Category: newsletter

This was supposed to be up a week ago. So sorry it’s late. Of course, y’know, it’d never be late if you subscribed…

Anyway…

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Oh, hey! There you are.

We’ve been having a few long, wet weeks here in southern California. The kind where the rain sucks all the heat out of the air and leaves you with a deep chill. In some ways, it’s great and reminds me of growing up in New England. And in other, much more current ways, I’m reminded that I live in a sixty-year old house built when the idea of needing insulation in southern California was just ha ha ha ha ridiculous. Also that I need to get the roof fixed in the garage. And also that we have half a dozen cats who think the sound of central heating means a street sweeper has somehow gotten into the house and we should all RUN IN TERROR!!!

And speaking of running in terror…

The world is an awful place right now. There are so many things to—rightfully—be angry or worried or openly scared about. I wish I could put an optimistic spin on it but… man, my optimism tanks are pretty much bone dry after the past few weeks.

What I can tell you is that being angry and scared all the time is exhausting, physically and emotionally. It’s unavoidable at points, I know, but try to give yourself permission to just breathe. Toss your phone over there and go for a walk. Go for a run. Play with your pets. Play a game. Read a book. Watch a favorite movie. Work in the garden. Make something. Seriously, do whatever you can to give yourself a couple minutes of peace and joy—and try not to feel guilty about it. We’re all going to need to be strong for the foreseeable future, and it’s easier to be strong when you’re not exhausted.

Thus ends the monthly pep talk.

In other, happier news…

Just as I sat down to start scribbling up this newsletter, I got an email to let me know God’s Junk Drawer is heading into copy edits a.k.a. line edits. The editor and I have already traded a few emails about scientific nomenclature vs casual conversation. Because that’s how my books roll, folks.

Also, a reminder that you can preorder the book right now from your favorite local bookstore. Or request your library grab a copy. Or both! Both is good, as the gif says.

On a related note, I know I’ve mentioned the west coast/ new England book tour a few times. After talking to a few folks, I’m probably going to let that simmer for a few months. Most places aren’t going to be start setting their fall schedules until mid-summer at best, so trying to plan a lot before then is kind of silly. But I’ve made note of the places some of you suggested, and I’ll probably be asking you all again in… July? August? Somewhere around there.

Also, my early readers for TOS have given me their thoughts and notes and overall they’re… really good. They don’t think it’s flawless (everybody had a few critical observations, and most of them were spot-on), but for the most part they were creeped out at the right points, laughed a lot at the right points, and… well, got misdirected at all the points I’d wanted them to be. So I’m going over the manuscript again with a lot of their notes in mind, then a quick polish, and… well, my agent will probably have this before the next newsletter.

I finished that comic script (finally) and the editor and I are bouncing around a few artist names. It’s still a ways off, but I thought some of you might want to know.

Thanks to all of you who came out during the mini-signing tour for Combat Monsters. Was great to see people and talk about Carter & Kraft. And I think some of those talks actually got me thinking about another story for our two intrepid WWII heroes…

On a related note, at the end of March I’m going to be at WonderCon in Anaheim. I’m part of a Sunday morning panel on Writing Blended Genres, then a book signing right after that, and then I’m probably going to be wandering the floor, talking to folks and looking at cool things. Maybe I’ll see you there?

What else can I tell you about?

Cool Stuff I’ve Been Watching
A couple days after sending the last newsletter we watched Flow, the now-Oscar-winning animated movie about a cat and a capybara and look it’s just amazing, okay? The movie itself and the story behind the movie. Academy Award very well-deserved. My beloved and I are caught up on Severance and holy crap what amazing show! Also, it’s not so much “watching” but we’ve been binging Midnight Burger off a friend’s recommendation. It’s about the staff of a time-raveling, dimension-hopping diner, and if you like my stuff I think you’ll really enjoy it.

