BEHOLD: A WILD (twist) APPLE APPEARS. But first: a brief digression about agricultural-industrial apple storage!
Did you know that the reason we get apples (and ostensibly a lot of other fruits and veggies) year-round, way outside their harvest period, is thanks to the magic of industrial agriculture? An apple gets picked and then is preserved in its current state through magic, which is to say the apple is fixed by the gaze of a merciless god, placed upon an accursed altar made of wyvern bones rimed with hoarfrost, and then insulted endlessly by a gamboling satyr-like figure known as the Apple Jimby, and it is these wicked insults and cursed configuration that keeps an apple fixed supernaturally in the state where it can still be eaten fresh months later.
*receives a note*
Okay never mind, it’s apparently something called “science” where they put the apples in “controlled atmosphere” (CA) storage rooms, where the apples are “put to sleep” by “gases” and “temperature.” Whatever. I was told it was the god and the Apple Jimby wyvern insult thing.
You can read about apple storage here. It’s actually fairly neat — and also interesting that each apple can’t just be stored the same way as the apple next door to it. They are each precious apple snowflakes and must be tamed and pleased according to their capricious apple whims.
I’m also to understand that the way apples truly lose their character is not in this storage but rather, once they’re out of it — taken out of controlled storage, loaded onto trucks or trains or, I like to assume, an army of Big Ag Hovercrafts, left in grocery store bins for far too long. And that’s where apples get old and weird and lose the thing that makes them what they are, and it’s why you end up with mushy, meh, mediocre lumps — the ghost of good fruit rather than good fruit itself.
All right. Onto the review.
My review of a Wild Twist apple, from Giant grocery, late-Jan:
Two “wild twists” regarding this apple come to mind —
First, that it was once known as the Sweet Cheeks apple, which is a puzzling and vaguely-porny name, and I’m fascinated by how anyone thought that was a good name for an apple, because it’s a terrible name for an apple, yet also somehow an amazing name for an apple. Especially if you were intending to cat-call the apple on the streets of Appletown, like a weird apple creeper.
Second, that for an apple once named SWEET CHEEKS and now named WILD TWIST, the apple is alarmingly mid.
It’s crunchy, not crisp. It’s moderately juicy. It’s incredibly sweet, with minimal tartness detected. The cheeks, they are sweet, and nothing else beyond that. Its taste is, you know, apple. There’s zero complexity afoot. It’s just such a dullard’s apple. I don’t hate it! It’s fine! Totally fine! I’d eat one if you gave it to me but I’d never choose it directly.
I ate it and was left with almost no impression. Like I barely have any memory of eating the apple. I know I ate it. You can watch me eat it here. But it passed through me, like winter light through a clean window.
I’m to understand that this is a Honeycrisp x Pink Lady cross, and I like both of those apples, but smash them together and you get something less than the individual parts, I guess.
This is a straight-down-the-middle 4.5/10. My initial score was a truly-median 5/10, but I feel like, “I would eat this but never seek it” drops it below that. It’s whatever. It’s fine. Meh.
Sorry — to rewind here a bit, I saw Iron Lung, the (very indie) Markiplier movie that adapts the David Szymanski game of the same name.
To rewind further, do you know who Markiplier is? If you have a teenager or are in any way interested in video games, you probably do — I guess you’d call him a YouTuber, which is accurate but also just feels too small. You could go with “content creator” but that also sucks, because content is just such a fucked-up AI barf word these days, as if anything created ever is just a starchy gruel lump you can shove into your brainmouth to give it something to chew on for a while. Mostly, I think of him as a very funny, very creative, and very popular dude-who-makes-videos. I don’t know that I’m a fan in the sense of weeping and shrieking and swooning dizzily as the Beatles come on stage, but my kiddo watches him, and so I started watching him, and he’s good stuff.
(He’s also a killer comedian, by the way — his Supermarket Simulator videos make me laugh heartily. I guffaw even! Guffaw.)
OKAY GOOD YES ANYWAY
He made a movie based on a video game.
And to go back to the fore of the post, it’s the kind of movie that doesn’t really get to exist any more, and I hope — nay, I pray to whatever heretic gods I can find in the gurgling crimson mess of the blood sea — that more get to happen.
Here’s why.
