Hello Thursday!

Last week I had an appointment with an occupational therapist because of a strained muscle in my shoulder. She gave me a set of exercises to do three times a day and had me make a return appointment in two weeks. She said the who thing should be cleared up in a few months, and I don’t doubt her. OT exercises are really amazing to me. Each exercise they give you is dead easy, so that you think “there’s no way this will do anything,” but by the time you finish a set of ten, you’re really struggling because they’ve so precisely targeted the particular muscle you need to work on. 

I was on Etsy the other day and stumbled upon one of those “we’ll print your fanfiction and bind it into a book for you” services. And I got to thinking that it might me nice to have bound copies of Victorian lady spy K-pop AU fanfics, so I downloaded both volumes from AO3 as PDFs so I could get the length and see how much it would cost to have them printed and bound. This led me to two realizations:

1. As nice as it might be, I don’t think it would be $58/volume worth of nice at present.

2. Each book in the series is over 350 pages! This was another “Wow! I guess I am a real writer!” moment — somehow 375 pages feels realer than 164,000 words.

So I won’t be buying bound copies of my stories right now, but I will be finishing volume 2 by the end of this month and then immediately starting work on volume 3. I have to! Volume 2 ends at a cliffhanger, and I want to find out what happens next!

A fun creative writing exercise

Grace and I are re-watching Burn Notice (highly recommended, if you haven’t watched it). Inspired by Burn Notice’s rather bizarre use of Pete Townsend’s “Let My Love Open the Door” as their closing credits song, I came up with this creative writing exercise: Randomly generate a year between 1970 and 1989 and a number between 1 and 100. Then to go the Wikipedia category Lists of Billboard Year-End Hot 100 singles, find that year and that song, and come up with an idea for a spy, detective, or cop show using that song as the theme song. 

For example: 1981, #35: “While You See a Chance” by Steve Winwood. This one seems pretty straightforward. Some of them are much harder.

Optional rule for increased difficulty: If the song is a funk song, the show cannot be set in the 1970s and cannot have a Black protagonist.

Things to check out online

• My friend and former classmate Keith Pille wrote a manifesto last year “Be a Goddamned Human: An Art-making Manifesto.” It’s an amazing piece of work. It’s exceedingly rare that I read something and say “Yes! I agree with this!” with no nitpicks or caveats, but I agree with what Keith has written here. In fact, this is one of those times when I have to be generous as a writer: If you have time to read Keith’s manifesto or the rest of this newsletter but not both, read Keith’s manifesto. 

What I’ve been reading:

Since last week I’ve finished reading

• Minnesota Monthly, September/October 2026 

• Doughnuts Under a Crescent Moon, vol. 4 (Shio Usui) — I was pleased and surprised that they did manage to reach a happy ending at the end of this volume without it feeling rushed or forced. There is one part of the end that I’m not sure how to feel about, though: We don’t get any physical affection between the main characters other than holding hands. They even talk about not being interested in kissing or other physical affection. And without knowing the author’s intentions and editorial policies of the magazine where this story was originally published, I don’t know if I should be “Yay! Positive asexual representation!” or “Geez! What a cop-out! Lesbians deserve better!” I’m inclined to lean toward “Yay!” because I like feeling more positively about things, and an article I found at Anime News Network shows that I’m not the only one who’s uncertain about the “correct” interpretation here but leaning toward positive asexual representation.

• Witch Hat Atelier, vol. 14 (Kamome Shirahama) — And I’m once again left eagerly wondering “What’s going to happen next?” Volumes 15 and 16 are already out in Japan. Volume 15 has a December 2026 publication date in English; volume 16 doesn’t have an official English-language publication date, but will likely be out in March or April 2027, so the wait won’t be too long. // This series is worth study for writers, and for writers of YA in particular: The villains aren’t just mustache-twirling “evil for the sake of being evil,” but actually believe that they’re changing the world for the better (or preventing it from being changed for the worse.) And when the children think of something that the adults didn’t, it doesn’t feel like it’s because all the adults in the book are idiots. It feels more realistic, that the children simply haven’t internalized the “this is the way things are and so this is the that they have to be” that the adults have fallen prey to. Plus, the art for the series is beautiful.

I’ve continued reading

• Art in America, Fall 2026 — “Cringe Culture” by Eugenie Brinkema (page 88) was a particularly good article from this issue. Brinkema does a great job of define what “cringe” is and the function that it serves in art. I especially liked this section on the political function of cringe, and difference between cringe and schadenfreude:
  

  Complicating matters, one person’s cringe is another person’s enjoyment. If X thinks some event will never befall them, or if they disallow any similarity to Y, then X might relish the spectacle of Y’s mortification — this is schadenfreude. If, however, I feel sympathy with Y on any grounds, then their humiliation is mine as well . . . . Cringe thereby exposes a political truth: With whom do we feel we share something in common? It is an aesthetic reaction that strips bare one’s ethics of identification.

  I also appreciated (and will be making use of Brinkema’s conception of the “Four Horsemen of the Digitally Vulnerable — the queer, neurodivergent, economically precarious, and socially isolated.” It’s remarkable not only how being in any of these categories makes one more susceptible to online harassment, but also how being in any of these categories makes one more like to be in more of these categories. 

• Wanderhome RPG (Jay Dragon) 

• The Turbulent Appearance of Brise Collier (Natalie Kelda) 

• Food Wars!: Shokugeki no Soma, vol. 23 (Yuto Tsukuda) — It seems like in any manga that runs for long enough, it’s revealed that the current conflict is an echo of a conflict from the previous generation. That has happened now in Food Wars!, and I can’t wait to see where it takes us.

• Once Broken Faith (Seanan McGuire) 

If you missed any past Thursdays, you can access the archives here.

And as always, THIS NEWSLETTER CONTAINS 100% HUMAN-CREATED WORDS.

Have a great week, and I’ll see you next Thursday,

Jason