No More Meta

Mpepper/ January 16, 2025/ Announcements/ 0 comments

Last year, I left Twitter (X). It was a tough decision; I had spent 15 years building and curating a network of fellow writers, readers, film enthusiasts, and the like. I stuck it out as long as I could—longer, really, than I should have. Sure, my little corner of that hell site had remained mostly clean and comfortable, but I

Read More

It Goes Both Ways

Mpepper/ January 3, 2025/ Uncategorized

Time for yet another unpopular opinion. See, I really do want to support small, independent bookstores. I’d like to believe we’re in this together, so to speak. But that’s an idealistic, unrealistic view. Because, as with so many things in this f***ed up world, it actually comes down to money. I live in an area that has an indie bookstore

Read More

End-of-Year Sale

Mpepper/ December 29, 2024/ Announcements

Now through January 1, you can grab the ebook versions of The Switchgrass Crown and The Ghosts of Marshley Park for 50% off on Smashwords! Click here for TSC. Click here for GoMP.

Goals for 2025

Mpepper/ December 26, 2024/ Uncategorized

I’m not one for resolutions, but I do like to set goals. Quantifiable is better; otherwise, how do you really know if you’ve achieved it? But I also reserve the right to shift, move, and/or change my goals as I go. I think flexibility is key. Reading In 2024, I set a goal of 42 books and managed to read

Read More

Year in Review

Mpepper/ December 24, 2024/ Flashbacks, Writing

Sure, there’s another week left in 2024, but I can’t imagine what could happen to change my feelings about the year in general. It was a bad one for me. I barely wrote and didn’t publish anything. I was asked to run for the local school board then backstabbed by the people who encouraged me to get involved in the

Read More

When You Can’t Forget

Mpepper/ December 11, 2024/ Flashbacks

I’ve seen a Jack Prelutsky poem circulating on Bluesky, and… I want to like it. I want to like his work. I used to like it—love it, even—but as the saying goes, “Don’t meet your heroes.” I grew up… not poor, exactly, but we didn’t have excess for anything unnecessary. When Prelutsky’s book The New Kid on the Block came

Read More

Ignorance Is Not Bliss: The Sleeping Beauty* Metaphor

Mpepper/ October 25, 2024/ Think Pieces

*Using Disney’s animated feature for reference here. About a month ago, I posted this YouTube video about why diversity in media is not only a good thing, it’s not really a threat to the status quo. Due to my run for school board, I was thinking mostly about the attempts to ban books, but it applies to all the dude

Read More

RIP Lynda Obst

Mpepper/ October 23, 2024/ Flashbacks

Two days ago, I posted a book review of Matthew McConaughey’s Greenlights on my YouTube channel. Reading the book (and reviewing it) necessarily made me think about my time on film sets, which of course made me think of interning for Lynda Obst. The very next day—yesterday—I saw the headline that Lynda had passed away. She was young; the same

Read More

Find Me Online

Mpepper/ October 21, 2024/ Announcements

This weekend, I joined the many who have exited X (formerly known as Twitter). It was a tough decision; I’d been on the platform since February 2009 and curated a really great community made mostly of writers but also artists and others. I stuck out wave after wave of bad decisions, keeping to the fringes and my core group rather

Read More