Wait, Did I Miss One?
Well, here we are, the February newsletter. Although I’m sure it’s going to be tough to top the brilliance of the January newsletter. You all got that one right? Some of the best stuff I’ve ever written.
(there was no January newsletter)
Look, I told you this wasn’t going to be frequent. I didn’t want to clutter your inbox if I didn’t have anything to say. And the truth is, right after the holidays... I didn’t have anything to tell you. I’d been working, yeah, but I also took two weeks off to just be with my partner and my friends and just, y’know, breathe for a few minutes.
But let’s get to why you all signed up for this thing. Where are things at...?
I’m about... I’m going to call it 75-80% through the third draft of the new book (GJD). In all fairness, I really wanted to be further along by now, and I’ve been kinda beating myself up a bit over how long this draft’s been taking. And then just the other day it hit me (as some of you who follow me on the medias social are aware) this is taking long compared to other books I’ve done because it’s turned into a huge project. At this stage, possibly the biggest thing I’ve ever written. When I started this draft (the third) GJD had a wordcount of about 172K words.
(If that number doesn’t mean anything to you, let’s compare it to something you may know. The final version of The Broken Room—the one my agent, David, took out to publishers-- was about 120K words. The version of Terminus you read/ listened to was about 101K words. Some of you may have heard the story about how -14- started at around 150K but then needed to be cut down to under 130K words because of production costs.)
As I write this out for you, I’ve shaved almost six thousand words out of GJD. Probably going to cut that much again before I’m done. But I may also need to add some other things in. My current hope is to have this done and polished by the end of the coming week. At which point I may take a quick breather and focus on another project for a week or three. And then back to GJD for a last look with fresh eyes before I send it off to my agent so he can find it a home. Fingers crossed, that’ll be... a month and a half, maybe two months from now? Mid-late April?
And then back to that other project which will hopefully be the book you get after GJD. And maybe something else in there, too.
When will you get to see all of this? Well, realistically, we’re usually looking at a year between the book being bought and it getting released. I’ve had it take less time . I’ve had it take more. But the safe bet is you’ll get to read GJD next summer. Maybe I’ll be hitting a summer con near you to show it off.
So that’s where things are at.
What else to talk about...?
Well, there’s this newsletter itself. A few weeks back someone pointed out to me that Substack has a pretty bad habit of allowing (and sometimes even paying for) awful things on their platform, then hiding behind the flimsy shield of “free speech.” Now, I’m personally a huge proponent of free speech, as in “the government can’t punish you for speaking your mind.” But a lot less a proponent of private businesses endorsing (and sometimes funding) racism, sexism, hate, and more.
Where does that put me? I mean, if someone’s here asking you to subscribe to their paid Substack newsletter... yeah, technically, a cut of that money’s being turned around and used to fund racism, sexism, hate speech, and so on. That said, there’s an argument to be made I’m a drain on their system, since I use their resources but don’t charge for this newsletter and have no plans to. So I could shout “I’m bringing them down from the inside!”
But Substack does get something from me and that’s... well, all of you. Everyone reading this. You’re more eyes they can put things in front of. Passive income, a bit of data mining, maybe a nudge to subscribe to this other newsletter... so, yeah, I’m contributing. And so are you. Personally, I don’t feel great about that. There’ll probably be another one of these next month, but after that... I don’t know. Social media seems to be crumbling. Maybe I’ll just move everything to my own website...?
Feel free to politely share your thoughts down below. And yes, I know it’s impossible to get into the Good Place these days—don’t make that your main point.
Cool Stuff I’ve Been Watching-- Rosaline, Warrior Nun season 2 (finally!) Castle Rock (loooong overdue), The Bad Batch
Cool Stuff I’ve Been Reading-- Fenris & Mott (Greg vanEekhout) Hellraiser: Bloodline (Peter Atkins). About to start Holmes Coming by Kenneth Johnson
Cool New Toys – my beloved gave me a wonderful trio of Spider-Man action figures for Christmas-- Spider-Man Noir, the 70’s Japanese Spider-Man, and the deep-cut “Bag-Man” Spidey. Twitch from Transformers Earthspark just showed up the other day. The zombie Scarlet Witch from What If... is the first action figure I ever pre-ordered (showed up about a month ago) and she’s kinda wonderful (in a horrifying way). Also a glorious Micronauts homage figure, The Hidden, from Fresh Monkey Fiction’s Eagle Force line.
Talk to you again soon.