Category: newsletter

Hey look! We’re back from vacation! And using a new newsletter service! And you can’t even tell, can you? It’s okay, that was the general idea, remember…

Anyway, let’s get to the stuff you want to know…

I think I’ve added just shy of 12K words to TOS since coming back from vacation. Also, it’s really weird to say “coming back from vacation” when we mostly just stayed at home and did stuff and tried to relax. I mean, we spent the last last two days talking about all the things we think we did wrong during this little staycation and how we’d probably do it differently next time. Not that this was nightmarishly bad or anything (okay, yeah, I might have fractured a bone in my leg doing garden work, but who among hasn’t dropped a hundred pounds of concrete on their shin?), we just realized we kind of overplanned some things and underplanned others and had a few of those “you know what we should’ve done…” moments at the end. Next year, it’ll be better.

But anyway… sorry, yeah, the new book is a litle over 52K now and I’m very happy. Lots of enthusiasm for it. Nothing could wreck my momentum now, right…?

<cue ominous music>

My agent finally got his notes back to me about GJD, the previous thing I wrote. He loved most of the characters and their arcs (see below), a lot of the different plot elements, the big overall idea of it. BUT he also pointed out a couple fairly large problems. And he doesn’t think he’d be able to sell the book as it is. Which means a big rewrite for me.

No, no, I can hear some of you. Thing is, he’s absolutely right. Two of my early readers pointed out some of the same things, but I kind of brushed them off and told myself they just didn’t get what I was trying to do (so big apology to Kristi and Robyn). Whereas the real truth is, I did exactly what I set out to do… it just didn’t make for a good story. I got so caught up in trying to have a certain theme, to make this statement, that I didn’t realize how, well, boring it got in places. Or how annoying one or two characters were.

So, back to the drawing board. It’s not a page-one rewrite, but probably close to one of those house renovations where they tear it down to the studs and start again from there. I’m guessing this’ll be at least a month to six weeks of work. Maybe closer to two.

On the plus side, this might not change things much at all, from your point of view.

In other news…

As I mentioned above, we’re not on Substack anymore. I, for one, feel a little morally cleaner already. I’m afraid whatever comments and likes there are lost forever, but all the old newsletters are still over on the Ranty Writing Blog. I plan to stick to my regular schedule—newsletter goes out mid-month, gets re-posted there on the last Monday of the month.

So by subscribing, you get early access to quality material like this…

Cool Stuff I’ve Been Watching— Finally got around to watching Upload, which I’m enjoying a lot more than I thought I would. We’re just a few episodes into season two right now. Lower Decks is back, which is always fantastic (“Moopsie!”)

Cool Stuff I’ve Been Reading—I hate to say it but I’ve read almost nothing since we last talked like this. I mean, I read one thing that was kind of ehhhhhh and I’m in the middle of something that really could go either way. Nothing where I feel like “hey, I’ve got to tell you all about this!”

Cool New Toys – My beloved grabbed me the Marvel Legends Joe Fixit Hulk, and I grabbed myself the What If..? Gamora. Really, I’ve got a pile of stuff that needs to be opened because I hate leaving toys in boxes. I’m just not that guy.

So, where are things at?

Well. my agent’s been swamped with stuff and only just got to start reading GJD a week or so back (as you’re reading this, not as I’m writing it). Life happens, sometimes things get slowed down. We’re both still hoping this means we can get it in front of editors before the end of the year. For a few reasons I won’t bore you with right now.

(I started to write them all out and then realized “this’ll probably be really boring to about 83% of the people reading it” )

My current project, TOS, is at about 41K words. I spent the last week or so of July just scribbling like mad, filled up two more legal pads, and now I’m in the slow process of transcribing it all. This is kind of how I wrote Paradox Bound. Longhand on legal pads and then typing it up becomes a sort of preliminary clean up/ edit pass

Why so much at the end of July? Why so slow transcribing? Well, as it turns out…

I’m on vacation.

Yeah, taking the month off. All of August. The whole thing. Yes, I’m very aware how super-lucky I am to be in a position to do that. Also, yes, it’s almost disturbing to not be working on anything for this long.

Which is part of the reason I’m doing it.

See, my partner and I haven’t had a real vacation together in years. I think last one was in… 2006? Around there. Before I was writing full time and definitely before my career took off in any way. Since then I might take a week off, but she’ll usually keep working on her own projects. Or maybe we’d take two weeks at the holidays, but holiday time gets filled up fast with visiting friends and family and, y’know, holiday stuff. And let’s be honest– either way, how often does “taking a few days off” quickly become “doing all those random errands around the house” …?

