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If you want any of my books as a holiday gift you have to order by Dec 16th for it to get there in time. Iron Circus is having a sale until the 16th where everything is 30% off, so you can grab Stars, Hide Your Fire or Cautionary Fables at a discount. My werewolf stuff is only in my store. 

On Christmas, I’m going to do another charity stream for the Trevor Project. If you are unfamiliar, the Trevor Project is for suicide prevention and support for LGBTQ+ youth.

I asked folks on my patreon which game I should play. The Forgotten City won. If you are unfamiliar with The Forgotten City, it is a time loop ethics puzzle in a Roman city that is cursed. Basically, if anyone in the city “sins” the whole city is turned into gold. You have to figure out what counts as a sin and how to break the curse. I’ll start at noon pst. You can watch on my twitch. 

As for movies in my discord, reminder that I play a movie for anyone to watch Saturday’s at 11am pst. You can join here. We are watching:

• Dec 6th – Amadeus
• Dec 13th – The Northman
• skipping the 20th
• Dec 27th – Snowpiercer

And as usual, I’ll be streaming, thought I changed some of the times. 

Everything else will be the streaming schedule:

• Tuesday at 7pm – 10pm PST – Art times
• Wednesday at 7pm – 9pm PST – Art times
• Sunday at 8pm – 10pm PST – Baldur’s Gate 3

Join me on my twitch!

I’m visiting my parents this month so I mostly focused on getting ahead on Glass Diamonds. It’s about half way done. So it will probably wrap up around this time next year. 

My eyes are almost done healing from surgery in September. So I started upping my work outs again. I started doing both yoga and pilates once a week. Ugh. It has resulted in my being sore a lot. But after a month I’m already getting better at it. In the new year, I’m gonna try to get back to doing cardio again. I fell off it during the summer and need to get back to it. 

This month I finally got the chance to go through all The Murderbot Diaries. I really liked the show when I watched it earlier this year. The books didn’t disappoint. It did made me wonder what season 2 of the show Murderbot would be like because the human characters aren’t in the second and third book. I am also glad that I read it AFTER I was done writing all of Glass Diamonds. Both Rebecca and Murderbot are frustrated with the humans they are trying to protect. And I think if I had read it before writing Glass Diamonds, I would have accidentally veered Rebecca too much in Murderbot’s direction. 

One of the movies watched in my discord was All the Presidents Men, which is you don’t know is about investigating Watergate. I definitely see why it was nominated for a bunch of Oscars. The lighting and shots keep the tension going through what could because have easily been considered boring. I did think it was interesting that the movie doesn’t follow the whole investigation. 

I also saw The Breakfast Club for the first time. I was mostly underwhelmed by it. Mostly because I felt like I saw everything interested referenced in other things. Usually I still enjoy movies that have been referenced referenced a lot, but since The Breakfast Club is conversations without much plot, the stuff that gets referenced is basically the whole movie. I vastly perfer John Hughes other movies, (and ended up rewatching Planes, Trains, and Automobiles on Thankgiving. 

A classic I ended liking more was The Day the Earth Stood Still. While the plot was straight forward, it did a lot of interesting stuff with lighting and their limited effects. I was surprised that for a movie made in 1951, they did a good job at having a multicultural crowd at the end. 

While working I ended up find a video that did a deep dive into why America’s biking infrastructure is so other places in the world. A lot of it comes down to one guy in the 70s thinking that casual biking would “ruin” biking as a sport. He wanted bikes to be treated like cars and pushed any attempts at bike lanes or anything that made biking easier. It was very interesting watch.

Another niche deep dive I watched a video on the interactive animatronic characters at Disneyland & Disneyworld. It does a research into their first animatronic Abe Lincoln that Walt Disney wanted to be able to answer questions, but it was pretty limited. And then how it different techniques for having characters guests could interact with were developed and then put aside. 

And finally, this month I learned baby crocodiles make laser gun noises. Make sure to turn on the sound.

See you next month. Thank you all for your support. 

Glass Diamonds page 54 is up. You can also read pages early by backing my patreon. Right now you can read Glass Diamonds to page 58.

Glass Diamonds page 53 is up. You can also read pages early by backing my patreon. Right now you can read Glass Diamonds to page 57.

Glass Diamonds page 52 is up. You can also read pages early by backing my patreon. Right now you can read Glass Diamonds to page 56.

I hope you all had a good October! 

The next anthology I’m editing is announced! Lie Machine will open submissions December 1st. 

Pretty quiet this month. I’m doing my Saturday morning/afternoon movies. On the 8th we are watching The Fall, the 15th All the Presidents Men, the 22nd the Breakfast Club, and the 29th the Day the Earth Stood Still. If you wanna hang and watch these, here is a link to join. And as usual, I’ll be streaming. 

