“Our fathers and ourselves sowed dragon’s teeth / Our children know and suffer the armed men.”
– Stephen Vincent Benet, “Litany for Dictatorships”

Times have been hard for a lot of folks, and there are many reasons why the immediate future looks bleak. I’m worried about a great many things – some of them very real, others probably somewhat fanciful. I don’t know what to do next, and I don’t know where to turn, except towards one another.

What I do know is that I have to keep doing what I do. Not because it’s an act of resistance, not because art will save anyone (myself included), not even because I don’t have any real choice, but because, as Stephen Vincent Benet says in the poem I quoted above, “a man must go to his work.”

I’ve been a full-time freelance writer for over a decade now. Like it or not, my livelihood is tied up in my stories and essays about weird monsters, cheesy movies, ghosts and goblins, and anything else someone will pay me to write about.

Over the last few years, I’ve seen my industry suffer in various ways. I’ve known lots of people who got laid off from jobs at major publications, seen other publishers struggle against a rising tide of “AI” slop. I’ve lost some clients because they simply went out of business, others because they were bought by bigger companies, laid off their editorial staff, cut costs to the point where they no longer paid enough to make writing for them worthwhile, and on and on.

The fragmentation and enshittification of social media has led to a massive shift in how authors and artists have to hawk their wares – a shift that we haven’t yet felt the full repercussions of, I’m very sure. For now, I’ve made a comfortable home at Bluesky, where I get more engagement than I ever did on any of the other platforms, but who knows how long that will last?

I’ve also been trying to put together some other alternatives. I’m on Discord, if you know where to find me there, and I’m working on setting up a newsletter. I’ve also started a Patreon where you can follow along as I write about old monster movies. I’m still tweaking the pricing tiers and there are some future elements coming hopefully soon. And, of course, you can always find me at this here website.

I’m a regular contributor to Weird Horror, Signal Horizon, and Unwinnable, and a more irregular contributor many other places, as well as movies editor for Unwinnable’s sister publication, Exploits, if you ever want to write about movies for an extremely token sum.

I recently kicked off a new column at Signal Horizon, where I’m writing about gimmick films, midnight spook shows, and the links between the two. It’s a subject I’m very fond of, and I’m looking forward to exploring it across the coming months.

Other projects are in the works, but these things take time. Recently, I finished a new short story for the first time in a few months, which was a good feeling, even if now I have to do the revisions on it, which is a less good feeling.

Ultimately, though, freelance work is simply thinner on the ground than it used to be and, like so many people, I’m feeling the pinch. If you’ve got a project that you think I would be well suited to, get in touch and let’s talk about it! You can see some of the work I’ve done at my Muckrack.

This is only partly a lament about the state of freelance writing in 2025, though. It’s also a post about solidarity. Things are tough all over, for reasons that go far beyond the economic, and I know so many people who are suffering, many of them much more than I. These are the times when we have to try to be there for one another when and where we can.

I don’t always know what that looks like, but I know that it will take generosity, determination, and solidarity. Wherever we’re going, we’ll only get there together.

“You are about to go on a journey into terror! Hope you have a strong heart!”