What I’ve been writing and reading: May 2023

Hi there! In the last post, I wrote about my fears that AI would replace a lot of writers relatively quickly. Within a week of sending that email, I heard from two different readers of this very newsletter who had, in fact, recently been laid off from their writing gigs and (in one case, presumably) […]

What i’ve been writing and reading: April 2023

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 at producing passable text almost instantaneously, and it’s practically free. Now that Amazon has gotten into the generative AI language model game, I think the entire field of […]

What i’ve been reading and writing: March 2023

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 believe a medical professional would diagnose as “a widdle bit of an upset tummy.” Lying there in the throes of a low-level pain of my own creation, […]

What i’ve been reading and writing: February 2023

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 readings, and much of the evening programming is free and open to the public in venues around the city. I’m participating in a couple of AWP events this year—one at […]

What i’ve been reading and writing: January 2023

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 which would have been a highlight of any of any month last year. Perhaps most startlingly, I started 2023 off with a last-minute day-job business trip to the east coast, and […]

What I’ve been reading and writing: December 2022

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 together, too—2021 Christmas is indistinguishable from 2020 Christmas, I have to think hard to separate my memories of 2021 Halloween from 2020 Halloween, and so on. […]

What I’ve been reading and writing: November 2022

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 that I may have missed because I’m not spending any time on the site anymore. Facebook has been sending me these emails for years, since I basically left my […]

What i’ve been reading and writing: October 2022

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 on the New York Public Library’s list of Best New Comics for Adults for 2022. This one means a lot to me. While many year-end and best-of lists are loaded with pay-to-play […]

What i’ve been reading and writing: September 2022

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 anthology called Edgar Allan Poe’s Snifter of Death from AHOY Comics. It’s a comedy/horror anthology series by some of the best comics writers and […]

What I’ve been writing and reading: August 2022

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 Rushdie had been attacked. But that was decades ago, and so much time has passed that this month’s heinous attack on Rushdie was somehow a shock. And the photos […]