This is a flawed, fucked-up little sci-fi-horror movie about a convict welded into a primitive submarine, flung into an ocean of literal blood on some distant moon, and then asked to search blindly in the crimson deep for Something Mysterious while also being hunted by Something Mysterious. There’s patchy backstory and staticky communication and — I dunno what the fuck is going on. Ghosts? Some kind of apocalypse? A plague? A blood god? Again: I really don’t know. I could not tell you what the fuck I just watched. And I really like that I could not tell you what the fuck I just watched. It brings this fascinating vibe of something… Lynchian, paired with the claustrophic (and bloody) early work of Sam Raimi. A little bit Eraserhead, a little bit Evil Dead. A soupçon of Event Horizon, too.
(This is actually somewhat ironic then that Iron Lung was up against a Sam Raimi movie at the box office, duking it out.)
(And Iron Lung won that battle on Friday, and almost won the weekend.)
(And Iron Lung kicked the everloving shit out of Melania, thus proving that, in fact, there may be a god. Or gods. Or a sentient blood ocean. I dunno.)
Anyway. Here’s the thing — I just feel like, for the most part, movies and even television shows have to kind of be One Specific Thing now. Everything genre is Marvel Star Wars Stranger Things, and non-genre is probably something a little more high-minded than that, and it’s not that I hate any of these things. I don’t. I’m a basic bish a lot of times. I am not a fancy man. But while I may like and appreciate these things, I also really, really like weird-ass shit, shit that doesn’t belong, shit that doesn’t make sense, just some real head-fuckery, and I think this film is exactly that, and I am glad it exists.
Again, is it flawed? Sure. It’s pace is off. It runs too long. Sometimes it vibes a bit much like “a guy who plays video games for a living is now starring as a guy inside a video game.” But then it reaches for these big weird gross moments, and it gets them. Markiplier has real directing chops in this — some stunning visuals and truly twitchy moments are present.
Well, it’s mighty fucking refreshing to get a movie that does not give one hot little rabbit shit about that. You’re just like the convict in the movie — welded into a box for two hours, given little clue or context, good luck, it’s gonna get weird down there in the blood-dark tides.
So, I dunno — see it. It’s weird. It’s neat. I’m gonna find and play the game. I hope more movies like this get to exist. I hope more Markiplier movies get to exist. This feels truly independent — and, when you learn how he made the damn thing, and how his community supported him, you’ll see just how independent this was.
MORE WEIRD-ASS INDIE MOVIES, please and thank you.
In fact, if someone could please let Markiplier make an Inscryption movie, that’d be lovely. *pushes money into defunct CD-ROM drive I have nearby*
(Oh and speaking of weird little indie horror movies, if you haven’t seen I SAW THE TV GLOW, that’s another. So. Yeah. Go see it.)
And, we have a cover for The Calamities, courtesy of Del Rey and the Boland Design Co (who also did the stellar Staircase in the Woods cover)!
The description:
The heir to one of the world’s most influential families reckons with the demonic secret to their power, in this contemporary dark fantasy that melds occult magic with shocking family drama from the New York Times bestselling author of The Book of Accidents.
Mourning Mayne knows he’ll one day bear the duty of managing his family’s vast empire of wealth and power. But the feckless Mourning has always struggled to accept this legacy, which is one of cruelty, domination, and exploitation… and something even darker.
Because the Maynes are no ordinary family: Hidden in our world are the fiends—half-human, half-demon, and possessed of dark magic born from buying human souls—and the Maynes are one of the oldest and most influential fiendish families.
But when Mourning’s estranged father, the formidable and terrifying Hadrian Mayne, demands that he return to the fold, Mourning has to make a decision whether to accept his legacy and embrace his role in the family, or to forge his own destiny, and with it, change the course of the world.
Because along the way home, he will meet Key, a black-market seller of human souls, and Quinn, an artist who may hold the dark truth behind the fate of the fiends. Alone, they have all struggled with the darkness of their fiendish nature…but together, they might find a path out of the shadows.
I won’t get too deep into talking about the book now — it’s occulty and demony and creepy and weird and I had a lot of fun writing it. I’m doing line-edits now and just re-reading it reminds me what a blast I had with it. Agares House and the Dantalion and founts of elixir! Stolen souls and twisted love and bad fathers! There’s also a certain orange cat in it. And a certain demon. But you’ll see that when you get the book.
Also will surely have more things to announce in the coming days — and I suspect I’ll be on tour with it, as well!
Oh, and of course, this is only the first book.
