HIGHWAY 62

I really need to stop watching the news. No, not the regular news about the US buying diesel from Russia while they’re still invading Ukraine and poking around eastern Europe. Not that kind of news. I’m talking about the news from publishing (which includes my own work.) What’s that? Harper Collins and the majority of the Big Four are using AI to do marketing and covers and back cover copy? The executives are pushing it from the top down? Golly, that sure doesn’t sound like t

I find myself in a strange position when I’m out there observing the postings of other writers out there on Bluesky. I don’t do Threads or X or Facebook or trawl writer (aspiring or otherwise) forums. I don’t go to Reddit to look at the self-publishing talk. Or Kindlepages or whatever. I’m just on one place. That’s really more than enough. It is sufficient psychic noise. Perhaps too sufficient. And it’s hard to say “fellow writers” or “my peers” or whatever, because my experi

It’s been awhile since I’ve done one of these sorts of introduction posts, and I’m catching some new followers. Hopefully a few more will manifest as a result of my interview with Quills and Chills about My Gifts Are Hungry going live. Theoretically that’ll happen by the time most of you read this (but really midnight on September 29th, West Coast time.) Here’s the link to their channel, should you wish to investigate. They have great guests from horror and other genres, wort

No, this one isn’t a de-contextualized line from a song repurposed, usually without any acknowledgement. Instead, it’s the title of the latest book I’m working on. Yeah, I’ve been talking about it for a little while, mostly because I thought I’d have been actually drafting the book by now and I’m not. I finally finished the chunky outline/direction draft yesterday, after thinking it wouldn’t need much work at all. Because I was being silly. And because it wasn’t really a stor

Hey folks. Yeah, yeah. Long time in not posting here. Well, posting blog entries requires this thing called work which is sometimes in short supply. Shitposting’s easy. Like catching a dagger thrown at you and throwing it back and the original tosser. So, I put out a book today. Compared to the Kickstarter itself, it’s a total non-event. Particularly because I royally screwed up and put the release date at October 15 of this year at Amazon, only I didn’t actually push the cha

Last week I went to an SFF show. In person and everything. And people say I’m antisocial and never leave the house. Not entirely true. I was only able to make it down for a day, given circumstance and it being on a holiday weekend and needing to be around to take care of a family member who has one of those things where they’re never going to get better from, going to always be there. Which is one of the reasons why I don’t get out as much as I used to. Like I’m going to miss

Tricky subject this one, since it wanders over into nostalgia, critical and otherwise. Nostalgia is a poison or the greatest thing ever, blah blah blah. I'm not here to litigate that. Both sides are right. I've seen nostalgia-poisoned dudes do terrible things in order to reshape the world into something more their liking. Hell, we're seeing it happen right now, roll that clock back to 1950. Or 1910. I have no patience for that. That said, I make no bones about liking what I l

Deep breath. The campaign for My Gifts Are Hungry is done and dusted. All those desperate Bluesky posts and blog posts and photo threads and attempts at outreach that just got blown off (even to some folks I know directly and that’s not a great feeling), all the surprise pickups and all of it. It’s over. Even after that despair post from last Thursday, when the campaign seemed moribund and belly up at the surface of that fishbowl and don’t let Timmy see, he’s too young to und

Taken at Mt. Wilson Observatory, 2026 Listening to Fables of the Reconstruction (or Reconstruction of the Fables, if you prefer) by REM, a forty-one year-old record. I’m old enough to remember waiting for it to come out, still have a ratty promotional poster from Tower Records somewhere, I think. I’d have to go dig it out. It’s an album that still rings for me, slicing into a very particular time and place. That being graduation from high school. Yes, I’m rather old, though I

I suppose I should start this with a disclaimer that there’s no wrong way to write or to tell a story. That you can do whatever it is that you want. They’re your words. They’re your stories. They’re your worlds, even if that world is supposed to be a replica of this one. That being critical to understand because fiction simply isn’t reality. Even when it’s pretending to be, maybe even particularly when it’s pretending to be. Fiction isn’t bound by gravity or the square cube l