We had two weeks of weather that felt like autumn was imminent, and then 80-degree days since. The humidity is so high that the house still needs the air conditioning but because the angle of the sun is different and the house doesn’t bake, the air turns icy after a while.

I also have a head cold. I woke up Sunday thinking it was strep and went to the urgent care right as it opened because ugh, strep. When I walked up to the counter, the woman there asked me how I was doing and I really didn’t know what to say. Polite convention is to say “good” but surely her next question was going to be “what brings you in today?” (it was) and my answer would be “I think I have strep,” (it was) and that is very much not “good,” but I told her I was good and now she knows I’m a liar, I guess. Or thinks I have a strep kink. More than 24-hours later, I’m still thinking about that interaction.

Anyway, the strep test was negative (yay?) but the clinician was like, “It’s a virus, so there’s nothing I can do for you. You won’t feel better today, or tomorrow. Maybe the Tuesday. Maybe.” I think that I appreciate her acceptance of my Fate. I still feel like crap.

Works Update

Last month, I penned an exhaustive index of everything I’m working on. This month, I have a couple updates for it.

The big reveal is the one I was still negotiating last month. That’s a book currently called 25 Years of Goodman Games, a history of the company as assembled through exhaustive interviews with those who have forged it. I’ve had two lengthy conversations with Joe Goodman already and both were brimming with fun and interesting facts that I didn’t know, so I am pretty sure you don’t know them either, so that’s exciting. Manuscript is due next October for a November crowdfunding campaign. It will be part of a suite of goodies, inspired by TSR’s Silver Anniversary box set.

Leslie Scott’s Boundless Play, in which I was supposed to have an essay on the broad appeal of RPGs, has hit a snag. A physical book is no longer in the cards, or at least not in the near future. Instead, the plan is to release the essays incrementally in a newsletter. In theory, I have no problem with this. In practice, Leslie’s opted to use Substack and I cannot in good conscience send my readers there. Why? Well: This. For now, that essay is in limbo.

Sean McCoy liked my third pitch for Megadamage:

“[I’ve been] thinking about an old essay I wrote where I argued that American horror is largely driven by fear of isolation and fear of losing or subversion of the Self; it also got me thinking about how Lovecraft’s argument that fear of the unknown is the oldest and most powerful fear is a pretty convenient one for a racist guy to believe. I think there is a worthwhile musing here about Mothership, the panic system, the plots of many of the scenarios and the mesh of similarly tuned pop culture inspirations that will tell us something about horror and why we indulge it in this particular way.”

You can check out the horror essay on Unwinnable. I haven’t read it in years, so I dunno if it is embarrassing or not (Peter Straub liked it, though), and I don’t want to re-read it until I am sitting down to write for Sean. He also liked what I called Pitch 0, which combined all three of my pitches:

“It also occurs to me, that while all these pitches would make for interesting, tightly focused essays, they could very probably be combined into a grand unified theory of Mothership horror – isolation, loss of self, the indifferent dangers of space, the corrosive forces of capitalism (which are also isolating, indifferent and individuality-annihilating). Could be interesting! Also, could be long.”

We’ll see where that goes. I believe I have a January deadline for that (but I also think I might be making that up…) and publication early spring.

Academia, Fear Me

Noted grift site Academia.edu has been emailing me daily to get me to join so I can see a bunch of citations Monsters, Aliens and Holes in the Ground has gotten in academic publications that I don’t care about. Never gonna spend money for this, but with Justin Wigard’s help, we sussed out a list of citations from Google Scholar. Most of them are just boring suggestions that the book is worth reading. One, though, is amazing:

In much cooler news, Kyle Patterson’s cousin sent over photos of MAHG being publicly displayed at the Lake Geneva Public Library, along side a collection of fiction with neat “Appendix N” tags (among other fun books). Love seeing my book in libraries!

Twenty Twenty-Six

I have six (of 52) weeks left to write for the 2026 posts. That ought to be done this week. Photos took about a week and a half last year. Once that’s finished, I am going to pull more stuff out of the collection to move along to other folks. Too much stuff, folks, tooooo much stuff.

After that, I guess I will go back to Monstrous Descents and start revising and finishing out the appendices and such. Or maybe I’ll just paint miniatures the rest of the year? Or sleep. Sleep is good.