Cool Stuff I’ve Been Reading
I’m late to the party, but my to-read pile finally coughed up Assassins Anonymous and I enjoyed it quite a bit. Currently about two-thirds through Craig DiLouie’s new one, My Ex-The Antichrist, which comes out this summer It’s about a guitarist who discovers her ex-bandmate-and-boyfriend is the actual son of Satan destined to destroy the world. After that I’ve got a blurb book and then (also long overdue) John Wiswell’s Someone You Can Build A Nest In.

Cool New Toys
Not a lot of new toys physically in hand this month. My beloved gave me a Gundam Guncannon model for Valentine’s Day, because somewhere along the line she started giving me a red robot every year. I took advantage of the Spero warehouse sale and grabbed a few Animal Warriors figures to customize and/or add to my Horrid army. I preordered a few things and backed a fun Kickstarter for Space Zombies from Mars action figures because, hey… who doesn’t like zombie astronauts, right?

Okay, I think that’s all for now. As always, thanks for reading. See you next time next month.

This issue of the newsletter was a little date-specific, so some of it may not be relevant anymore. You could avoid this horrible faux pas by subscribing to The Uncanny Cosmic Horror Zombie Almanac and then the newsletter would be delivered to your inbox in a timely fashion.

Just sayin’…

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A little early this month. For reasons. Which I will explain.

Eventually.

You’re probably reading this the day before Valentine’s Day, a holiday that can get a bunch of different reactions from people for a bunch of different reasons. I hope you’ve got someone to celebrate it with. Somebody who, in one way or another, makes you feel a little more complete or whole and a little less… well, less. A lover, a friend, or even a pet. Heck, even if it’s a place or an activity or a hobby. Something that makes your days feel a little lighter and easier.

In other news… about two weeks after the last newsletter I was finally done with Instagram. Locked down, no longer updating, no long replying. The only reason I’m not deleting is because A) I don’t want some rando grabbing my name/account and posting who knows what and 2) I mean, seriously, it could be a month before half my followers even see the announcement I’ve left. Which right there is, y’know, a pretty good argument for leaving.

That said, I was pleased to see a bunch of names I recognized from Instagram show up on Bluesky over the next week or so. A couple old friends (old in the sense of we’ve known each other along time—not that any of us have gotten old, ha ha ha ha, no). One or three toy-related folks. Heck, my publisher, Blackstone, has started an account there (which I think makes them the biggest publisher on Bluesky).

Speaking of social media, I also finally deleted my Twitter account. Well, deactivated, and now I’m waiting for Twitter to actually delete it. Like I mentioned last month, it’s been two years. More than enough time, and the past month has established it’s never coming back. Plus, y’know, all the Nazi stuff from Musk That made it easy, too.

So at this point I’m on Bluesky. Right now there, here (the newsletter), and my website are probably the best places to reach me. I’m still trying out Pixelfed and Cara for more visual stuff. No idea which one, if either, will be the one to pass that all-important critical mass point. I like Cara more, but it does feel a little more art-oriented. I get this weird vibe that my random toy photos or book covers are pushing some sort of invisible line. Pixelfed seems to be a little more open and has a lot of features I like, but like so many federated things (see: Mastodon) it’s kind of impossible to find anyone/anything unless you know exactly where to look, so it also feels very empty right now.

No, this isn’t an invitation for anyone to explain how inherently better and simple federation is, you just need to…

Anyway, let’s get to the real reason you signed up for this newsletter…

As I mentioned in the surprise mailing, God’s Junk Drawer is now up for preorder. I think everything’s updated/ rolled over/ rebooted/ whatever so it should be available to preorder everywhere now. I’ll probably bug you about it in the next eight or nine newsletters because preorders are so important and you wouldn’t believe how low the numbers usually are. Folks were stunned (and very happy) when my book, The Fold got around (if memory serves) 1300 preorders. I’ve been told Stephen King rarely gets more than a few thousand. If everyone reading this newsletter preordered it (and there’s only about 500 of you at the moment), it’d make my publisher giddy. Seriously.

So I’m going to keep mentioning it.

