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, […]

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 […]

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 […]

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. […]

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 […]

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 […]

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 […]

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 […]

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 pretty much crammed inside these four walls, everything is feeling kinda insular and maybe a little claustrophobic. I’m also finding it pretty […]

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 partnered with a blockchain company to create a real-life metaverse. The disappointment comes from the fact that I’m a big fan of Stephenson—I nominated him for a Genius […]