gone a little excessive with… well, you’ll find out next year. Anyway, she already thought it as pretty tight, but we still managed to cut another 4000 words out of it (maybe 16-20 pages, depending). I’m really happy with it. At this point we’ll probably do one last back-and-forth, make sure we agree on everything, and then it’s one step closer to being in your hands or ears or however you absorb books.

Worth noting I am very tentatively thinking of a west coast/ New England signing tour for this book. It’s all going to depend on finalized dates and where things fall, but… I’m thinking about it. I’ll talk about it a little more when I’ve got more information.

And this means I can get back to TOS, my current work in progress. I’d hoped to do a little bit of light work on it while I was doing God’s Junk Drawer edits, but with all the election static in my brain (see above) I… didn’t. So it’ll be my main focus for the next two or three weeks.

Also, as some of you might already know, I have a story in the new issue of Weird Tales! This is the bucket list project I’ve mentioned a few times, and I still have trouble believing it actually happened. When I first started to get this vague sense of writing and publishing (way back as a pre-teen aspiring writer) one thing I noticed was how often Weird Tales cropped up in the forewords and afterwords for this author and that author. It was where soooo many legends got their start. Even when my writing career actually took off and I became something of a low-level name, the idea was in the back of my mind but ha ha ha let’s be real. I’m never going to be in Weird Tales. So thanks to Jonathan Maberry for reaching out and seeing if I had a story that might fit this issue’s theme.

Oh, yeah. The story. It’s called “Straw Man” and it’s about a pair of location scouts who run into a few problems when they’re checking out a small town for a movie. And one or two of you might catch something familiar in it…

And here’s another reminder for Combat Monsters, the anthology I’ve got a new Carter and Kraft story in. It actually got a nice write-up in Publisher’s Weekly, and they mentioned “The Night Crew” (my story). It’s out on February 11th.

What else have I got for you…?

Cool Stuff I’ve Been Watching
Kevin Smith’s The 4:30 Movie was sweet and nostalgic and kind of painful, in a certain way. The end of Star Trek: Prodigy was really wonderful, and I think it’s a shame it got abandoned so quickly by so many people (including some at Paramount). It did strike me, I wonder if it was partly because of perceived potential conflict with their new Starfleet Academy show? Ahh well. Also, between this and She-Hulk, I’m absolutely loving Jameela Jamil’s villain phase.

Cool Stuff I’ve Been Reading
Very little (again, see above). In fact, I realized this morning I completely missed a blurb deadline for someone (so I’ll be writing an apology email for that). Did get to read Mike Chen’s new What If.. book just before Halloween (What If… Marc Spector was Host to Venom) and it was a lot of fun. Also found out Mike gave me a little cameo as one of Jake Lockley’s web of informants, so that was nice.

Cool New Toys
My Operation: Monster Force figures finally showed up and they are fantastic. So many options. The worst thing about them is they’re making me rethink how I want to set up shelves when I redo my office sometime in the near future. That and I want the next wave here now.

And I think that’s it for this month. Sorry it wasn’t as upbeat as some have been. So many thanks, as always, for subscribing to this nonsense.

October 28, 2024

October Newsletter

<<Just a reminder that you could subscribe to the newsletter and be getting all of this delivered straight to your inbox two weeks earlier. Yeah, I know, we’re all overwhelmed with newsletters. Buried in them. But this one only comes out once a month. Twice if I’ve got something really cool to tell you. So maybe give it a try… >>

October.

Finally.

On one hand, I feel like that scene in every movie when the villain rolls their shoulders as their newfound/ regained power settles over them (cue the ominous music). On the other hand, like half those villains, I’m also oddly unprepared for the moment. This holiday should be the time my creativity just goes wild, and instead—despite all the various skeletons and gravestones and other decorations in the garage—I just feel kind of unsure and indecisive.

