Category: Uncategorized

As always, if you’re reading the newsletter here you’re seeing it about two weeks after it was intended to land, so some of the information (and random musings) in it might be a bit out of date. Sorry. You can avoid this horrible temporal shift by signing up for the newsletter and getting it right in your inbox once a month or so.

Or not. I’m not the boss of you. Maybe you like the horrible temporal shift…

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Well, for those of you in the United States, I’m guessing today was tax day. Also guessing half of you did them weeks ago and the other half of you are reading this instead of doing them. Or maybe you’re being semi-responsible (for somebody doing their taxes at the last minute) and reading this is your reward for getting everything in the mail twenty minutes ago.

I admit I’m in the first group. Mine were done weeks ago and I got final confirmation they’d been accepted four or five days ago. I did them myself for years, but I’ve hit the point now (in a few senses) where it’s well worth it to spend an afternoon organizing my box of receipts and letting someone else take it from there.

Truth be told… I don’t mind paying taxes. No, seriously, I don’t. The government does some really stupid, awful things with tax money, yeah, but it also does a lot of good things. If any of you have followed me through the the ranty writing blog for any amount of time, you know that my beloved and I spent about three years living well below the poverty line. In Los Angeles. A huge part of how we got though it is because of things people paid for with their taxes. We used the public library’s internet (and to be painfully honest, sometimes stole rolls of toilet paper). We qualified for discounted utilities and even a free replacement fridge (that worked SO much better than our old one). Public transit. Public parks. Someone else paid for it when we really needed it, and I’m really glad to be paying for it now when someone else may need all of it (and more).

And someone on Bluesky pointed out recently… that’s true of so many things. Big things. The Center for Disease Control? Yeah, we all paid for that. People all over the world envy it, the government runs it, but it’s ours. Same with NASA. And the Department of Education, Department of Transportation, Veteran’s Affairs, and more. It’s all stuff we funded. We paid for it with our taxes to serve the public good, so other people would have it when they needed it.

Which is why it’s so frustrating to see some bozo taking a chainsaw to all of it in the name of “efficiency.” That’s our stuff being destroyed! Can you imagine if I smashed your front door off the hinges and then told you it’s better because you can get in quicker when you get home from work? And I unplugged your fridge so it won’t take as long to warm up those leftovers. Yeah, those examples make me sound really stupid (take that as you will) but more to the point… I shouldn’t be messing with your stuff in the first place.

Grrrrrrrrrrr…

Apologies. That turned into a little more of a rant than planned.

Happy tax day, everyone!

In more interesting news…

God’s Junk Drawer is still in copyedits. There was a slight delay, but things are back on track. I should have the copyedited manuscript back in two weeks, which means it’ll probably already be back to the publisher by the time you get the next newsletter. We’re also probably going to be talking about covers sometime soon. And hey, you can still preorder it from your favorite local bookstore, your second-favorite regional bookstore, or that gigantic South American river website.

My agent has TOS. I went through everyone’s notes. Rethought a few things. Thought a lot about a few other things. Moved a few things around. Cut some others. Added a bit more. In the end, the draft he’s got is only about 500 words shorter than the one everyone else saw, but I think it’s a lot stronger and tighter. Guess we’ll see…

David (my agent) and I also talked about another possible project which I’ll probably just call A2Q for now. If you’re a fan of the ranty writing blog, you may have some idea what that is. And what that might mean. So I’m trying to do some work on that before those copyedits come back.

Also doing a little more work on the comic. This is an awful time to try to be doing something new, but I’ve always wanted to do a comic book and never thought it’d be a secret gateway to untold fame and fortune. If this ends up breaking kinda-sorta–even I’ll be thrilled.

Oh, one other thing. Some of you may know I’ve got a short story collection, Dead Men Can’t Complain, that’s been audio-only for a few years now. One of the original stories from it–”Flesh Trade”–is going to be part of a new anthology. Dread Coast: So Cal Horror Tales is going to be out this August and all the proceeds go to benefit victims of the LA wildfires from the start of the year. This’ll be the first time “Flesh Trade” has ever been in physical print, so if you don’t do audiobooks… here’s your big chance to read it. And a bunch of other great stories, too.

And there’s something REALLY cool I got to see that I REALLY wish I could share… but that’ll have to wait for now.

What else can I share with you… ?

Cool Stuff I’ve Been Watching
This might sound silly to some of you but my beloved and I sat down and watched Paddington 2 and it truly is a wonder. I’d heard so many people say how good it was I figured there had to be some catch or something but no… it’s just that good. Doctor Who is back and I thought the first episode was so friggin’ clever. We’ve also been doing a rewatch of Grimm and it’s holding up really well so far. Also kind of surprised to learn we’d missed about eight or nine episodes when it originally aired, so we’re getting to see those too.

