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,

with still operations in both Kentucky and West Virginia. (At the time, the town of Lewisburg was segregated.

Billie Thomas, the child actor who played Buckwheat on Our Gang and Little Rascals, got a job editing and cutting film as an adult, and processed the negatives for both Jaws and Logan’s Run.

The best, most effective horror is always an examination of the human condition — the creation of empathy within the reader. After all, if your audience doesn’t care about the characters, then they won’t care when the Horror besieges those characters.

But this is fine.

Will he announce his retirement today? I don’t know. He has certainly earned it. And with the staff and crew no longer entirely in studio together, and the show whittled down to three episodes a week, it’s no longer at the heights it once was. But there are times it still makes me laugh so hard that I can’t breathe, and as an interviewer, he’s at the height of his powers.

I am a long way from that kid at the Bicentennial.

I have, however, gotten some writing-related work accomplished the past few days…

Today is supposed to be exercise bike day (since it is far too cold to go hiking through the woods) but Bubbles has already called dibs on the bike and refuses to move

Worse, even if you don’t use it, the stupid little Copilot pop-ups hamper and slow down what you’re doing, particularly in email, and on Microsoft Forms, which is what inspired this rant…

and the only reason I woke up then is because Josie, Spike, Stripe, and Bubbles formed a phalanx at my feet, and then sent Dallas to climb atop me and start meowing very loudly in my ear.

Indeed, in between the last two paragraphs, Gemma Amor messaged me on WhatsApp to inquire about something, and then followed that up with “Why are you awake so early?”

But it won’t be my problem, now will it?

Interesting new research article dropped yesterday regarding the social media usage of Americans in 2025.

I may have also stolen Red’s pen, since Todd Keisling and his pens weren’t on hand.

My back is better, in that I don’t scream in agony every time I stand up, so I’ve got that going for me.

Brian Keene Readers — making shit happen since 2001.

…that I began explaining The Curse of Lono to her, rather than The Great Shark Hunt. And in thanking Z profusely, I told him twice that the only edition of The Great Shark Hunt I own was the big Taschen coffee-table sized edition — an edition which doesn’t exist for The Great Shark Hunt, but rather — once again — The Curse of Lono.

…a man so morally loathsome that he made Edward Kramer seem like an altar boy and so deft at concealment that he made some of the more recent SFWA leadership look positively transparent.