I am very proud to accomplish anything under these working conditions.

In 2026, not even the weathermen know wtf is going on.

Chris and I signed the contract for OPERATION LITTLE GOLDEN BOOK, which is the codename I’ve given to our next anthology project. You may remember that THE END OF THE WORLD AS WE KNOW IT: NEW TALES OF STEPHEN KING’S THE STAND had a codename of OPERATION WALKABOUT.

Remember when I first relaunched this Blog and we talked about social media algorithms and how they are fragmenting us as a society and a community and how people are not getting the information they need because the algorithm decides they shouldn’t see it?

Saw on Facebook that some folks missed the deadline to apply for AuthorCon VI programming. Don’t despair. Just hold off until the preliminary schedule is released later this week, and then follow the directions released with that, and we’ll get you taken care of.

Spring and summer, the river echoes with a constant barrage of droning jet skis and revving speedboats and chugging boat motors and five hundred different kinds of musical genres blasted from five hundred different kinds of boats, and yet they all invariably seem to be blasting either Jimmy Buffet, Lee Greenwood, or various badly autotuned hip-hop songs.

So… yeah. Interesting and confusing legacy. On the one hand, he is responsible for introducing Gen X to these parapsychological ideas. On the other hand, he made most of it up, and borrowed heavily from Lovecraft’s Cthulhu mythos while also swiping (uncredited) from Robert Charroux's One Hundred Thousand Years of Man's Unknown History and other sources that pre-dated his work.

Big progress made yesterday. The old warehouse was completely emptied and everything is now in a new, secure, and not halfway underwater facility.

we really don’t need to hear “Brandy (You’re A Fine Girl)” every hour on the hour. That song isn’t good the first time you hear it, and repeated plays don’t improve it.

I could have counted on two hands the times I’ve overslept in life, and still had spare fingers left over to make obscene gestures.

That is morally wrong, and we as a society should be able to agree that it is unacceptable… Whose voices will be louder? Those who can still think independently of the algorithm, or the doe-eyed, slack-jawed zombies pushing their cart with one hand and staring at their phones with the other?

My other indecision this morning involves this left brain / right brain (or, as an old girlfriend used to call it, “left Brian / right Brian”)…

The other thing is to give them a reason to keep coming back. It can’t just be promotion. The internet is full of authors promoting things. And yes, that’s a necessary part of what we do — but it can’t be all that we do. Nobody wants to sign up just to be spammed.

I wouldn’t be a member of SFWA if you paid me to be (an organization who’s history is even more checkered than HWA) but I do have friends in the science-fiction and fantasy fields, and they tell me of new writers who’ve never read Tolkien, but simply watched the Peter Jackson films,

…it’s not the flu. It’s just an asshole of a cold.

…at which point my back began yelling at me, and my chest tightened, and my body said, “Enough. If you don’t sit down, we’ll sit you down.”

The resulting flood took out two entire shelves of books — basically Steve Gerlach, Greg Gifune, Christopher Golden, and J.F. Gonzalez.

And if the number of typos I had to fix in that first paragraph are any indication, or the number of edits I had to make are any indication… I definitely need the warm up this morning. No newsletter today, I think. This can serve instead.

2025 was the Year of Extremes. Everything was done at 100 miles per hour, and I have never minded going that fast. Indeed, I have lived my entire life at that speed. But, with each passing year,