The sad thing is Barnes & Noble is on the same path and people don’t seem to talk about it as much.

I Have Something to Communicate

First BQ&A Interview of 2026 is live w one of my favorite people in the world: @loriraderday.bsky.social We talk about art, inspiration, legacy and audience. Lori is such a smart and insightful writer and teacher. Enjoy! bryonquertermous.substack.com/p/bq-and-a-i...

For a decade we’ve known the biggest threat to our national security is right wing extremism. But rather than rooting it out and stopping it we gave them full control of our governmen.

It boggles my mind that I am still seeing brand new books coming out with blurbs from AJ Finn. Even if he wasn’t radioactive, the fact that he’s blurbed SO many books would make me want to avoid him.

THE PLOT was one of my favorite novels the year it came out, but @jeanhanff.bsky.social has outdone her own brilliance with this one. The Tom Ripley in Publishing vibe is still great here layered with themes of grief and ambition and who can really tell our own stories. I loved it so much.

I am a relentless cutter, but tamer than I used to be for this reason. After a certain point, I found the more cutting I did sucked everything out of the book that made it special and made it mine.

As someone who has judged multiple Edgar Award categories + other awards I’ve seen two scenarios play out 99% of the time. Most common is a small cluster of entries that are great and nearly indistinguishable between each other and it takes a lot of discussion and difficulty picking the winner. 1/2

Pieces like this should be heartening to all writers. Absolutely no one knows what will be a hit in publishing so all we can do as writers is write the book we want to write and make it as good as possible and then keep doing that until luck, timing, and readers are ready for what your stuff.

This is why a certain “progressive” social media provocateur - one of my earliest blocks on Twitter - found that his shit take hate bait content tanked on Bluesky even though it was very popular everywhere else. People here are sick of the negativity and just want a safe space to enjoy the Internet.

With all the shit going on in the US, stuff like the Razzies need to go away. Hate watching is a product of a time when people had to look for reasons to be unhappy. That is no longer the case. These days I’m all about support, kindness, and gratitude. www.hollywoodreporter.com/lists/razzie...

Just finished by fourth book of the year and it was a good one.

Hard Same vvvvvvv

Great grandparents were Canadian and we live 30 minutes from the border. Good to know. Good to know.

Sunday reading.

I love the idea of optional captions for plot recaps, but integrated into the story is a hard no for me.

I‘m always boggled by attempts to create art for right wing audiences because the vast majority of right wing audiences do not like art or consume art. Especially theater. It’s antithetical to everything they believe.

Your brain is a hallucination engine. Feed it a steady diet of shit, and it will build you a shit world. So what happens when you change what you feed it? www.kameronhurley.com/were-fucked-...

Navigating life with ADHD requires an ever-changing mix of high tech and low tech processes and tools. One of the things I‘ve been realizing is that I need to have a notebook on me at all times because handwriting important notes imprints them on my brain better than typing them into an Apple note.

Some of you have fallen off the routine of getting your pages in on your 2026 project. Some of you are feeling like you've failed because of that. You have not. Targets are there to get you writing, so all you have to do is start writing again. You've got this. You can finish! Just. Keep. Writing.

We like to endlessly dunk on bad takes and narratives. But all that does is promote more of the bad take. Make your own good take. Promote that. It's the difference between driving a conversation and reacting to one.

Mastering simple and obvious narratives rather than worrying about subtext or being too hamfisted are lessons all of us need to learn if we truly want to fight facism. “Woke” and “elite” are just different ways of telling dems and libs to stop trying to be subtle and proper. Be obvious and raw.

The “prosecute the former regime at every level” candidate has my vote in 2028.

Beyond the (fun!) magazine-trend-piece headline, this is a wise and thoughtful and timely consideration of parenting and living and being human in a world increasingly designed to obliterate boredom and frustration and friction and risk www.thecut.com/article/broo...

If you're looking to follow the short essays here about writing, power, failure, survival, and why stories are worth telling at all, I've rounded them up at ye olde blogge www.kameronhurley.com/blog/ (HOW RETRO IS THAT???)