The second book, Chaos Reigns, will be out (I believe) the following year.
I’m a writer and I should be eloquent. I should have eloquence, ready at hand, for things like this. I should have poetry paired with clarity and I should find a way to turn what I’m feeling into something, into anything beyond what it already is, like taking ingredients and making them into a plate of food, but all I have are these raw ingredients of rage and confusion and uncertainty. And I know it’s the same ingredients you all have, and I know we’re all just staring at them in front of us like we want to turn them into something, but we don’t know what and we don’t know how. I have names like Keith Porter and Renee Good and Alex Pretti and in some cases I’ve seen how they die, burned into my brain, more raw ingredients I can’t quite process, for which I can’t find eloquence. And I keep thinking I should find that eloquence here but I guess I’m well-past that point and I’m saying it anyway, that we are under the heel of a fascist federal government. I’m saying fuck ICE, abolish ICE, prosecute ICE, and I’m saying that these things are the moderate position, this is the centrist, milquetoast view at this point, and they should be thankful it is, because the longer people go under the boot, the longer they go without justice, the more the moderate position drifts to the immoderate, to the extreme, to people finding a way to get justice in ways that won’t be granted to them by the government above them. Justice taken if not given. Justice born of rage. Rage, rage, what we have is rage, fuck ICE, fuck Trump, fuck it all — but another ingredient is there, too, one I didn’t expect, one whose flavor is strange but perfect and necessary: there’s the reagent of hope, too, because we see people, people just regular people out there in Minnesota, and Chicago before that, and Los Angeles and Portland before that, finding their voices, their connections, their communities, their hearts, and standing tall before the small men in their masks and their fucking Nazi coats, and they stand and they film and they blow the whistles and they harangue and cast the necessary invective like magic fucking spells, and they do this even through clouds of chemical poison, they do this against advancing armed vehicles, they do this even when others amongst them are shot. The fear hasn’t taken them. That’s an ingredient not present: the fear. They have rage, but they have hope. They show rage. They give hope. They stand tall and give us all that hope, communicative, collective, contagious hope. Our government, our politicians, better smell what’s on the wind, better taste that blood in the water, better see the rage and those on our side better match that rage, and those against us must wither against it. Fuck ICE. Abolish ICE. Persecute ICE. And those who cannot agree on these plain and obvious things need to get out of the way and let the people work. I Stand With Minnesota dot com. Give money. Call your reps. Show up. Find the rage. But fuel it with hope. Love to you all, except the Nazi fuckers who are keeping this nightmare going.
It is the new year, and the apple reviews persist. What, did you think they would stop? THE APPLE REVIEWS CONTINUE UNTIL MORALE IMPROVES.
Anyway, today, my mind is a bit on branding.
I am on the record, I think, as stating that branding for writers is ultimately a bad thing — there is certainly some industry value to it, but I also like to note that a brand is a thing you burn into a sheep’s ass to ensure everyone knows who owns it. Branding sort of keeps you locked into a specific mode and it’s hard to escape the gravity of that. But really, today, I’m thinking about how food is branded. In particular, agriculture like apples.
I think one of the nice things about heritage (aka heirloom aka antique aka old-timey aka ancient occult pomological intrusions upon reality) apples is that they really don’t suffer from the plague of branding — I mean, okay, they do, a little bit. And it’s not like they were entirely free from the clutches of capitalism: apples have long been desirable and part of the resources bought and sold and traded between regions and nations. But still, it’s nice that a lot of the old apples are named without sales magic in mind. “I call this apple GRUNCH because I discovered it and my name is EDWARD GRUNCH.” “This apple is called RUSSETED FUCKLUMP because it is russeted and looks like a nasty fucklump.” There is a purity to this, a simplicity — this is the apple, this its name, we are unconcerned with whether or not you are enticed by its title, by its branding. But now —
Well, now you get PIZAZZ and JAZZ and HONEYCRISP and EVERCRISP and SEXYCRISP and JUICYLUST or whatever the fuck they’re calling apples now.
(This is a small part of my “evil apple” book, Black River Orchard — the family whose orchard grows the aforementioned apple goes through a conversation of what to name it. The father wants to name it after himself, and the daughter — a wannabe influencer — believes it needs to be called something sexier to get people’s attention. So: Ruby Slipper is what they settle on. And if I’m being honest, I think that’s a banger name for a lush, red apple.)
