Not-the-Tonys 2026

Here we are with another recap of the past year, the highlights across multiple fronts, from media to personal to creative endeavors…

MOVIES

I thought it was a pretty great year for movies, but it boiled down to a horse race between A Big Bold Beautiful Journey and Marty Supreme for me. Awarding year’s best to Journey would be the latest example of just why Colin Farrell is my favorite actor. Awarding it to Supreme would give that honor to the next standout Hollywood actor, Timothée Chalamet, who also starred in A Complete Unknown. Both would more than deserve the honor. I’m talking both actors and films.

BOOKS

My favorite read last year was undoubtedly The Killer Angels, which I don’t get tired of describing as the book I was destined to read, but was very pleasantly surprised to find out how much I love. It’s the kind of experience that I consider to be the very best storytelling.

MUSIC

I really got into Colter Wall. Here’s a huge part of why:

TV

I watched a bunch of good stuff. My biggest new-to-me was certainly Severance. But my favorite show remains Ghosts. I continue to be baffled at how much it gets taken for granted.

FAVORITE WRITING PROJECT

As has kind of been belabored, I had a pretty busy year, but finally writing Collider was undoubtedly the highlight. Whenever it sees light of day I kind of think it would be impossible not to consider it something special, in and out of context.

FAMILY

The August family reunion was more rewarding than the 2024 edition. Got to spend a good deal of time with most of the family in various groupings. Finally takes the edge off missing the 2020 edition (that everyone did, since it was supposed to happen in March, just when everything shut down).

WORK

Kind of have to end on an unfortunate note, here. The room was rearranged, and that ended up leading to an implosion. Still working on how exactly that affects my ongoing employment there. Been working on potentially moving on. I still absolutely love and treasure the kids at the center, but I’ve never felt less needed. Which is certainly an ego thing, I know, which is really so much of the problem. People continue to be my main stumbling block.

It was an incredibly long year. I packed it with a lot of good things, too, but there were a number of stressors that I just couldn’t seem to get out from under. I celebrated every triumph, though. I didn’t take them for granted. Everything is a learning experience! And also: no hurricanes! 

Let me repeat: No hurricanes!

So that was pretty good.

2026: Writing Goals

I was kind of prolific from a self-publishing perspective, last year.  The goal, as ever (beyond...actually selling books?), is for mainstream publishing.  Awaiting the fate of two short stories I submitted late last year (who knows?), and I have my comic book biography of Dr. Seuss hitting shelves soon (more on that upon release!), after more than a decade waiting and really, believing it was never going to happen, and...

My last book released last year was The Blizzard of '78, the latest of my annual publications for family and friends, and as it happens, I got the idea for this year's before 2026 ever showed up, so that's going to be fun waiting to write.

I completed Collider in 2025, which was by far the biggest accomplishment, as it was, as I keep pointing out, 30 years in the making, and at the time, I thought I could use it to finally sell the Danab Cycle to publishers, but...I think I perhaps went a little too...literary with it, more than I had with Seven Thunders, which itself isn't exactly the straight narrative readers, editors, anyone might expect from space opera...Which brings me to Lady of the Horde, previously listed here as The Fateful Lightning, which is actually the conclusion of this trilogy (although I've since figured out how the fourth book is also part of the same cycle within the cycle).  Horde is the name I gave it when I mocked up covers a while ago, but I'd been thinking of it as Lightning for so long I forgot.  But I love Horde and thinking of it that way again helped define how the story needs to be told.  It should once again shatter all my recent word count records, so I look forward...

If I somehow tackle two novel-length manuscripts this year, the other will be Book of Doom, the most ambitious book I've ever envisioned, which last year I took another crack outlining, seeing what parts needed changing, and which were fine as they've been for...well, two decades.  I never, ever understand writers who say they struggle for material.  I just don't.  I always have ideas.  Sometimes I tackle them right away, and sometimes...I really, really don't.  Sometimes it's just finding the courage to tackle the big ones, the ones I know I've gotta nail.  All this, meanwhile, in the shadow of the novels I wrote at this point "long ago," which even I sometimes overlook, but have tried to resurface with the hardcover update of The Cloak of Shrouded Men I retitled The Man Comes Around.

And who knows what else I'll write?  I already know the next Easter Tale, part of the string of stories I've been working on since 2017, and collected the results up to last year in their own book.  I always have a Star Trek story to write, which I've done at least one a year since 1999.  I don't want Seuss to be my only push for comics, either, even if that means writing more scripts that go nowhere other than my blogging material (or the pages of Man Comes Around, in the extras).

