I began this post last night, fully intending it to be my last post of 2025. I had planned to post it before midnight. Unfortunately I didn’t make it to midnight. I fell asleep well short of it and that was just fine.
I haven’t had any kind of consistent posting schedule on this blog (do we still call them blogs?) and that’s not likely to change for next year. As always, I will try but I’m not making any promises.
2025 was not a bad for me as a writer. As a citizen of planet Earth watching the slow but steady rise of global fascism, it’s been a nightmare.
2026 will see at least four books coming out as well as at least one anthology in which my work is featured. 2025 saw my story A SINGULAR INFESTATION published at the Amazing Stories Website. That story, I’ve recently been informed, will be part of their Best of 2025 anthology.
As for today, I think the very beginning of the year, the day that we stand blinking in the sunlight of a new adventure that will last the next 365 days, is a better time to stop and pause. Hopefully we remember the lessons of the previous year and implement them as we collectively go forward. Hopefully we remember our mistakes and don’t repeat those.
We stand in hope that 2026 will be a better year (it wouldn’t be hard) and we try to quell the fear that 2026 will have more of the same or worse.
Either way, here we are caught between hope and fear with no choice but to continue on.
Happy New Year to all who read this. May the next year be heavy on hope and light on the fear.
I’ve been making it a habit to write at least 500 words a day (and sometimes more). This is how I managed to complete my last Wild Incorporated book, the super secret, 30,000 word novella I just completed, and it’s how I have been progressing on my brand new Sirtago and Poet story.
I’m about a third of the way through and you will be able to read it later on in the year. It’s going to be published in a collection with another novella which will make its debut in the next SWORDS OF FIRE anthology. (this will be number 4)
But today’s 500 words were hard to get going, but once they started flowing I had to stop myself, because there’s a part coming up that I want to come at fresh tomorrow.
And that’s how it’s done, folks. One word after another, one sentence after another, one paragraph after another. Blocks of writing time that equals 500 words that move the story along.
This is how I hope to continue along to the end of this one and then two more after that that I have planned out, and then after that… who knows?
I wrote a weird western story. The Devil’s Defile is a newly released anthology of supernatural western stories. Taking place in the spooky haunted old west town called Devil’s Gulch, The Black Lake is one of four stories featured in this newest release from Rage Machine Books.
The Black Lake is a story about skinwalkers, demons, race relations (kind of) and the price one pays for pursuing justice.
Devil’s Gulch is a Western town where strange things lie in the shadows. The Weird West was never weirder in this shared world anthology set in a town haunted by ghosts and worse.
The anthology also features weird tales written by M. D. Jackson, T. Neil Thomas and G. W. Thomas
Okay, so you know that I have just released a new Wild Incorporated book, right?
Oh, you don’t? Well, I have! It’s the fourth book in the series and this one is called GO, JOHNNY GO.
But here’s a question:
What does my new Wild Incorporated adventure have to do with Oscar Isaac, Peter Capaldi, Jeffrey Wright and John Malkovich?
Well, the answer is simple. I created several new supporting characters for this book and as I was writing I imagined them being played these actors.
One of the characters that I bring on stage, so to speak, in this book is a character I have mentioned before, but never really written about and that is the book’s man character, Harry Calhoun’s father, Haimish Calhoun.
I’m very serious that, as I was writing I imagined the part being played by Peter Capaldi. He just felt like the perfect actor to take on the role of Harry’s father.
The main villain of the book is a new character called Ivan Golovic. He’s a nasty piece of work, outwardly very charming and likable but inwardly quite deadly. Plus he has a lot of deep dark secrets. He seems to know more about Wild Incorporated and Harry’s involvement with them then Harry is really comfortable with.
As I was writing I decided that the best actor to play that role was Oscar Isaac. The voice, the mannerisms, the facial expressions, Isaac fit the character perfectly. In my mind he was Ivan Golovic (or is that his real name?)
Another character in the book is an aging blues musician named Ezekiel Zacharias. On the surface he is what he appears to be, a simple travelling musician who has managed to book a gig in a club in Toronto.
But as with the other characters, he is more… much more… than he appears. And in my mind he was played by Jeffrey Wright.
Another character who at first appears as a threatening, very menacing figure. But as Harry gets to know him he turns out to be more… much much more… then that. I figure the perfect actor to play the part of Mick the Stick would be John Malkovich.