Cool Stuff I’ve Been Reading
A lot of work-ish reading this past month. Read two books to give notes and two to give blurbs–one of which is an upcoming Marvel Fantastic Four collection. So hey, I guess we’ll finally see my name on a Marvel book. Deephaven by Ethan Aldridge was a great little YA story about kids at a mysterious boarding school. I also picked up the collected GI Joe: World On Fire comic storyline by Paul Allor, Chris Evenhuis, Niko Walter, Emma Vieceli, and Ryan Kelly. It was one of the last arcs IDW published, and it’s a dystopian alternate world where Cobra won, the US is an occupied country, and GI Joe is an underground resistance group. Really good, and parts of it hit pretty hard right now.

Cool New Toys
Ooooof. The past two weeks feel like they’ve mostly been indie toy companies saying “we have no idea what’s going to happen, sorry.” One Kickstarter I backed canceled the whole project, saying they couldn’t move forward in good faith. I did grab two more Horrid Infantry figures at WonderCon (giving me a total of “far too many”) and got to hang out at the Spero booth for a bit and talk with folks. I also just picked up the McFarlane DC Universe camouflaged Tumbler. I don’t collect DC figures, or 7” figures, but this spoke to me. For reasons I won’t bore you with here.

But feel free to ask somewhere else if you really want to know.

And I think that’s everything I’ve got for you. As always, thanks for reading. See you next month.

Oh, hello there. I didn’t see you come in. Please, take a seat and join me for a while. Apologies for the dust, I’m still freshening things up. No, no, take the good chair. It’s fine.

Well, let’s get caught up, shall we?

I started the ranty writing blog about sixteen years ago. I was going to bore you with the exact how and why, but its not really important, is it? I mean, some of you know, but I’m betting overall most of you don’t really care. No, it’s okay, I get it. To paraphrase Patton Oswalt, I don’t need to know where the stuff I like comes from.

Anyway, I’ve been offering tips and advice for a while now. Just tips and advice, because ultimately writing is an art and we all approach art in our own ways for our own projects. That’s my golden rule for this stuff. What works for me probably won’t work for you and it definitely won’t work for him. A huge, often overlooked part of being an artist is finding the tools that work best for you. Which often means figuring out the ones that don’t work for you.

And I’ve found I like blathering on about this stuff. It helps you with stuff, and every now and then it helps me with stuff, too. And I like helping where I can. Here, at the Writers Coffeehouse, at cons. Remember cons? Good times…

“Well, hang on there,” says RealWriter677147, their voice rising up from the depths of the internet. “If you like helping other writers so much, where’ve you been for the past year?”

Fair point.

After lockdown more or less puttered out (but our covid crisis continued), I was just feeling… beat. 2020 was a grueling year—personally, creatively, nationally. 2021 was marginally better, but only in the sense of breaking both thumbs not feeling that bad after you’d already broken both knees. Rolling into 2022 I was just… beat. Exhausted. I’d hit the point where it was hard to care about a lot of stuff, but I was just pushing ahead and doing it anyway. Which just made me more fatigued, and then we were in one of those vicious circles you hear about.

So I took a break. A long break. And kind of looked at a couple things and how I’d been approaching them.

And well, all this (he said gesturing around) was one of the things I wanted to fix. I’d gotten spread out a lot over the past decade and a half on the internet. We had the ranty blog, sure. But we also had the Lovecraft Zombie Almanac, which was me sort of parking my own name on blogspot in a just-in-case way. And there were a bunch of different social media accounts. Plus a personal website Penguin Random House had created for me years ago when they discovered I owned my domain-name but had never done anything with it. So I asked around and somebody recommended a designer who could pull all this together under one umbrella, so to speak.

It felt weird to start posting again when everything would be moving to another website in a month or two, so I held off for a little longer. And then certain people with more money than sense decided to get into the social media game and well… that knocked things around a bit, too. I enjoy doing this, yes, but I won’t lie to you– there is a business aspect for me as well. I’m not planting subliminal messages for you to buy my books (probably), but it definitely helps to make sure people remember I’m still alive, y’know? So, his Muskiness made me rethink a few things. I was fortunate to have a patient web designer who didn’t mind my swings between complete indecision and almost obsessive focus. And then it was the holidays and, look, everybody’s got lives and loved ones.

And then holy crap it’s been like a year since I really posted anything here. It’s time to get back to it, right? Let’s go!

Well, first…

I may be doing a few new things here. I also started a newsletter in this downtime, but it’s through Substack and… jeeeez, speaking of people with more money than sense, right? I don’t know how much longer I’ll be able to convince myself this is a good thing. Either way, I’d already decided I’m going to also post the newsletter here on the ranty blog. So once a month you’ll get a general update about what I’m working on, where different projects are at, and also just some quick updates on other things of interest like books, movies, toys, and so on.

