HIGHWAY 62

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

Kinda some spoilers for previous Hazeland works here, at least the first two. I’ll try to be as oblique as possible. Be forewarned. Full disclosure: I’ve never been comfortable with horror as a descriptor for my work on Hazeland. Even before it was Hazeland and it was just a couple of short stories and then a novella called The Queen of No Tomorrows. Firstly, the stories, particularly one called “Chunked” but the others as well, didn’t have any relation to The Queen of No Tom

It's a free concert from now on. That's our world. All the ticket booths got taken down and the hairies from the Wild Zone have crashed the scene. Woodstock without limits. The old world of outdoor festival and money at the door just took the first helicopter out. If only there had been a better plan. The organizers had to head out of there pretty fast. Hey wait a minute, this isn't Woodstock. It's Altamont. Only the world isn't so much planned as cobbled together from moment

The Kickstarter campaign for My Gifts Are Hungry is still rolling. We’re at 150% funded but there’s stretch goals to think about. Oh yeah, and how this is the time that people actually buy and connect with the books because after this, it’s onto Amazon and benign neglect by the algorithm. Over the next little while, I’ll be talking about some influences and inspirations for Hazeland and in particular, My Gifts Are Hungry. I always say that books come from a place I can’t reac

So, don’t know if you’ve heard. Maybe you haven’t. But I’m running a crowdfunding campaign for my latest book over on Kickstarter. It’s true. Not a dream. Not an imaginary story and won’t be written away in the next generation of for-hire writers coming onboard and making everything grim and gritty and ready for prestige presentation over ten episode seasons with all the fun sucked out. I know. Curveball. Additionally, the book funded. In the first day. In fact, it funded eve

After going back and forth on things over the last couple of weeks, I went ahead and decided to run the Kickstarter campaign for my newest book. I’d thought that I wouldn’t have the energy/focus to run it and promote it and all, particularly since I was spending a lot of time helping my wife recover from surgery. Yeah, last week was long and rocky. The surgery isn’t the only issue in our lives and I’m gonna leave it there. I have a lot to do that has nothing to with writing o

A lonely Imperial Pilot guiding folks into the waiting area before the show. Flew down to attend Wonder-Con last week. Well, and to spend a few days seeing friends and LA and eating a lot of Mexican food because my family doesn’t like it as much as I do. I’ll spend most of this one talking about Wonder-Con as a show. Not sure I’m going to write up the other stuff so much except to wrap up everything in passing. Part of what I’ll talk about there is the root of the problems th

Hey folks. Yeah, it’s been a minute. Last time I posted here, I’d just finished up the first draft of My Gifts Are Hungry. Well, the second draft really. That first draft is the maybe fifty pages of raw plotting, that whole skeleton. In this case, there were another couple rounds of putting stuff in different places and changing the fundamental nature of the “antagonist” in the book, which forced some other stuff to be written a little more fully. Made for a slower process. L