Everything else will be the streaming schedule:

• Tuesday at 8pm – 10pm PST – Art times
• Wednesday at 4pm – 6pm PST – Art times
• Sunday at 8pm – 10pm PST – Baldur’s Gate 3

Join me on my twitch!

Bones and I have officially moved Wolf & Bones Comic Club to a blog write up. I posted our thoughts on The Dark Phoenix Saga on my Patreon. If is free to read. Next we will be reading the first 1/3 of Bone by Jeff Smith. 

I was a guest on the podcast World Anvil. I was part of their halloween line up where I talked about werewolves in fiction today and in the past. You can give it a listen here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vHd2DpwNWe0

I also did an incredibly bad job playing Castlevania: Symphony of the Night. I have never played a metriodvania game. So after I was done, I got told I have to HOLD the jump button rather than just press it. I might give it another chance. But I think I’ll finish Slay the Princess and Disco Elysium on stream first. 

I’m in the home stretch of writing Blue Moon. Just got a murder and the climax to write. Been awhile, but I’m excited to get to the end so Meredith can start drawing. 

I’ve also been doing some end of year stuff for Iron Circus. Last week I went through all the titles sales. I made notes on what is selling and what isn’t. So usually books do really well when they first come out, then their sales slowly peter out. I took note on what kinda books continue to sell consistently after they aren’t in the spotlight. Like even though the Cautionary Fable books are mostly a bit old, they continue to sell well (3 of them are in Iron Circus’s top 20 titles for the year). So I’m talking to Spike about what we should look for when submissions open again. 

Just a few days ago I found out about the webcomic Dust ‘n’ Dread by Lesle Kieu. I immediately read all of it in one go. The premise is a Frankenstein and a werewolf are hired guns in the old west. The inking is excellent and Kieu does a great job with spot blacks. It also has some excellent monster designs and uniquie takes on things. Like in the original wolfman, werewolves see a pentagram in the hand of their victims. Kieu ups the horror by having the werewolf see they damage they will cause and that reveals the pentagram. Haunting him in a way similiar to how the ghosts of the werewolf victims haunt David in American Werewolf in London. Also, the undead man/frankenstein character, is partly animated by a system of bugs inside him, making any damage he takes more gruesome. I highly recommend it. 

I also grabbed the newest volume of Power Fantasy. I read the first trade back in July. I had some minor issues with the pacing in volume 1, but volume 2 smoothed at out. I summed it up to Spike as superpowered people arguing politics and philosophy. One of the characters has a superpowered child. It is very much about how despite attempts to shield his son from the bad of the world, the emotional volatility teenagers go through is a bad combination with this much power, even if his parents are powerful enough to keep him inline. And everyone’s fears combined with their own huge amount of power, only add to that danger. 

Good Devils Don’t Play Fair With Evil by David Brothers and Nick Dragotta. was something I picked up as soon as it came out. It’s a collection of shorts Brothers and Dragotta that are them channelling all their favorite shonen manga. They got a good handle on the action in all of them. I particularly liked Fight Like Hell which follows a kid that has fought to survive all his life. He is killed in a fight and since fighting is all he knows, he wants to fight in Heaven. But without the need to survive, he loses his edge.

I also checked out the prose YA book Library of The Dead by T.L. Huchu. It’s about a teen that delivers messages for ghosts. She gets tied up in a mystery involving missing kids because one of the ghosts is the mother of one of the missing kids. I have owned the book for awhile. I heard about it last year at Worldcon because Huchu was on an urban fantasy panel about making the city a character of your book. He had some interesting things to say building the city into the story, so I grabbed a copy of Library of the Dead. However, while the world building was interesting, it didn’t have a lot of baring on the plot of the book. So the pacing was very uneven. I felt like 80% of the plot happened in the last third of the book. I’m gonna hold off on checking out any more of this series until I hear if people think the pacing improved.   

The werewolf movies I showed in my discord were some of my favorites, so the only new movie I saw was Del Toro’s new Frankenstein movie. Like all of Del Toro’s movie, it’s beautiful. It is closer to the book. He used Bernie Wrightson’s illustrated Frankenstein as inspiration (Bernie Wrightson is credited in the movie), and some of the shots are right out of the book. 

And while on the topic of Frankenstein, Matt Baume did a deep dive into James Whale, the director of the original Frankenstein. It was a really interesting dig into how he got started and then pigeon holed as the monster movie guy. 

And the thing that inspired me to give Castlevania a try is I wanted a very long video that is the history of the franchise. The youtuber dug into the topic because he was wondering why there isn’t a new Castlevania game when the Netflix series seems to be doing so well. Turns out it’s because the real villain of the Castlevania franchise is corporate mismanagement. 

Hope you have a good month. As always, thanks for your support!