Also, you may notice some little hiccups here and there throughout the blog. The designer did an amazing job bringing everything over and keeping 95% of the links and formatting intact. But the truth is, at this point we’ve got some posts that are old Word docs which were cut and pasted into Blogspot’s editor which were then ported over to this system. There’s some rough patches out there and I’ll try to clean them up as I stumble across them.

Oh, and last thing. I won’t be taking down those Blogspot blogs. I won’t be adding to them, but I’ll probably just lock the comments and direct people here. Point is, if in the past you linked to a post for some reason, you won’t lose that. But if you want to update it to here… that’d be cool.

I’ve got a few things on deck for upcoming topics, but I’m always up for suggestions. Maybe something specific you were looking for help with or just wanted a few nudges in the right direction. Let me know in the comments down below.

Speaking of which, next time I’d like to talk about the things we talk about.

Until then, go write.

And thanks for checking out the new place.

Hey. Interesting week, huh?

First off, many thanks to all of you for your patience. Probably looks dumb as hell, guy who’s got his dream job complaining about being burned out. But the truth is, even a dream job is still a job. And I think for all of us, trying to do your job for the past two years has just been brutal. And it all finally caught up with me. I guess the one big difference is I’m in the very fortunate position of just being able to throw my hands up and say “I’m done” for a week or three.

And it’s helped immensely. I feel rested for the first time in months (almost since before Halloween, really). The new book is back on track. I even think I’ve got a handle on how to deal with the disconnect between my new word processing program (say hello, LibreOffice Writer) and the blog site here. Yes, you may have noticed some odd formatting over the past half-dozen or so posts.

So again, thanks to all of you for your patience.

Anyway… I know I promised to talk about languages next time I put up something new, but I figured it’s probably worth mentioning that big potential shift coming up in the internet. You know. That guy. The one with so much money he literally doesn’t know what to do with it, so he just keeps making questionable choices and never suffering any repercussions. Will things go forward? Will they collapse? Will he get bored and sort of wander off like he’s done for so many other loudly proclaimed offers and deals?

Who knows.

No, seriously. I think there’s good reason to be worried if a guy like that ended up in charge of a major worldwide communication system. He has an extreme “rich white man/ never dealt with a real problem in my life” view of the world. I also think… well, like I mentioned above, he does have a real follow-through problem. I’d say it’s 50-50 at best that this sale even happens. Seriously.

It’s an odd bit of synchronicity that just as I’m coming back from a break on this particular platform, as my fellow youths like to say, and there’s a potential upset at the other big one I spend a lot of time at. Makes you think, as my fellow olds often say. About social media and the role it plays in our lives and our careers.

For a few months now I’ve been looking at this site (which is still here on Blogspot, fer cripes sake) and thinking I should really migrate it over to my website and have everything contained there. One thing this past week’s highlighted is how fragile things can be on the internet. One buyout, one new executive who doesn’t like that balance sheet, and everything can change in minutes. Like, actual minutes.

I also know one reason I’ve been dragging my feet on doing it is because I’ll lose all the links in these posts. Bam, all that interconnectedness and easy reference gone. I could rebuild it, but it’d take time. A lot of time. And I am, y’know, working on other things…

All that said, I’m probably going to stay on Twitter for the foreseeable future. We’ll have to see how it goes there over the next few months. If you’re so interested, there’s also Instagram, which is mostly toys and cats, yeah, but some book stuff too. With all this going on, I set up an account on Counter.Social just because a few folks I know were over there and I figured it might not be a bad thing to claim my name there, so to speak. And someone reminded me I had a Mastodon account I hadn’t used in a while, so I’ve dusted that off and made sure the engine still runs. If you’re on any of these sites, please come find me and listen to my daily prattling. If nothing else, you’ll know when this site gets updated.

And please do keep an eye out here. I’ve got a few cool things planned out for the month of May. I think they’re cool, anyway. That foreign language post, talkin’ about three act structure a bit, and maybe a rambly birthday post or two, as I’ve done once or thrice in the past.

So we’ve all got that to look forward to.

Until then, go write.

I know, I know. I’ve been really bad about this lately. As some of you may be aware, it’s been a wild month for me. New book comes out next week, so I’ve been doing tons of promo stuff, some interviews, scheduling other promo stuff and interviews, and also—when I can—trying to work on my new book. The one everyone’s going to be asking about week after next.

Oh, and I also spent some time going up on the roof (twice!) trying to fix a tarp. That ate up a fair amount of time.

Also, random fun fact– this is post #750 here on the ranty writing blog. Yay to all of us for sticking with it this long. Hopefully you’ve gotten something out of all these random rants and musings.