Although I know a lot of that is… well, a ton of the stress and anxiety we’ve been dealing with here for the past three months or so has finally resolved. I don’t want to talk about it any more than that—not yet, anyway—but I think the sudden lack of pressure has left me a little off-balance. My beloved and I were talking last night about how mentally it sort of feels like it should be mid-August, maybe? We lost a bunch of time and now we’re stuck playing catch-up. Part of me knows I should be putting out decorations and another part of me just doesn’t want to do anything. Seriously, on one level I could just sit on the couch and do absolutely nothing for a day or six and it’d probably be kind of healthy, from a certain perspective. I know, back in the olden times, it was pretty normal for me to finish a big film project, wrap everything out, and then just sort of shut off for a day or two in my apartment. I remember one day when I spent an hour or so standing in front of a bookshelf. Not reading or organizing, just… standing there.

Anyway, I’ll probably put Halloween decorations up in a couple of days. Maybe I’ll just do Khonshu again. Or maybe last minute inspiration. Guess we’ll see.

Let’s go over some writing updates.

As you’re reading this, I just now got the first round of note from my editor for God’s Junk Drawer. Like, just now, as I was about to hit “send it” on the newsletter. Actually, it’s why the newsletter’s going out a little later than planned. But once I hit send, I’ll be diving into that. And you’ll probably hear more about it next time.

I’ve also finished the second draft of TOS. It’s a solid, beginning-to-end manuscript, about 14,000 words longer than the last draft. And now it’s ready for some tightening and polishing. My hope is to do some of that in small waves whenever I need a break from God’s Junk Drawer edits. One quick pass here, another one there, and so on. In a perfect world, both of these are done by… Thanksgiving? Then I can take a quick breather for the three or four day holiday weekend and give TOS one last read-through, and have it off to my beta readers first thing in the year.

And look, if you’re not already a beta reader, please don’t ask. Let’s not make it weird and awkward for both of us.

I also did some tiny, last-minute edits for that magazine dream project I mentioned last time. Really, it was more of just approving some very tiny edits. Said magazine has their own style—most of them do—and I pretty much just had to check with the editor on that and then give my thumbs up. The style changes wouldn’t be my first choice, but they’re also not so awful that they’re worth fighting over. Picking your battles is a notable percentage of a professional writing career.

Oh, one other thing. Last time I mentioned Combat Monsters: Untold Tales of WWII. It’s an anthology I’ve got a Carter & Kraft story in and it’s up for preorder in all the usual places (out February 11th). But if you’re in southern California (or just like signed books), you might want to hold off on that preorder. Just for a little bit. The editor, Henry Herz, is trying to set up a couple signings, so there may be scribbled-in copies available in San Diego and Los Angeles. And if you wanted to come say hi and get it personalized, that’s cool too. Hopefully I’ll know more about those in the next few weeks.

What else have I got for you…?

Cool Stuff I’ve Been Watching
Agatha All Along has been fun, but this past week I think it bumped up to really good. Finally got to see Abigail, the movie about the little ballerina girl who gets kidnapped and thought it was fantastic. If you haven’t seen it yet, I don‘t think there’s anything else you need to know going in…

Cool Stuff I’ve Been Reading
I got an advance copy of The Contest by Jeff MacAfee and it’s just fantastic. I’m bitterly jealous, which is the best compliment any writer can give another. It’s not out until early next year but I think you can preorder it now. Got my second ROM omnibus and have been enjoying that.

Cool New Toys
I stress-ordered a lot of toys over the past few months, and a bunch of them have shown up in the past week or so. A few more Animal Warriors (waaaaaay too many at this point). I emptied my Pile O’ Loot from Big Bad Toystore so I finally have my Ghost Rider and my Werewolf By Night Ted aka Man-Thing. And I just got an alert that all my long-awaited Operation: Monster Force figures are finally in stock and… well, there’s a lot of stuff in my Pile O’ Loot again

And I think that’s it for this month. Many thanks, as always, for subscribing to this nonsense.

Categories