Take That, Hamlet
Hi! Lots of you wrote back in response to the special newsletter I sent out right after the election. I read all of the emails and I tried to get back to...
Let's Talk About It
Hi! I know this is billed as a free monthly newsletter, and I’m sorry to bother you a second time in one week. But I feel compelled to send out an additional...
This Email Is More Than 75 Percent Election-Free
Hello! I hope to keep it brief this month because, let’s be honest, the politics are eating our collective brain. On the Friday before Thanksgiving, I’m...
Closing the Book on Summer
Hello! I have a very special appearance coming up soon that I wanted you to know about. On Wednesday, October 9th at 7 pm, I’ll be interviewing Irish...
Against Washington
Hi! Lots of states have been updating their flags recently. Some of them are eliminating blatant racist iconography—shout out to Mississippi for going from...
The Happy Surprise of Kamala Harris
Hi! I like to think I know a little bit about politics. In the weeks after his disastrous debate performance, I had expected President Biden to eventually...
Let’s Go Shopping!
Hi! Because it’s been such a rough week in politics, I wanted to open with a quick piece of advice from my boss at Civic Ventures, Zach Silk, that has helped...
She's Written Her Own Last Chapter
Hi there! I got an email from Seattle writer Lesley Hazleton earlier this month, which was, on its own, not an especially unusual event. I had become...
Five Years of Visiting Bookstores
Hi! This month, my Neighborhood Reads column at the Seattle Times—in which I profile a different Seattle-area independent bookstore every month—officially...
The Hole in My Bumbershoot
Hi! Seattle’s Labor-Day-weekend music and arts festival, Bumbershoot, announced their arts programming earlier this month. There’s a fashion exhibit, an...
The Lying Machine
Hello! Lately, I’ve been thinking about writing comics again. After a year or so of slow going, three solid ideas have been banging around in my head,...
Following Politics Is a Good Way to Get Trampled
Hello! I used to be obsessed with following presidential campaigns. Even in 1996, probably the most boring campaign in my lifetime, I kept close track of Bob...
My Buttondown Life
Hello! If you’re reading this email, I’m happy to report that I’ve successfully migrated my email away from Substack. I looked at a number of newsletter...
Werner Herzog's AI Apocalypse
Hi there! Earlier this month, AHOY Comics published my most recent comics work in Project: Cryptid #3, a story I wrote called “The Demon in the Pines.” It’s...
The Lies That Rich People Tell
Hi! First of all, thanks so much to those of you who sent sympathetic get-well-soon notes after last issue’s account of my first bout with Covid. You were so...
In Poor Taste
Friends, Three and a half years after the beginning of the pandemic, I finally caught Covid for the first time. It was pretty rough! The fever completely...
Two Cryptids for the Price of One
Hello! I’m excited to let you know that the comic with my short story “The Demon in the Pines,” illustrated by the amazing Peter Krause, will be published...
A Post-Post World
Hello, If you’re in Seattle, I hope you’ll join me at the Elliott Bay Book Company on Tuesday, August 29th at 7 pm. I’ll be interviewing author Garth Stein...
A Vision (Pro) of Loneliness
Howdy, Earlier this month, Apple unveiled their Vision Pro headset, ending years of wild speculation about Apple’s strategy for virtual/augmented reality. I...
That Last Step Was a Doozy
Hi there! In the last newsletter, I wrote about my fears that AI would replace a lot of writers relatively quickly. Within a week of sending that email, I...
A Human Wrote This
Hello! Just about every writer I know has lost their mind over ChatGPT and other AI language models this year. And for good reason! AI has become very good...
The Super Craptastic Bookselling Machine
Last weekend, I suffered a catastrophic collision with a box of Girl Scout cookies that left me awake in the middle of the night suffering from what I...
Information Doesn't Want to Be Free
Hi! Next week, the annual Association of Writers and Writing Programs (AWP) conference is happening in Seattle. There will be a ton of panels, parties, and...
Doin' a Little East Coast Swing
Hi! Happy New Year! Just one month in, and 2023 already feels more action-packed than 2022. I attended a big birthday party and a literary happy hour—each of...
Will 2020 finally end next year?
In my memory, 2020 and 2021 have merged into one hazy blur—a pandemic, chaos in the world, and lots of quiet nights at home. The holidays have all blurred...
My Year of Less
Hello, Can we bear one more conversation about social media? I am pleased to report that Twitter has started sending me panicked emails to point out tweets...
Making the List
I'm very pleased to report that Snelson: Comedy Is Dying, the graphic novel that artist Fred Harper and I recently published with AHOY Comics, was featured...
Edgar Allan Poe Vs. The Internet
For those of you who follow my comics writing, I'm happy to report that there's a new arrival in comics stores and bookshops this fall: I wrote a story in an...
Not a great month for literature.
Every time I opened a newspaper in my late teens and early 20s, when the fatwa against Salman Rushdie was at its height, I half-expected to read news that...
If you can't take the heat, stay off the increasingly warming planet
This week's heat wave has forced the dogs and I to retreat to the one room in my house with air conditioning for 21 hours a day. Because my life right now is...
Averse to the metaverse, inverse of the multiverse
I was disappointed, but not surprised, to read that Seattle author Neal Stephenson, who invented the idea of a metaverse in his 1992 novel Snow Crash, has...
A Short Walk to Nowhere in Particular
Hi there, I'm in the pits right now, friends. The news is all heartbreaking, the weather in Seattle is pretty dire, and nobody knows for sure if Covid is or...