Also-also… holy crap this has been a stressful week. We’ve been dealing with some horrible stuff here in the states and as of last night a large chunk of Eastern Europe kind of spiraled into.. well, hell. So I completely get it if you’re not up to this right now. It might help get your mind off things, but it also might feel kind of frivolous, both me writing this and you reading it, and stress you out even more. I know why I’m here, but seriously– if you need a minute to not look at a screen, to just close your eyes and listen to music or something… go for it. Take ten, take a few deep breath, put your favorite song on repeat. Take care of yourself, okay? You can’t do anything if you’re a wreck, so do what you need to keep yourself together.

Anyway…

I wanted to talk to you real quick about that unknown thing. You know the one I’m talking about. Yeah, that.

And fair warning, this is one of those posts inspired by a Saturday geekery movie.

So, hey, I was watching a Saturday geekery movie a few weekends back, and the actors, director, and even the writer didn’t know what the monsters were. From a production point of view, anyway. Y’see, it was pretty clear the movie was done very cheap and on the fly, without much of a script. It’s my educated guess that they just shot the movie and figured “well, when we’re in post we’ll see what the special effects house has for cheap models and CGI in some kind of monster then.”

The problem, of course was… well, they’re filming now. And the actors need to look at that spot on the driveway and pretend there’s something there. But they can’t say anything definitive because nobody knows what it’s going to be. Maybe dinosaurs. Maybe giant insects. Maybe dragons. Who knows. Again, we’ll figure it out later, right? For now, just… be vague. Act confused.

Which they did. A lot. And it got thin really fast. Because while it was unknown to them, filming the movie, the monsters were very clear and visible to us watching the finished movie. So nobody’s reactions made any sense, because nobody knew what they were reacting to. What it was doing, how big it was, nothing. People were looking past monsters, above monsters, at one point kind of uncomfortably at a monster’s crotch.

Plus, nobody’s dialogue made any sense because it was all about “those things” rather than what those things were. I mean… that’s a dinosaur. No question. Even if it’s secretly a giant robot or an alien, it looks exactly like a dinosaur and it’s kind of silly for nobody to say that. If anything, it makes the characters look really stupid.

Perhaps even more jarring, nobody ever talked about whythese things were there. I mean, if you and I went outside and almost got killed by a dinosaur/giant spider/dragon and ran back inside (slamming the door behind us), it makes sense we’d be yelling “WTF was that?!?!” But after things calmed down a bit and we had time to talk… wouldn’t we wonder how there’s a dinosaur in the driveway? Maybe question where these giant spiders came from? That’d seem kind of natural, right?

But the characters couldn’t have these conversations because nobody actually knew what was in the driveway. A bat-winged demon with a spiked tail and a killbot with missile pods on its shoulders would spark two very different discussions. But we don’t know what it’s going to be, sooooooo… the characters need to talk about something else. And not the giant monsters outside. Maybe about how she hates her job. Or why they wish they hadn’t argued with their girlfriend this morning. Maybe a little monologue about faith or humanity’s basic nature.

Anyway, have you figured out how this applies to writing in general?

It’s pretty common in fiction to have “unknown” elements. The faceless enemy. The mysterious figure. The unseen monster. Things that leave our characters confused and maybe angry and trying to figure out what the heck’s going on.

But… at some point they’re going to find out what that unknown element actually is. Either that, or we need to have a serious talk about it’s aggressively unknown state. And once it’s known, everything still has to make sense. The way Phoebe reacted in chapter four. Dot’s vague statements in chapter eight. How Wakko was killed in chapter fifteen. All of that’s going to line up and make sense with the now-known element, right? And, yeah, even if I want to keep things unknown to my readers (and maybe my characters, too) for the whole story, I still need to know what this unknown element is.

Y’see, Timmy, the world I’m creating needs rules. because my readers are going to sense if I’m just sort of winging it and saying “anything goes.” Doesn’t matter if it’s sci-fi or supernatural or ancient elder evil from the dawn of time—my story comes with an unwritten promise that all this makes sense. I’m not cheating you, there really is a logic to this. I might not directly tell it to you, but you should still feel it and see its affect on things.

So, yeah, I can use the unknown. But at the least, I need to know which unknown I’m using. because believe me… they’ll know.

Next time…

Crap, like I said above, there’s a lot happening between now and then. The Broken Room comes out next Tuesday, and if you’d like to pick up a copy in your preferred format, that’d be super cool. If you’re so interested, I’m also doing signings Wednesday at Mysterious Galaxy and Saturday at Dark Delicacies. You could pre-order from either of them, wherever you are, and get a personally-defaced copy shipped to your doorway. If you order from Mysterious Galaxy, you can watch me babble about the book online in real time.

Anyway, next time, I’d like to talk about making stuff up.

Until then, go write.

And seriously. Take ten. Take a few deep breaths. Drink some water. Listen to some music.