Seems like today was a good day to stay offline and play Dungeons and Dragons all day…

With that kind of ambition, your chances of perfection are basically nil. But oh, the reach! How many people never even try because they know they don't quite have the talent to pull it off? The older I get, the more impressed I am at people doing imperfect work but doing it w/everything they've got

Inspired by @jordanharper.bsky.social I want to get back to reading plays this year and was just wondering what my first should be. I’m woefully under read in Christopher Durant and The Marriage of Bette and Boo seems like a great place to start.

I just had a natural peanut butter sandwich with natural strawberry preserves on whole grain bread and that might be the most satisfying sandwich I’ve ever had.

When in doubt, do as @meganabbott.bsky.social says and always make the weird choice, and like @jordanharper.bsky.social says, in a world of AI be stranger, weirder, and hornier.

Winding down a shitty year in my favorite place in the world: a movie theater. And every theater is *packed* for STRANGER THINGS, which is so cool to see.

It’s cold and snowy and miserable here to end the year, but I’m seeing Stranger Things in a theater tonight and until then I have this very delightful book from Deborah Levinson that’s giving off major Janet Evanovich and Finley Donovan energy.

Amen. Hallelujah. Etc. Publishers need to stop looking for shortcuts and get back to building audiences and careers the sustainable way, through time, experimentation, and trust. Stop being an industry that lives and dies by homeruns, be an industry that thrives on strings of singles and doubles.

Watched WAKE UP DEAD MAN again last night and enjoyed it even more than the first time. I think it’s the most rewatchable of the trilogy so far. I love how angry the movie is at bullshit anger and manipulation. It doesn’t rage against religion as much as people who use religion for power and money.

Thinking about films in 2025 and I still can't reconcile the facts that 1) there was an adaptation of Donald Westlake's Parker series written and directed by Shane Black and 2) it was one of the worst movies I've ever seen.

I always love how @jimchines.com does an annual post about his writing income. Following the posts through the years give a pretty realistic and interesting perspective on the industry. Here is his latest post with links to all of the previous posts as well. www.patreon.com/posts/2024-w...

My last newsletter of the year is bursting with fun stuff including my favorite reads of the year from @maris.bsky.social @jordanharper.bsky.social @loriraderday.bsky.social @greenwell.bsky.social and others!

Good morning, Baltimore. Over at Oldster, I’m back on my other bullshit, working through the endless list of things I don’t know. This time, I’m trying to figure out why I’m happier than I’ve ever been despite the state of the world, etc. open.substack.com/pub/oldster/...

One of the things I’ve been working with my therapist on is letting myself enjoy achieving the majority of a goal. Writing every day and hard deadlines are great in theory, but useless when life intervenes and I lose all motivation.

The immediate threat has always been not that it would take jobs, but that some dipshit exec would spend a billion dollars integrating it into the business, drive everything off the cliff, and 5-8 years later the rest of us are left picking up the pieces.

Second annual solo Christmas movie outing for MARTY SUPREME after a nice meal of Chinese food. Time with family at the holidays is nice, but don’t underestimate the joy of holiday time by yourself.

Taking a break from Agatha Christie movies for my favorite Christmas movie of all time.

For @rollingstone.com, I wrote about the making of the myth of sheriff Buford Pusser, and how recent revelations that he was likely responsible for the 1967 murder of his wife, Pauline, undercuts that myth -- and begs for a new narrative about intimate partner violence and family trauma.

Christmas always feels like Agatha Christie season to me, and I’m starting this week with one I’m shocked I’ve missed for this long: Evil Under the Sun. Star-studded cast and screenplay by Anthony Shaffer. What’s not to love? Will probably follow up with the companion Death on the Nile.

Something something own your own domain and website also something something blog revival.

The entire Internet economy is fake and propped up by the same six rich people handing each other the same bag of money.

Stop sharing the fucking post. Jesus Christ. Let it die in silence and darkness like it deserves.

For sheer fun AVENGERS: END GAME opening night with a full crowd. Quieter memories are APOCALYPSE NOW REDUX at the Lowe’s Astor Place the night before I left NYC and moved back home, then walking through a blizzard downtown Ann Arbor and taking refuge in the State Theater to see SIDEWAYS.

Best Christmas gift since the Tom Cruise cake.

YES. Then cast Gosling and Emma Stone as Nick and Nora.