Another thing is… well, ugly truth of the world is the climate is shifting. A lot of places have had really hot summers and/ or extreme weather events. Here in southern California, we’ve shifted into more of a hot late-summer early fall. Two or three years in a row now, August means regular temperatures of 100+. We’d be blissfully happy when it dropped into the mid-90s because we could work without our computers overheating. Which really meant we spent most of August hot, frustrated, and… well, not working anyway.

So last year we decided y’know what– let’s just plan on not working in August. Let’s take the month off and catch up on reading, gardening, gaming, hobbies, whatever else we want. Do all the stuff that always feels like it’s “other stuff we need/want to do.”

And we’re not being monsters about it. I mean, we both like writing,a lot, so if one of us has this sudden flash of inspiration, we’re not pointing fingers and shrieking accusingly. I’ve been doing some transcribing every day of that end-of-July rush. The ranty writing blog. This newletter, obviously.

Yeah. Vacation. It’s been kind of nice. A little distrubing, like I mentioned above.

In other news…

This is the last newsletter you’ll get through Substack. The newsletter isn’t going away, mind you, it’s just… going away from Substack. I’ll be migrating the mailing list over to either Buttondown or just straight through WordPress. Mentioned this last time, but if you’ve changed your mind about having your email shifted to a new list, I get it. Just say the word.

For the rest of you– you should see this same time as always next month.

Anyway,,,

Cool Stuff I’ve Been Watching— Good Omens 2. The Strange New Worlds/Lower Decks crossover was such pure joy I’ve already watched it three times.

Cool Stuff I’ve Been Reading—The Endless Vessel by Charles Soule. Cult Classic by Stephen Blackmoore, Atomic Robo: The Vengeful Dead by Brian Clevinger and Scott Wegener

Cool New Toys – Just after the last newsletter I found something I’ve wanted for years—a Comic Con exclusive Micronauts set. An impulse purchase over that weekend has also left me with a small collection of Star Wars: Mission Fleet ships and figures, most of them centered around The Mandalorian. I have a pile of action figures I need to free from their packages, so check out Instagram if that interests you at all.

We’re halfway through the year. That’s just amazing to me. Then again, the past decade has pretty much destroyed my internal clock and I have no sense of time anymore, so…

What can I tell you about?

I finished that last short story. Finally. I know I’ve told you about a few I’ve done lately, but the truth is I’m not great when it comes to short stories, especially for anthologies. I can come up with lots of great short story ideas, yeah, but a lot of the time I tend to freeze up. Especially when they’re very specific. “We’re doing an anthology about cyborg vampire motorcycle gangs—you in?”

In this case the specific aspect of the anthology came from, well, history. It’s a Carter & Kraft story, which have all been set during World War II, but this is the first time I’ve tied one to a very specific historical event. And that meant flexing and stretching and doing my best to make the story work within that framework. Fortunately the editor read the first draft, made some suggestions, and also assured me we didn’t need to be super-rigid with regards to history. So it got done, we’re both happy, and I can’t wait for you to read it. To read all of them, really.

And all of this means I’m back working on TOS, which I’ve mentioned here once or thrice. I’m thinking this could be really solid by the end of the month. At least a big chunk of it done. Which would be very cool.

In other news…

As I’m writing this, we’re mere days away from San Diego Comic-Con, and this is the first time in well over a decade I’m not going. And I live here in San Diego! I was thinking about it a few months back, and the sad truth is I haven’t had a release in over a year at this point (yeah, I know! Imagine how I feel about it). So if I went, I’d have nothing new to show anyone, just be taking space away from someone else, and—truth be told—probably not doing a lot with that space. Plus, to be totally honest… I wasn’t really thrilled about the safety protocols during last year’s SDCC (or at least, the lack of enforcement), and now that they’re just throwing the doors open, well…

(although on Friday the 21st I’ll be doing my own mini-panel on Instagram– all day Ask Me Anything. Old projects, new projects, film work, toys, cats, whatever)

Then again, with the film industry strikes (go union, burn this friggin’ system to the ground), this might be the best con in years for writers and artists. Who knows? All I know is next year I’ll be pushing to have a much bigger con presence wherever people want me.

And one more thing. I’m thinking of migrating this newsletter over to a different service. I’m really not liking the Substack business model, as I’ve mentioned once or thrice before, and after a few months of trying to balance things I’ve just come to the conclusion… they just don’t balance. Not for me, anyway.

