Well, okay. It’s not so much of a road for me. More like a fifteen minute train ride. And maybe three blocks of walking.

Anyway...

I’m looking forward to SDCC next week as a bit of a bright spot in the middle of the summer. A few days to say hi to folks I usually only get to chat with online, maybe blot out the world a little bit. I have some panels and signings (more on that below), there’s a party I’m probably going to, two or three panels I’m hoping I’ll get to see. It should be a lot of fun

But I also won’t deny that the past several months—most of this year, really—has been very draining. Like, sleep for a week draining. There’s a bunch of different reasons. If you read last month’s newsletter, you know some of why. There’s also been a lot of business stuff (more on that below, too), which is great but can also take up some headspace. And just, y’know, as I’ve talked about here many times... the world is just exhausting right now. I’ve been talking with my beloved about just how much Comic Con I really feel up to.

But I’m probably going to do most of it. I know if I don’t I’ll be kicking myself for not seeing this friend or that friend. Because let’s be honest—that’s most of what cons have going for them these days. Getting to see and say hi to people you know, people you admire, people who are just plain cool.

Yes, you with that friggin’ amazing MHA Dabi cosplay on the train into downtown last year. I saw you sitting there. You looked fantastic!

Anyway... I’ll sleep in August. Hopefully. I feel like the past month or so has been a big readjustment period, although I couldn’t really say how. Just the vibe. Starting something new. Breaking old habits, trying to form new ones.

Production work continues on The Off Season. I finished going through the copyedits and turned those in (with only a few minor tweaks here and there). Also wrote up an Afterword (finally) thanking so many people for their various contributions to this book. Had a long talk with my editor about a bonus thing we’d been talking about, and we came to realize we’d been talking about two different things. I think we’ve got it hammered out. Guess we’ll see soon enough. Layouts are coming. And we’ve had some early marketing talks about... things. We’ll see those soon enough, too.

I mentioned last time that I was almost done with this new draft of ATCS, and now (because of assorted delays) I’ve got maybe ten pages left to do once this newsletter goes out. But something about the pacing has been gnawing at me. It just felt off. There was a long stretch where things happened but they all felt kind of flat. So I took a long look at it, poked at a few things, figured out what wasn’t working and what needed to change. So, good thing, I’ve got it figured out. Bad thing, it means ripping the back third of the book almost completely apart, rearranging some things, adding some other things. Which technically isn’t really a bad thing, except that I told my editor he’d probably have this before Comic Con. Good thing again, though, I talked to him about and he’s fine with me taking an extra three weeks or so to work on it. “Best book, not fastest book” he keeps saying.

One of those weeks, however, I immediately lose to SDCC.

Oh, hey, speaking yet again about SDCC...

If you’re also in attendance, I’ve got a lot of stuff on Thursday and... that’s it. I’ll probably be wandering around on Friday annnnnnd that might be it for me. Unless I just come down to have lunch or dinner or a drink with someone. So maybe you’d see me at the Spaghetti Factory or eating pancakes somewhere or something.

Anyway, on Thursday...

2:15–4:15 in room Marina D over in the Marriot, I’ll be part of the Writer’s Coffeehouse. It’s open to writers of any and all levels, you can come and ask questions about anything writing related. Outlines, dialogue, genre, twists, anything. Or you can ask publishing questions. Anything goes.

5:00- 6:30 I’m up under the sail for two back-to-back signings connected to two different things. Essentially for the first half of it I’ll be at AA06, and for the second half I’ll be at AA04. And Mysterious Galaxy will be there selling books. Or you can bring your own copies, if you want to lug them around all day. I’ll scribble in either.

7:00-8:00 in room 6DE I’m part of a panel called When The Void Screams Back, about that sharp edge where horror and sci-fi overlap.

Then I will go home and have drinks with my beloved and our houseguest.

Friday you may stumble across me on the floor, attending certain panels, lurking at certain booths. If you happen to find me, please say hi. I may drop random notes on Bluesky, if you follow me there, like a painfully inept Carmen Sandiego (“I heard he’s going to be at the Blackstone booth for the next ten minutes or so.”)

I’ll probably make up a quick graphic with all this and post it on socials/ send it out to you Tuesday, if anyone wants it.

What else can I tell you about ...?

Cool Stuff I’ve Been Watching
Honestly... not much. We saw Hoppers, which is not remotely what I expected but very fun. We raced through the whole third season of FROM in maybe two weeks. I’ve been watching a lot of Grave Conversations on YouTube, which is a death-centric talk show with David Dastmalchian that can be very funny and a bit deep at times, depending on the guest.

Cool Stuff I’ve Been Reading
I got knocked away from reading for a bit, but I used the scattered time to get caught up on The Hab (by Josh Dysart, David Lapham, Bill Sienkiewicz), which is a very twisted story about a billionaire and his staff in his private survival bunker when things start to go very wrong. Loved Stephen Blackmoore’s Crooked House, which is both the last and the first Eric Carter book (out this fall).

Cool New Toys
It’s been a weird, kind of slow month (see above). I’ve bought some random accessories for various figs, and a few generic bodies to modify into my own characters. Nothing that interesting. Two of the little Gourd Horde pumpkin figures from the animated Stranger Things show (they’re surprisingly nice). But I’ve also ended up with...

Okay, so when Stranger Things (the live show) ended at the start of the year, it struck me that I didn’t know of any toys for it. There’d been one LEGO set, a few brief, random attempts at action figures, but nothing had really stuck around because it’s 90%... well, people in clothes. Not a high energy line.

But one thing I did discover was there’d been a few weird crossovers with Masters of the Universe. So there was a MotU Demogorgon. A weird, buff Demogorgon in armor. It was a weird scale, but I knew the armor came off and I found one for maybe $17 total on eBay so I said... what the hell.

And it was a nice little figure. And it struck me there’s a similar-designed Hellboy figure coming from Boss Fight, and wouldn’t he look cool fighting a couple Demogorgons on the desk? So I found a second one cheap on eBay. And then a third a little later. Except it turned out, no, wait, I’d already gotten the third one this was actually a fourth. Then I saw a fifth, stripped-down one that was ridiculously cheap. And one guy selling two of ‘em together, which I definitely didn’t need, but at the price he was offering...

Anyway, I somehow, for some reason, have started army-building MotU Demogorgons. I have a large shoebox full of them.

Hellboy’s going to have his hands full.

And that’s all I’ve got for you. Next week is SDCC! Hope I’ll see some of you there, and if not... I’ll talk with you again here in August. Thanks, as always, for reading all of this.