Category: 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…
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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.

<<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.

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.

So, hey… the past week’s been pretty brutal on a personal level (and, well, a national level, too, really), but I do have some cool news for you.

We’ve officially signed everything for GJD which I guess I can now tell you stands for God’s Junk Drawer. What’s it about? Well…

Forty years ago, the Gather family—James, his daughter Beau, and her little brother Billy—vanished on a whitewater rafting trip. No sign of them was ever found.

…until five years later, when Billy Gather appeared on the far side of the world, telling a ridiculous, impossible story of his family plunging down through time to a primordial valley populated by dinosaurs, a clan of cavemen, an alien, and an android butler from the far future. Little Billy became the punchline of so many jokes, until he finally faded away.

Now years of research and calculations have told adult Billy Gather exactly where and when he needs to be standing in order to get back to his prehistoric valley.

But the valley isn’t the place he remembered. Maybe it never was. He’ll need to navigate more danger, more violence, and even more mysteries if he has any hope of finding his way back to the present-day world again.

And so will the handful of grad students he accidentally brought with him.

And to stop you now, no, there isn’t an official release date yet. I’m guessing maaaaybe next spring, going off past experience? As soon as I know, you’ll know.

Meanwhile, I’m just over halfway through the second draft of TOS. Which is very cool. And maybe deserves a little explanation.

(if you’ve followed the ranty writing blog for any amount of time, you’ve probably heard some of this before)

When I sit down to write a first draft, I’m a big believer in forward motion. I don’t like to linger or puzzle over things or worry about if I’m getting some detail right or not. My first draft goal is to get to the end. It’s much easier to renovate a house when you have, y’know, a house, and I think it’s much easier to find the right words and details for a story once you’ve actually got a story.

Now, in all fairness, this means my first drafts often have lots of filler names for people and places, markers to make sure something gets a second look (#########), and lots of all-caps notes to myself Things like ASK JEFF RE: OLD REPORTS or DOES THIS LINE UP??? or the ever-popular DO I EVEN NEED THIS BIT???

So for me, the second draft is when it becomes a little less about the wild, fun creative process and a little more about the work. Filling in the empty spaces on the page. Researching the facts. Talking to people smarter than me about this and that. And doing a little basic editing along the way, too. My real goal at the end of draft two is to have a manuscript that I could hand to someone and they could read beginning to end with no problem. Is it the most efficient method? Don’t know, but it works really well for me.

Also, please keep in mind this doesn’t mean I do let people read it at this point. I normally do one big solid, pure editing pass after this. Examining, cutting. rephrasing, cutting more

So that’s where I am with that.

Also, hey, one last thing– San Diego Comic Con is next week and I am not going to be there. Not officially, anyway. I’m not doing any panels or signings, but it’s just a ten minute train ride away for me so I may be wandering around (masked, because the SDCC floor was a cesspit of disease before the pandemic) just to say hi to a few folks and maybe try for one or two con exclusives. Look carefully, maybe you’ll see me there. Look for the wine-red blazer and the cool t-shirt.

What else have I got for you…?

Cool Stuff I’ve Been Watching
Deep into My Hero Academia now. Star Trek: Prodigy is back and it’s still wonderful. A Million Ways To Die In The West wasn’t a great movie, but it was pretty fun with wine and pizza (we’re going to be joking about kids with sticks and hoops for a while, I think).

Cool Stuff I’ve Been Reading
I got a bunch of Atomic Robo graphic novels to fill holes in my collection and have enjoyed all of them. I also picked up a Tintin book (Explorers on the Moon) that I had as a kid and adored, and I’m pleased that it still holds up in its own, very retro way. Currently deep in the Micronauts omnibus.

Cool New Toys
Hey, I sold a book, which meant a trip to the LEGO store for the big Jazz Club set and a couple smaller, Mandalorian-themed Star Wars sets. Also, I was very fortunate that a friend picked up the two exclusive Monster Force figs for me at JoeFest right around the time of the last newsletter and… wow. I hoped they’d be good, but I really like this Forgotten King/ Omen of Doom. I also got a small handful of Animal Warriors of the Kingdom figs during Spero’s Fourth of July sale and I’m really liking them as well.

And I think that’s all for now. Thanks, as always, for your interest.