This is not a newsletter.

I know what you’re thinking! The world doesn’t need another author newsletter.

Don’t get me wrong – I love them, and I subscribe to TONS of them, but I couldn’t find anything meaningful or special that *I* could contribute.

And while I may not be able to write a newsletter, I CAN write an okay science-fiction story, and that’s what Undercover in the Apocalypse is. An ongoing narrative in installments, addressed to an army of shadow operatives, artists and warriors undercover in a hellscape. A field guide for writers who find themselves trapped behind enemy lines, struggling to make meaningful art amid what feels a lot like an apocalypse.

For you see, Sam J. Miller has come unstuck in time. He burns like screaming neon through the toxic spiraling labyrinth of spacetime. He frolics in post-human forests where ecstatic green has taken back the planet, and in the belly of smoke-stinking industrial hellscape futures. He rides dinosaurs. He issues dire warnings on fifties street corners.

This is not a newsletter.

When I was lucky enough to teach at the Clarion Science Fiction & Fantasy Writer’s Workshop, I realized that while I don’t have all the answers – I DO have all the questions 😅. I’ve grappled with the same challenges so many writers are up against, trying to create meaningful art in a time and a space where art isn’t valued, where the end of the world feels extremely fucking nigh. Whatever’s stumping you or holding you back, I have probably had to figure out my own solution, and I might be able to help you do the same.

Okay YES it’s totally a newsletter.

It’ll have news and updates and events. All that stuff. But it’s also a work of speculative fiction, a story spoken directly to artists and activists making art (and change) in a dystopian future where it feels like all is lost. If you’re trapped in the same nightmare dystopia as me, I hope you’ll opt into a story that centers hope and creativity and resistance and community.