LA ComicCon, back in September 2025, was an amazing experience. Four days of book selling, meeting vendors on the con circuit, cosplay, and very long days on my feet.

The winner of the drawing for the bookshelf-sized demon claws was Billie Orr of Anaheim, CA.

As a mechanism for expanding my newsletter's numbers, it seems to have been a success. I think I'll continue to do it with book fairs and cons going forward.

Can't believe it has been almost nine months since my last newsletter. I sit down to start a new edition, and —

Squirrel!

Add to that the mounting frustration with my lack of progress on either of the novels I have in progress. A portion of the frustration is associated with a health issue I dealt with last year; now in the rearview mirror.

The remainder falls into a particular kind of exhaustion that comes not from the absence of ideas, but from their sheer weight. Story exists — you can feel its shape, hear the voices, almost touch the texture of the world — and yet translating all of that interior certainty into sentences on a page is another matter entirely. The gap between vision and execution is where the struggle lives. It is less a wall or a block than a fog: you know there is something on the other side, you're just not entirely sure you're walking in the right direction.

From the outside, writing appears to be the simple act of recording what you already know. From the inside, it is closer to negotiation — between the story you planned and the story that wants to be told, between the voice you reached for and the one that keeps showing up, between your best day's clarity and whatever your brain is doing on a Thursday afternoon.

Squirrel!!!

The discipline required isn't just showing up at the desk. It's showing up and staying when the work pushes back, which it will, and does, and always has. And then there are the days when the words come, not in a torrent, but in something more honest than that: a sentence that feels true, followed by another, followed by another. Maybe it's two hundred words. Maybe five hundred. Measured against a deadline or someone else's output, it can seem like almost nothing. Measured against the resistance that was there an hour ago, it is everything. Progress in long-form writing is rarely cinematic. It is mostly incremental, mostly quiet, and mostly indistinguishable from simply not quitting.

In the end, what separates the finished manuscript from the abandoned one is not talent, not inspiration, not a particularly good writing environment, though none of those hurt. It's the willingness to keep returning to the page even when the page has nothing flattering to say about your effort. Slow, methodical progress, but it is still progress.

The struggle is real.

There is something energizing, renewing, about being among a gathering of writers. I've been attending the Santa Barbara Writers Conference off and on since June of 2005. Over the past twenty-one years, I've attended fifteen-ish times. It is easily the most generous community of professionals I've encountered. Workshop leaders are dedicated to helping folks improve. Monte and Grace are dedicated to providing this extraordinary space annually.

Four years ago, I started volunteering my time doing one-on-one Q&A sessions for attendees interested in indie publishing. Two years ago, I officially joined the conference's faculty as a consultant. This year I was asked to team with an old friend and assume the mantle of Pirate Workshop Leader.

What is a Pirate Workshop, you ask? The lore of the Pirate Workshop goes back to the very early days of the conference. As this is, primarily, a gathering for the honing of craft, many of the day's sessions focused on read and critique. However, folks hungry for more didn't want to stop when the official speakers had rolled up and called it a night. Shelly Lowenkoff, and later John Daniels, would find quiet spaces around the old Miramar to gather with eager and hearty souls looking for a deep-dive read and critique. Sessions became legendary for the alcohol that flowed and the razor-witted critiques into the wee hours of the morning.

After a couple of years, it became clear this was a vitally needed addition to the conference's curriculum, and it was added to the schedule.

Flash forward from the early '70s to 2005, and I'm attending my first SBWC. I heard from many that if I was serious about honing my craft and getting clear, unvarnished critique of my work, the Pirate Sessions were the place to be. That advice was quickly followed by warnings about the late hours and legendary libation consumption — liquid courage. Armed with those warnings I went looking for these semi-mythical gatherings, landing in what turned out to be the first Pirate session led by John Reed.

Bringing it back to the present: John has now stepped away from leading this dedicated rabble, and, as I mentioned above, I find myself filling shoes I could never have imagined trying on twenty-one years ago. Teamed with Nick Deitch (more on Nick in the next section), we have had an amazing string of late nights filled with not quite as much alcohol and stories of knights, sailors, suicide, teen angst, flash fiction, sociopaths, and a reimagining of Native American mythos.

Coupled with my consultations, I've been asked to participate in a couple of seminars to demystify the spectrum of publishing options. The picture below is from the Thursday morning session, which was a deep-dive Q&A. (image below)

The week was simultaneously energizing and exhausting in the best possible way. I'm leaving with more momentum than I arrived with. That feels like progress.

Nicholas Deitch has authored an extraordinary debut novel, Death and Life in the City of Dreams.

A jaded city planner, Townsend Meadows, looks out across Evermore Valley with the ghost of his dead friend by his side. "Do you ever wonder," Fen asks, "what this city will look like five hundred years from now?"

Their city is teetering on the brink of collapse, and the mayor's answer is a gleaming new auto mall at the valley's edge. For Townsend, it's the death of everything a city should be. Struggling to regain his passion and forced to choose between compliance and conviction, he must risk his career to fight for a more hopeful and verdant future.

From an architect's vision at the dawn of the twentieth century, to a rancher's dynasty scarred by violence and greed, to a city founder's hidden message of hope, this story about the rise, fall, and reawakening of an American city reaches far beyond the present. A timely, sweeping novel of memory, corruption, and resilience, Death and Life in the City of Dreams asks, "What legacy will we choose to leave for our children?"

Nick and I have been part of a read-and-critique writers group for the past decade-plus and we've workshopped portions of this over the years. I'm reading it for the first time now and I'm totally hooked. You wouldn't think a dying city and an almost broken city planner could be the foundation for a compelling read. Nick has envisioned and crafted fully realized characters and community in a rich, engaging story running two timelines that has kept me up several nights well past my usual time for lights out.

If you are looking for a long, satisfying bit of historical fiction completely unlike anything else you've read, take a look at Death and Life in the City of Dreams.

Check out this beautiful trailer for the book!

Minutes after cutting the grass. Nice to see this old boy still acting like a puppy.

As always, if you have picts of your fur babies, please hit reply. I'm a big fan of critters in all forms.