This is, of course, the nature of capitalism — in a perfect execution, capitalism is a secondary mechanism, and one well-regulated, but we are about as far from a perfect execution as we can be, and so capitalism is mostly just a giant machine trying to distract you while it keeps going for your wallet. The sales and branding part of the machine doesn’t even really need to be all that honest anymore — it can just say a thing and give you a logo or an advertisement and coast pretty entirely on vibes, and a lot of products do exactly that. I suppose to their credit, some apples are still aptly named: Honeycrisp is crisp, and tastes a little like honey. But others are like, sure, okay. Jazz doesn’t play jazz music. It is not evocative of jazz. It’s just a jazzy name for an otherwise whatever apple.
Anyway, all this brings me to:
My review of a Lemonade apple, from the grocery store, mid-Dec:
I think it stands to figure that if we are to assume the branding here is true and evocative of the apple-eating experience born of this particular apple, we should then expect that the apple in question tastes like lemonade.
Spoiler alert: this apple does not taste like lemonade.
So, I ate two of these, to note, both from the same day, same store.
That apple was — nnyeaaaah meh? Ennnh? Nnnnmmuhhh? The skin was pleasing. The apple was soft, just on the edge of mealy. The flavor was a ghost of flavor: present, barely accounted for, and what flavor was there was kind of this blunt, watery sweet-tart thing. Lemonade was not in the flavor profile. Nothing was in the flavor profile. Nothing but woe.
Actually, scratch that, woe probably tastes like something.
Then last night I made this ricotta apple cake someone sent me on Bluesky (whoever that was, thanks, it made something more akin to cornbread and less akin to cake, but I like it), and one of the apples I used was the other Lemonade apple, so I took a slice of that and ate it and —
Okay, not an entirely different apple, but definitely an apple in a better place, mentally and emotionally. This apple had not yet been traumatized by time, or perhaps, simply had a good therapist, because this second apple was crunchier — still on the softer side, but on the pleasing side of that fence. Didn’t melt in your mouth or turn to sand, but also didn’t remain asserting itself between your chompers for ten minutes. The apple was also a bit more flavorful — still not like WOW OOH ZING, but it had a taste like a lesser Cox’s Orange Pippin, or a Golden Delicious. Still not a thrilling apple. Still not lemonadey, at all. Not particularly juicy. But enjoyable for what it was.
That second apple punched up the tartness and sweetness a bit. Was sunnier. The citrus was more orange than lemon.
Still not great, but didn’t hate it at all.
As such, I’ll judge the apple based on the better of the two, but know that the first one would’ve gotten a 3/10 easy. Second one, let’s call it a 5/10.
It’s never precisely easy to be a writer — professional or otherwise. I mean, it’s easy in the sense of, hey, anybody can open a word processor and start (fiercely or methodically) putting a story down on the page, one mad word at a time. But it’s also quite hard: you have to reckon with a difficult industry, a lack of respect and recognition from the non-writers in your life, a schedule that surely isn’t conducive, a dearth of proper places to actually sit down and make the words happen, and so forth. Writing always, always feels like an act that vacillates wildly between the Herculean and the Sisyphean — always difficult, sometimes triumphant, sometimes you’re pancaked by the boulder you’ve been shoving up the hill for days, weeks, months, years.
But I also think that, oof, ooh boy, 2025 has really hammered the nails in, hasn’t it? Hammered those fuckers in deep.
It’s like, okay —
First, the world sucks, and it’s hard to push through the wall of pulsating snarge just to find some clean runway in which to take off and get some clear skies for a nice writing day.
Second, everything is getting more expensive, which often means doing more non-writing work, which leaves precious little time for the writing work.
Third, I dunno that book sales are down, but the industry is certainly seeming harder on some folks this year — maybe this is just what I’m seeing, but I know a lot more authors in this past year who have had real difficulties with the industry (not the work, but the industry). Difficulties getting published, difficulties with advances, difficulties getting attention above the noise. It doesn’t help that film and television is in such a weird place, which makes it harder to secure any additional money from the random book option — and foreign rights sales seem down, too, for most folks I know.
(And again, this is all as costs are going up.)
Fourth, trends seem to be dominating more — and this isn’t a knock against the writers or readers of those trends, but rather a knock against publishers who really, really are leaning harder than ever on said trends. (Always a fraught path. Every trend is a bubble, and every bubble is fit to burst.)