That said, we’re all trying to be a little safer with personal information, so I just wanted to get a general vibe if most of you would be okay with me just shifting your email address over to another system (and then shutting this down). Generally yes? Absolutely not? How did I get on this mailing list?

Anyway…

Cool Stuff I’ve Been Watching— Still enjoying Strange New Worlds (as I type this, we’re less than two weeks from the Lower Decks crossover episode). Skull Island was surprisingly fun—I was expecting something much more kid-oriented.

Cool Stuff I’ve Been Reading— I got to read the new one from Kristi Charish (which you’ll all probably get to read next year). About to dive into The Endless Vessel by Charles Soule and then another book to blurb.

Cool New Toys – I got the Spinnerette figure that was part of a Spider-Man two-pack. It’s basically “what if Mary Jane also had spider powers,” and I think we even glimpse her in the Spider-Verse. Through eBay I stumbled across a toy/ game/ comic shop (KC’s Rockets) which is ridiculously close to me and has been here for years. So I picked up the Red Guardian (from Black Widow), a classic Ravager Star-Lord, and Toybox versions of Cap and Spidey.

(which I should’ve posted last week, but wow, so much stuff going on–more on that next time)

And here we are, halfway through the month again. I know it sounds a bit odd, but even just doing this once a month I’m a little worried some of you are feeling spammed. I know this newsletter is just bare-bones updates, and padded ones at that, but I’m trying hard not to make this content for the sake of content, if that makes sense? Let me know if you think this is coming too often for what you’re actually getting out of it..

This may also be some sort of gut/defensive reaction. Some folks manage to put out one or two newsletters a week. It sometimes makes me feel like I’m not writing fast enough. Or not enough happens in my life worth talking about. Or maybe the ever popular “why not both.”

Anyway… let’s get to it.

I finished up the last tweaks on GJD just the other day. Many thanks to Stephen, Kristi, Rob, Autumn, Robyn, and Colleen for early thoughts and notes. Final word count, after this quasi-final round of edits and rewrites, was just shy of 168K.

As you’re reading this, it’s very likely my agent is kicking back with his copy of said manuscript. We talked about it a while back and he’s seen my early outline, but other than that it’s all new for him. In a perfect world, he has minimal thoughts or comments and maybe he’ll be shopping it around before the end of summer.

Meanwhile, I’m finally going to get to that short story I’ve mentioned once or thrice which is now pushing up against a deadline (sorry, Henry!!). And then back to TOS, the other project I’ve mentioned before. My big hope is I can get the first draft of TOS done by the end of July which… isn’t impossible? I’ve got a solid outline, but it’s a story that lends itself to a sort of rambly, campfire-tale sort of tone. In the best possible way. So I guess we’ll see how that goes.

Also probably worth mentioning… okay, because of my time working in Hollywood (and then my time reporting on Hollywood) I’m very aware of what different terms mean and I know how rare it is for things to move forward. It’s why I don’t talk about any of it much unless I know there’s actually something to talk about. I’ve had maybe half a dozen film options at this point. None of them went anywhere. You heard about some of them after the fact.

I bring this up because there’s currently an option out there and, because of the WGA strike (which I support 110%), the producers have exercised certain clauses in the contract that allow them to stop the clock, so to speak. See, options have built in time limits. Think of them like a one-year rental contract. When the year’s up, that’s it. You don’t get to say “well, I went on vacation for two weeks, so I shouldn’t have to pay rent for those weeks I wasn’t living there.” These folks are very interested in what they’ve got (and so am I) so they’re putting everything on hold and will restart that clock once they can, y’know, hire some screenwriters again.

What is it? Who are these mysterious “producers” of which I speak? Like I said above… I’d like to wait until I can tell you something really solid. For now, you’ve absolutely heard of the producer/ director/ studio and you’ll probably be happy about what they’re trying to adapt.

Once the WGA strike is over.

Anyway…

Cool Stuff I’ve Been Watching— A lot of movies. Into The Spider-Verse was simply magnificent, as was Guardians of the Galaxy vol. 3. I held off sending this out just so I can say, honestly, that the second season of Strange New Worlds is off to a friggin’ fantastic start.

Cool Stuff I’ve Been Reading— Walking the Dusk by Mike Robinson, Lower Decks by Ryan North and Chris Fenoglio.

Cool New Toys – My wonderful partner gave me a Grimlock and the Deluxe “Buff Groot” figure for my birthday, and my best friend gave me Adam Warlock. That gives me a full set of Guardians. Also got a small pile of Spider-Verse figures. Now I just need to figure out how to display them all…