Well, who knows?  I also want to tackle another poetry cycle.  I have one that required...a decent amount of research, that I was very much excited to start last year, but that'll either happen in 2026, later, or...?

This is all cumulative.  It's fun to see what each year produces, which I managed to accomplish.  I released a lot of material last year.  This year will be more about writing itself.  But it always is.

My Civil War Year

Occasionally I'll fill out a year quite inadvertently with a running theme in what I'm reading.  One year I read a number of adaptations of The Iliad, and that was My Iliad Year.  Another year I read all of L. Frank Baum's Oz books, and that was My Oz Year.  This year I ended up reading a fair bit about the American Civil War, and so it was My Civil War Year.

Because I, ah, tend to accumulate a lot of books, most of 'em end up waiting a fair bit of time to actually be read, and that's what happened to The Memoirs of Ulysses S. Grant, which I picked up at Target a number of years back from a discount section, someone having ordered but chosen not to buy it.  It was something I wanted to read anyway, so I bought it, and it sat on a shelf, shifting ever onward toward the reading rotation, and this was its lucky year.

I could talk a bit about Grant here now, what's actually in his Memoirs (how he ended up writing them and what history has generally said about them is pretty well known at this point, so I needn't spend time on that), but suffice to say I ended up greatly impressed with his thoughts on the campaigns he fought, his meticulous progress and sometimes thrilling maneuvers.  Part of the myth of the Civil War we still struggle to untangle today is that Grant more or less stumbled toward Appomattox where Lee cordially surrendered in the courthouse, every bit his superior, Grant being a hopeless drunk who just happened to be the last one holding the ball for the Union, and destined to be a hapless president, later, mired in corruption...

Well, the Memoirs only cover the war (and his life preceding it), not the presidency, alas, but I happen to believe a fair bit of mythmaking surrounds the presidency, too.  The editors of the edition I read even suggest Grant of being disingenuous by failing to bring up his drinking problem, so...yeah.  Not a lot of partiality even in his own book (the introduction also claims his health affected his ability to maintain enough focus for a completely clean accounting, no evidence for which I found, either).  Bias runs deep, folks.

Anyway, so later I finally read The Killer Angels, the classic novel that later inspired the film Gettysburg, which I also watched, to remind myself whether or not it deserves its reputations(s) (both serious and ridiculous, from enthusiasts to viewers merely mocking fake beards).  I fell very deeply in love with Angels as I read it, a truly elegiac, impartial, deeply human look at both sides of the war.  As someone who grew up in Maine, I knew the first effect of Angels was to sanctify Joshua Chamberlain, which carried over if not still more strongly in Jeff Daniels' portrayal in the film.  Watching Gettysburg back, it's still a hard argument to dismiss, by the way.  Angels features an America we've allowed increasingly to fade into the past, where partisanship does not have to define someone, where sides only matter if you don't care about the person caught up in them.  It is an experience every American ought to have, and I am prepared to call it one of the great works of American literature.

I also read a book about politics during the war, specifically how Democrats comported themselves in the north.  The author tried very hard to push a "loyal opposition" narrative, but I can't help but conclude the problems they posed are as badly felt today as they were then.  And besides these three, I read an entry in Bernard Cornwell's Civil War series (never completed), and...found him very much the opposite of Michael Shaara, and that's all I really need to say about that.

I followed all that up with a documentary series about the war, and that was satisfying.  

Aside from fiction, and sometimes memoirs of one variety or another, my main reading interest has long been history.  I have David McCullough's 1776 on rush reading order from a very recent thrift store purchase (the American Revolution is another amateur hobby of mine), and from a library sale I included several tasty pieces of literature in that general extraction.  What can I say?  One of them is a journalist's survey of much of the past century.  I might just have to hopscotch that one, too...I only paused Memoirs and Killer Angels because I didn't know their actual worth, only what is generally said about them.  Both are far, far better than suggested.  Both are essential, as it turns out.  It was my great good fortune to read both this year.