Fifth, the itchy death rash of generative AI and LLMs continues to pop up everywhere, its digital blisters uglying up everything they touch. The value of writing is under assault by the shitsucking techlords that are cramming it into everything, and it’s further under assault by the users of AI, users in the truest sense who gladly fetishize ideas while dismissing the work and effort necessary to create great things.
In a lot of ways, this is pretty demoralizing. It’s hard not to feel like this is overwhelming — even insurmountable.
But I want to present and preserve some optimism here — and not because I feel obligated to tap-dance so as to not leave you feeling absolute pants-shittingly sad on the cusp of a new year, but because I honestly possess this optimism, and it’s optimism in part that comes from what I wrote the other day (the open letter against the open letter against AI blah blah blah thing).
It goes a little something like this —
AI is not intelligent. There is no sentience there. There’s no there there. It offers no real mind, no real cognition, certainly no imagination. And we know this because the way it was and is built requires that the shitsucking techlords steal all our crap and feed it into the plagiaristic artbarf machine. Seriously. It doesn’t come up with anything on its own. It only has what it has taken. It offers nothing of its own. It offers everything of ours. It’s a comedian who can only steal jokes. It has no humor, and no understanding of humor. It doensn’t understand anything. It doesn’t know anything. Because, drum roll please, it’s not intelligent. It’s not human.
AI will never be better than you or me. It will never be better than the sum total of human art and existence. It can only be behind, beneath, lesser. It will always be trying to catch up, to pilfer and thieve, to quickly gorge itself on the meals we make and then throw it all back up again as if it’s a culinary master. But it’s no master. It’s not even an apprentice. It’s just a really fancy Xerox Machine — a haughty Lorum Ipsum generator.
It doesn’t have what you and I have.
We’re most compelled by — and affected by — original work. And I understand here that original is fraught as an idea. In a lot of ways, nothing is ever original. Everything has, in its way, come before. And therein you might think, well, that’s how the AI gets us, innit? If nothing is original, it can just scoop it all up and reprocess it accordingly, and produce “new” things ad infinitum. We’re cooked. But there is a factor of originality in the things we love and that factor is always, always, always the lens through which the thing is seen. And that lense is the storyteller. The storyteller or tellers who tell a tale, whether we’re talking book or film or song or music video or painting or whatever, is the unique factor. They are the original and crucial part — a keystone that locks the whole thing together. Perspective matters. Experience matters. The arrangements we choose or are obsessed by really fucking matter. Put differently, we lend our imagination — an imagination forged in the fires of our experiences and our traumas and our opinions and our families and friends and and and — to the work, and that cannot be reproduced. Not by AI. Not by other writers. Not by any force in the known universe. Not to get all writers are special snowflakes on you, but maybe we are special snowflakes. Maybe we are each a uniquely crystalline configuration.
And this isn’t just about AI, either — this is about publishers who want trends, this is about filmmakers who want to make films. Some of the most amazing things are always the things that set the trends, rather than the things that follow them. And looking at movies this year, it wasn’t the Repeated Franchise Work that really sang. It was Sinners, it was Weapons, it was Sirat and One Battle After Another and Black Bag and the Baltimorons.
What I’m trying to say is: we’re going to fucking win.
We, the people — we, the humans — are going to fucking win.
I want to say it again and you say it with me:
WE ARE GOING TO FUCKING WIN.
We’re it, man. We’re the reason for the season. Everything that has ever mattered (in the human world, not the natural world, to be clear) comes from people. Individuals and communities. Not from machines, not from corporations, but from people and communities who not only have ideas but the wherewithal to pursue those ideas with effort, commitment, learning, and sheer teeth-gritting bloody-mindedness. I want you to feel that in your bones. I want you to feel the power you possess as a person in this world who tells stories. We’re going to what?
We’re going to win. How?
I want you to tell those stories. Your stories. The ones that matter most to you — not the ones that feed machines, not the ones that feed companies, but the ones that feed you, and by proxy, the audience beyond you.