So… that’s what all these characters have in common. They are my dream cast if this book were ever turned into a movie. No one could afford them all, probably, but this is my dream. And, like I said, I heard their voices and I saw their performances add to the uniqueness of each of the characters as I was writing.
So if you’ve bought the book, or if you’re just thinking about it, maybe you could imagine these actors playing the characters as you read.
Or maybe the cast in your head is better? I’d love to hear about your dream casting.
The new WILD INCORPORATED adventure is available! Currently only in e-book format but soon in paperback and all over the world!
So, what’s it about? Well, according to the back blurb:
WILD INCORPORATED is a crime fighting organization whose origin is shrouded in secrecy. Harry Calhoun has become a member of this strange group. Led by the mysterious Morrigan Wild and aided by five talented experts in differing fields, the organization travels the world to right wrongs and battle evildoers. But is Harry Calhoun really cut out to be part of the team?
GO, JOHNNY GO
Harry goes back to his home town of Toronto, trying to move past Wild Incorporated. Home with with his family, he thinks he’s found new love and a new job, but Wild Incorporated is not done with him yet. Harry finds himself in the thick of a deadly mystery that threatens to open Morrigan Wild’s closely held secrets about her father, her old gang, her Fortress of Solitude and a mysterious man who is supposed to be long dead!
Available in ebook right now. BUY IT HERE. Paperback version should be out in a day or two.
In the first volume of this series I covered the origin of the idea of Ka Sirtago and Poet. That was twenty years ago.
This volume has been released in the year 2025. It was 2005 when I wrote the first Sirtago and Poet story. I have been writing these stories for twenty years.
During all that time the characters have developed and changed. They have grown older and, in some ways, more cantankerous (as have I, unsurprisingly) but in some ways they are still the same characters that I wrote about all those years ago.
There is, however, one significant change the stories have undergone and that is the elephant in the room that I need to address. The first half dozen stories were written in the third person, ostensibly from Poet’s point of view. These early stories were shorter, the longest of which, Pieces in a Game, was around 12,000 words long.
The more recent stories are longer. They are all closer to 30,000 words and (and this is the important bit) they are told in the first person, exclusively from Poet’s point of view.
I have absolutely no idea why I decided to change that. After a span of about ten years, since Pieces in a Game was published in the anthology SWORDS OF FIRE, I had not written any Sirtago and Poet stories. Ideas for tales would occasionally roll around the old bean, but I did not actually sit down to write one until 2021 when I wrote Frozen Doom, the tale that ends the first volume in this series, BLADES AND ALCHEMY. That story was written in the third person.
I started writing the story that would become Through Dungeons Deep shortly after. I began writing it in the first person. I don’t really know why I chose to do that, but it just seemed to work. Having the stories told in the first person seemed to be more direct and more intimate. I also started hearing Poet’s voice all the more clearly in my head, much more so than when I was writing the earlier tales.
This direct connection to Poet seemed to galvanize the stories. It gave me a greater insight into the characters and it also helped to sustain the tales as they grew in length. The Sirtago and Poet tales that followed Through Dungeons Deep were all easily twice as long as the earlier stories and, consequently, they became far richer.
As I said, I do not know why I chose to do it that way but I am happy that I did and, for the foreseeable future, any and all Sirtago and Poet stories will be told in the first person from Poet’s point of view.
I imagine Poet scrawling down these tales, reminiscences of a life unjustly lived, perhaps. In that way I was inspired by the FLASHMAN novels of George MacDonald Fraser. In those historical adventures Fraser had an unapologetic Harry Flashman near the end of his life, writing his memoirs full of the unvarnished truth of his escapades, rather different and far more scandalous than his official CV.
When I write a Sirtago and Poet story now I imagine the same fate for the author. Near the end of his life, somewhat well established (perhaps) penning his adventures in exactly the way they happened. An old man’s fading memory notwithstanding, these are, I imagine, as close to the truth as we will get as far as these two characters are concerned.
Truth is a subjective term, of course, considering the fantastical nature of these tales.
Will there be more? Of course there will. There is a third volume in the works with one story already completed which will be accompanied by at least one if not two more tales. It it my sincere hope that I will be able to write Sirtago and Poet tales for the next twenty years, at least.
Though, at this point, I have no plans to reveal Poet’s real name. I imagine at this point even Poet cannot remember his actual name. It will remain an enigma for a long while to come.
This volume is available as an e-book or in paperback. It will soon be available as an audiobook as well and wherever e-books and print books (Barnes & Noble, Kobo, Apple Books, etc.) can be found on the ole’ World Wide Web!