THAT SAID… Now that we’ve got an actual release date and preorders, I want to hammer out details for that west coast signing tour I mentioned last time. Starting in San Diego and then tentative stops in LA, San Francisco, Sacramento, Portland, Seattle and… I don’t know, you tell me. Is there somewhere else in there I should stop? I was thinking of San Luis Obispo at one point, but I don’t really know the town. Feel free to toss out suggestions for specific bookeries in these cities or other places I should consider stopping by (and yes, some of you already have).

There’s also New England. Hoping to be out there just after Thanksgiving. I think I’ve got a slightly better sense of bookstores out there, but if you’ve got a local indie you think would be open to me scribbling, please let me know. My hope is to do a stop in each state, with maybe a signing in eastern and western Massachusetts. And yes, some folks have already offered suggestions here, too.

Again, none of this is a guarantee—it’s possible stores might not be able to make my schedule work for them (completely understandable), plus… I mean, who knows what’s going to happen between now and then. It’s the undiscovered country. But once we get these nailed down (hopefully in the next couple of weeks) you could switch your preorder to your friendly local bookstore, give them some business, and then we’ll all see each other this fall.

In other news, TOS is off with a handful of trustworthy, brutally honest friends and so far the response is… positive? I’m feeling really good about this one, which could very likely be massive self-delusion or… maybe it’s actually good? Hoping to have notes/ comments/ critiques back from everyone in another week or two, which means I’ll probably have more thoughts on this for the next newsletter.

Also– Combat Monsters came out this week and is available everywhere. yes, everywhere! It’s got a new Carter & Kraft story from me, “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 over the next few weeks. We’re going to be at- Mysterious Galaxy in San Diego this Saturday (the 15th) at 1:00, then Dark Delicacies in Burbank (3pm, Feb 22), and Artifact Books in Encinitas (3pm, March 1). Preorder the book through one of them, then come by and get it signed by us when you pick it up. And if you’re a few hundred miles away and can’t make it, I’m pretty sure they all deliver. Just sayin…

Also-also– I’ll be at WonderCon at the end of March. Possibly doing a few panels. Probably more on that next time, too.

Wow this has gotten long. Okay, not much more…

Cool Stuff I’ve Been Watching
Finally started watching Severance, which I’ve been hearing about for a while. Only knew the premise, very little of the actual plot or story so this has been fantastic. We’re probably four episodes in as you’re reading this. Also The Dragon Prince is back and we’ve been enjoying that a lot, as always.

Cool Stuff I’ve Been Reading
Got an early peek at Fantastic Four: Solve Everything by Jonathan Hickman and Dale Eaglesham and that was really great. Also finally got around to Eight Billion Genies by Charles Soule and Ryan Browne and it’s simple phenomenal.

Cool New Toys
Weirdly enough, the cool new toys that stood out this past month were a bunch of old toys. See, back when I was in college my parents cleaned a lot of stuff out of my bedroom and accidentally (or so they claimed) got rid of, well, pretty much every toy I owned before the age of twenty. The only ones that escaped were some things I’d locked away or taken to college with me. As such, it kind of stung when, a few years back, my mom started talking about this box of Transformers she’d found that was probably mine or my nephew’s. I grumpily pointed out they couldn’t be mine since those were all somewhere in a New England landfill. She laughed it off and eventually asked my nephew, who looked at the box and said they weren’t his, either. Said box came up again when my folks were visiting back in November and I said, fine, send it to me. It’s be interesting to see what it was, anyway.

Anyway, I told you all that (this is so long, I apologize again) so you’d have an idea how stunned I was to open this box when it showed up and see that it was a random bunch of my old toys, including, yes, some G1 Transformers. Things I hadn’t seen in almost thirty-five years! An Optimus Prime. Two of my favorite Decepticon jets. A GI Joe B.A.T. And more! I just sat there kind of awe-struck for almost half an hour.

Okay, I think that’s all (ha ha ha) I’ve got for you for this month. See you next time. Thanks for reading.

And again, I hope you get to spend some time this weekend with someone or something that makes you feel more complete.

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.

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’.
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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.