In a sense, most of my annual resolutions are probably some version of this: write who you are, fuck trends, get weird, and especially this year, fuck the machine. But this year I want you to not only implement that but also to do it with hope in your heart and spite in your teeth. I want you to be the best, weirdest version of yourself you can be. Turn off all your sad bummer imposter worries, shut down your doubts. Demolish the guardrails and kick over the road closed signs. Get weird with it. Get YOU with it. I want to see that on the page. We all want to see that on the page. No AI can do what you do. No AI can be who you are. No trend needs to inform the work. You are the trend. You are your own genre. Fuck it all. None of that shit matters. It’s all something that someone else made up. Rip that shit out of your heart and your guts and your head and fingerpaint with the viscera on the page. Put you there. In the words. In between the words. Make choices. Wield yourself.
That is how we win.
I’ll tell you, briefly, the thing that got me to this optimism — it wasn’t just my post the other day, but it was in combination with something else.
It was the news that Scott Hawkins is finally writing a second novel.
I am an acolyte of his first book — The Library at Mount Char, which you should definitely read if you haven’t, and you should do so with minimal investigation. It’s a super weird fucking book, in the best way possible. I often say that it vibes like if someone took an urban fantasy conceit and wrote it as the proper horror that conceit really is. The story is truly its own thing. I could not have written that book. You could not have written that book. And for damn fucking sure the artbarf machine could not have written that book. Only Scott Hawkins could have written it. And he did write it.
And that’s a special magic.
He did write it.
How fucking glorious is that? He wrote it. It exists. Nobody else could’ve done it but him. AND HE DID IT. We have it! We get to have this book that he chose to write. And that’s true of so many books! So many books that are the sole product of their authors not just in the literal sense but in the deeper, metaphysical sense. Nobody out there is writing a Hailey Piper or Eric LaRocca book besides Hailey Piper and Eric LaRocca. Nobody else could have written Paul Tremblay’s Cabin at the End of the World or CJ Leede’s Maeve Fly or Nat Cassidy’s Mary or Premee Mohamed’s Butcher in the Forest. Nobody out there is Le Guin or King or Poppy Brite or Josh Malerman or Tananarive Due or Robin Hobb or John Scalzi or friends of mine like Kevin Hearne, Delilah Dawson, Adam Christopher. No other book is The Starless Sea or Hap & Leonard or Brown Girl Dreaming or Annihilation or or or or or — like, I have to pick a place to stop here because I could do this for days. Days! Weeks! Endless lists of books that could’ve only been written by the writers who wrote them — writers who did write them and now we have them. We have these books. We have these books.
WE HAVE THESE BOOKS
That’s a miracle — but not a rare miracle. A miracle like a sunrise, or a strange cloud, or a weird bird. A miracle that happens often, that maybe we don’t appreciate enough. It’s special. Stories are special. Storytellers are special.
Machines aren’t special.
Publishers aren’t special.
None of the bullshit that drags us down is special.
But the work — the work and what the work produces — is absolutely special.
And we are absolutely going to fucking win.
So, I just want you to vibe that shit. I want you to feel good about that. I want you to feel powerful in this regard. We have all these books and the very best, the absolute zenith, of what a machine can do with these books is steal them and photocopy them into some weaker, sadder version. It can never make anything better than the things it takes. The machine is weak. The machine doesn’t have ideas. It doesn’t do work. It has our ideas, our work. That means something. It wouldn’t steal what we do if what we do wasn’t special.
That means you get to go be special.
That means you can write the weird thing, the big thing, the thing only you can write. That means you get to make miracles. That means the AI can’t do what we do because the AI doesn’t know what we do. The more we reject trends and formulas and tropes, the more the AI can’t pin us the fuck down. The more we duck and move, feint and dodge, the more the machine can’t track us. We cover ourselves in the mud of our own creation so the Predator cannot find us.
So, consider that your resolution.
Wield the weapon that is you.
Get weird with it.
Make something the machine can only steal and reproduce shittily.
(And above all else: do not use the tool of our enemy. No gen-AI, no LLMs. Not for nothing. Be human. Write for humans. Human-authored, human-edited, human-designed, human-marketed work. Editors, narrators, designers, cover artists, marketers. People all the way down. Do not feed the machine.)
We have these books.
We have you.
We are going to win.
All right.
That’s it for me, I think —
I want to say thanks to all of you who come here and who read this stuff, and furthermore, who are kind enough to share it. Storytelling, I am oft to note, is a call in the darkness and we hope to hear someone, somewhere, call back. And this blog is that, too. It’s me in this dark place, shouting, hoping someone is there to hear, and that someone is there to shout back. Thanks for being there in the dark with me. In 2026, let’s shout in the dark together.
