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,

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…