I’m very busily writing the next WILD INCORPORATED adventure. This will be my fourth book in that series and this one is called GO, JOHNNY GO,
It takes place all over the globe! Toronto, New York and a whiz bang climax in the Antarctic at a certain super crime fighter’s secret Fortress, where she goes to try to get some solitude, but that’s difficult when an old enemy from the past is hell-bent on destroying everything she’s built!
It’s being released by RAGE MACHINE BOOKS and it’s even got a cover (despite the fact that I’m still writing it, so I guess I can’t change my mound about the Antarctic). Here it is:
It’s coming along very well at the moment and if all goes according to plan it will be available in November.
However, right now I have released a new edition of the first WILD INCORPORATED book THE SHATTERED MEN. It came out quite a while ago and it had some typographical bugaboos that I have wanted to fix for a while. It also did not match with the editions that came after it. I have fixed it up and the book has a new cover and a new look. It’s the same story so if you have it there’s not much new in this second edition aside from some fixed typos and some cosmetic formatting.
But if you don’t have a copy, then this is the one you want to buy!
I also have a few other books planned. Later this month I will release a second collection of Sirtago and Poet stories. These are Sword & Sorcery tales for those of you who are fans of Robert E. Howard or Fritz Leiber. Sirtago and Poet are a couple of ne’er do-well mercenaries who always seem to run afoul of wizards and wizardry.
BLADES AND ABOMINATIONS gathers together two exciting novellas that contain lots of action, swordplay, foreplay, horseplay and, of course, magic and monsters. Look for it about the middle of July.
I have a third collection of Sirtago and Poet stories and this one will feature at least one story that will not have been previously available anywhere. Look for BLADES AND BEWITCHMENT sometime next year.
Also next year I will have at least one space opera book. Tentatively it’s called THE EMPRESS JADE and it is a prequel to my book THE MASK OF ETERNITY.
And look: There’s even some cover art!
(Which may or may not be the final art, but it looks really cool, right?) I definitely will write it once I’m finished GO, JOHNNY GO and the next Sirtago and Poet story.
Well, here we are at another beautiful Canada Day. The world is on fire (metaphorically) and half the country is literally on fire, but none of that will stop us from celebrating our day.
Who are Canadians? That’s the question, isn’t it? Who are we? What quality do Canadians have that makes us different from everybody else?
That right there is the key to it, I think. Being Canadian is all about identity. Sure, we’re tied to the land and the land is most important to Canadians, but the land is so vast and the terrain so different from coast to coat. From the rocky mountains, to the prairies, from the Canadian shield to the Atlantic shelf, our sovereignty is immutable.
But who are we Canucks? Are we sorry? Are we nice? Are we generous? What do we celebrate when we celebrate our Canadian-ness?
Who do we celebrate as ultimately Canadian?
Well, I think a big clue can be found in a man who is arguably the greatest hero that Canada has ever had; Terry Fox.
Terry Fox would not be a hero to a country that dwells on success or winners, because Terry didn’t win. He lost. He lost his leg to cancer and he tried to raise awareness and raise money to battle cancer by running across this vast country on an artificial leg.
He only got a third of the way. He failed. Cancer got him. Cancer took his life. In any other nation this would be a tragedy and a tragedy only. But here in Canada, Terry’s effort is celebrated at a triumph. His effort is a call to all of us to continue on and help him complete his mission.
That’s who Canadians celebrate. Not the guy who eventually completed Terry’s run. Not the guy who went around the world in a wheelchair. Not the people who succeeded. They are heroes and their achievements are nothing to sneeze at. But when we think of Canadian heroes who do we think about? Who represents our identity?
The guy who tried. The young man who set us on the road. That’s a Canadian hero.
Like I said at the beginning, the world is on fire. We as Canadians find ourselves just like Pierre Elliot Trudeau’s proverbial mouse who lives next to a sleeping elephant. Except now the elephant is awake and he’s kicking and screaming and wearing a cross of iron and a swastika arm band.
I don’t know what’s going to happen, but whatever does, whatever tragedy befalls us, we will try and build an identity out of that. We will find the triumph within the tragedy.
Just in time for my birthday! Do you want to help me celebrate? Buy a copy of my new collection of short fiction! Buy it for kindle or in paperback!
It’s the perfect way to help celebrate my birthday because I get a sale and you get a book! It’s a win-win!
And, just to pique your interest: Here is the introduction to the book!