Those rejections…

I just got a couple rejection notices. I had submitted Seven Thunders again earlier this year, and finally got word back. I submitted a chapter of Collider, got word back. But I guess I used to have a harder problem with that. I just took them in stride. Trying to be stoic about it, maybe. Or maybe it’s because I’ve grown a little dull to the idea after all the self-publishing. I don’t get any actual sales from that. I’m not exactly slick about it. There were a lot of bloggers who figured this out, just among the communities I joined a decade or so back. Some of them absolutely, shamelessly manipulated the system. I never cared for that. I never cared for the reciprocity game. I don’t find integrity in reviews, either, that are disingenuous (“I never read this genre but somehow still loved this book by this buddy o’ mine”). And I certainly have the sales to show for it. I’m actually not sure I’ve ever made a sale to a blogging acquaintance. I actively stopped converting to ebooks when it became clear good ol’ Pat would swoop in on promotion days to get them for free. I certainly bought my fair share of free books that way, I know, and it almost always led to disappointment. 

But I’m thinking, set up one more blog, a dedicated Danab Cycle blog, and centralize promotion, chatter. If I opt for that. I always had big dreams for this. But now I have two completed manuscripts, and I guess my patience for the publishing world grows thin. I just don’t know how to do it. 

It’s a thought, anyway. I try not to be cynical. I know my efforts aren’t ever really that prolonged. I know I’m prone to giving up. Part of this is because I’m also a big fan of comic books. In that medium all of this works. I did find out it doesn’t exactly work to get into comics, either. So there’s that. But comic book creators are always hopping, throughout their careers, all over the place, and no one bats an eye. I mean, Marvel just inked a deal to publish John Byrne’s indy X-Men. 

I know I have the itch to write. It’s the getting published that was always the problem, or finding myself in scenarios that successfully led in that direction. Then self-publishing became just so darn easy…

Anyway, we’ll see.

Collider…completed.

 

It seems positively unimaginable…

Back when all this began, it wasn’t going to be a book at all, it was just screwing around, and then I planned a different story, which was supposed to be a book, and I wrote that, and it became apparent to me that I really did want to write that first story, write that first book.

But it required a lot of work, because again, it wasn’t conceived as a book, and I was just a dumb kid at the time, and…But there were the bones of something, there. And I just kept thinking about it.

A little less than a decade ago, I wrote something that was very, very close to writing Collider itself. It gave me the first real bones of what it would become. So I kept plugging away at the ideas, and slowly they started to make sense to me, to coalesce. And in the past two years I wrote two full-length manuscripts, and then it seemed like I was finally ready.

Then I started writing it. At first it was slow going, just picking away at it. A few weeks ago I slipped into another gear. I started writing daily, longer chapters than I’ve written in a long time, day after day, and I started feeling the momentum. The story started surprising me. It took turns I didn’t expect. 

And now, it’s done. It’s finally done. This last chapter was almost anticlimactic. How strange is that? I could barely sleep last night, the anticipation of this moment clogging the atmosphere…

Now, of course, the real work begins…

Finally (really!) writing Collider

I started writing Collider yesterday. 

It’s only about thirty years in the making. When I first came up with the Space Corps stories, the Danab didn’t even exist. It’s since become known as the Danab Cycle. I didn’t really have a story, back then, but I stumbled into one when I very unexpectedly decided to kill off one of the main characters early on.  Hey, I’m a Star Trek geek. I’m sure there was some Tasha Yar reasoning involved. 

As the years advanced, I worked on the story until everything about it made sense. I even figured out why that character’s death meant something. I wrote a novella, eventually, dealing specifically with that (Terrestrial Affairs), which kind of lightened the load a little. It remains absolutely essential to this story, but the whole story doesn’t have to explain why it happened so much as what resulted. 

I had the last of the needful breakthroughs, really, only later in the day. So I added to what I wrote yesterday this morning. And can now plunge confidently forward.

I‘ll keep you posted…

My Dr. Seuss comic book script is going to be published???

 https://a.co/d/gJwZ6uh

Wow. So. Wow. 

This isn’t scheduled to happen until next January, but this is something I gave up on ever happening. I wrote this thing more than a decade ago, a lifetime ago in a lot of respects. 

It’s the third comic book script I wrote for this publisher (I don’t get paid at all, and clearly, after those first two, even getting exposure certainly never happened, either). The first two garnered a smattering of reviews, some of them about what you’d expect from these things.

Since this thing was written so long ago, it’s not up to date. It doesn’t cover the recent censorship of Dr. Seuss’s career that we somehow let happen. I know there are different ways to phrase that, and if the publisher itself plays along, does it really count? To me, it does. Not because I have an abiding love for the “lost” material. In fact, I read far more Seuss after I wrote this script, and it’s not all the Seuss, not even that “new” Seuss that happened after all this. 

But there’s a rhyming scheme to the thing. I tried. I tried to cover the spirit. It’s been entirely out of my hands for many years.

But it apparently will be a real thing!