FOREWORD
One of the problems with being a writer is one of the basic problems of being alive and that is the unreliability of memory.
I’ll get to that in a minute.
Rage Machine Books had published my short story collection of dark fantasy stories in a volume called HERALDED BY BLOOD. This was a collection of stories that I had sold to various markets through the years plus one or two that had never been published prior to that collection.
I had always imagined that they would welcome a companion volume for my science fiction stories that had found markets. I reckoned that I had just enough short stories to fill a slim volume.
But then I thought; what about a collection of the stories that hadn’t found a market?
I conceived of an anthology of short stories called Unloved Tales. The reason they were unloved was because, despite being shunted around to several markets and having made their way in front of the eyes of editors who could potentially purchase them, they were passed on in favor of other, and, perhaps, better stories.
I had what I thought was a rather robust table of contents for this collection… sadly. Stories that I thought were all well and fine, indeed, stories that other editors thought were good stories…
…just not good enough.
And I was tired. Tired of sending the stories out to markets, tired of waiting for a reply, tired of wondering how long I should wait for a reply before sending the story out again to another market, and then repeating the process.
So I thought I would gather up all of these stories… all of these good but not quite good enough stories… and give them a home. A final destination, if you will. It was somewhat akin to retirement. Or perhaps the literary equivalent of sending old Boxer out to pasture (or to the glue factory).
I even had cover art for it.
Then one of the stories sold. That had to be removed from the Table of Contents for obvious reasons.
Then, as I was going through the list I realized that I had run up against that most human of problems, one that tends to get exacerbated with the advancement of years… a failing memory.
Two of the stories in my potential table of contents had found markets that I had forgotten about. They had appeared in a magazine many years ago. Paying markets.
Perhaps it wasn’t big pay. It may only have been a nominal stipend. Nevertheless, those stories could not be considered to be unloved.
Well, after that the entire enterprise collapsed like a house of cards.
However, I did still have my potential list of stories for my companion science fiction anthology. Now I had an opportunity to bring that anthology up to snuff in terms of word count. By combining the two I now had almost 70,000 words of fiction that could make up the collection.
So I had my science fiction collection (though some of the stories are not, strictly speaking, science fiction. Some are clearly fantasy and some defy categorization).
That, plus the fact that not all of these stories ever found a market. Some of the tales in this collection were unloved.
But what of it?
Perhaps these stories will find the love that they were denied in the marketplace. Perhaps as part of this collection these tales will find some modicum of affection from you, reader. After all, if you are reading this either on a printed page or an illuminated screen, congratulations! You have found the stories that were previously unloved until you have showed them some regard.
You may not like them. You may say to yourself; “Well, that wasn’t worth the hard earned cash I plunked down to get this volume sent to my device!” Or you may say; “That story was great! What editor in his right mind would have passed that gem up?”
It’s an arbitrary judgment for a story to have to pass through some form of gatekeeper in order to be deemed worthy. I wrote it. I chose it for this collection. It has the same worth now as all of its brothers, sisters or cousins sharing these pages.
The worth of each story is now for you to decide. Read on. Enjoy. If you hate a story, give the next one a try. If you love a story, move on to the next. You might love that even more.
You, after all, dear reader, have the only judgment on these efforts that I care about.
Well we’re more than a week into January and I haven’t acknowledged that it is now 2025. Perhaps I was putting it off because, like many of us, I’m in a bit of denial about our circumstances. Nevertheless, we must endure.
My birthday is coming up, though and something that I’ve always promised myself is that I would release a collection of the various science fiction stories that I have written over the years. To that end I am just about to release a collection called THE CRYO GAME and Other Stories.
And, according to the blurb on the back of the book:
FROM THE DARKEST RECESSES OF THE MIND TO THE DARKEST CORNERS OF THE GALAXY
These are tales of the future twisted and turned by the trends of the present. Like a funhouse mirror that reflects imperfectly, these are tales seen through a glass darkly.
From a new consciousness birthed in a glitchy computer program, to a warning of the future unheeded by the first emperor of Rome.
From the events of H. G. Wells’ The Time Machine told from the Morlocks’ point of view, to a look at the Beatles if they had never become famous. From a brain in a jar who solves galactic mysteries, to a space jockey accused of murdering a very rich passenger
These are tales from dark worlds, encounters with the fantastic and brushes with eternity.
Does that sound exciting? I hope that it does. The book is scheduled to release later on this week. Keep an eye out for it!
Jack Mackenzie: Writer