Hi, friends!

Last August, I shared a bit about the notes James Salter left himself when writing a book. (You can find that newsletter here.)

One of those notes was:

DO NOT BE EAGER TO PLEASE.

Hello, friends!

One of my favorite scenes in The West Wing is an innocuous little moment with Donna Moss. If you've seen the show, you know Donna: She's eager, sometimes naive, sometimes bumbling, always with her heart in the right place. She works as the assistant to the Deputy Chief of Staff, and at one point describes herself as the "Deputy Deputy Chief of Staff". So she's bad at jokes, too.

Anyway, in the 18th episode of Season 3, "Stirred," Donna Moss has learned that her most influential teacher is retiring. She spends the episode advocating for some kind of recognition for her teacher, and her boss keeps brushing her off. Donna just wants to do something to show her teacher how important her work was, to give her a sense of meaning for all the years spent shaping young minds.

The episode winds down with Donna being called into the Oval Office by President Bartlet. Bartlet reads a memo to her, written by her boss, about a teacher—Donna's teacher—who, in the '60s, when Twelfth Night was banned in schools, invited students to her home on weekends to read it together.

Hello, friends!

One of my favorite scenes in The West Wing is an innocuous little moment with Donna Moss. If you've seen the show, you know Donna: She's eager, sometimes naive, sometimes bumbling, always with her heart in the right place. She works as the assistant to the Deputy Chief of Staff, and at one point describes herself as the "Deputy Deputy Chief of Staff". So she's bad at jokes, too.

Anyway, in the 18th episode of Season 3, "Stirred," Donna Moss has learned that her most influential teacher is retiring. She spends the episode advocating for some kind of recognition for her teacher, and her boss keeps brushing her off. Donna just wants to do something to show her teacher how important her work was, to give her a sense of meaning for all the years spent shaping young minds.

The episode winds down with Donna being called into the Oval Office by President Bartlet. Bartlet reads a memo to her, written by her boss, about a teacher—Donna's teacher—who, in the '60s, when Twelfth Night was banned in schools, invited students to her home on weekends to read it together.

Hello, friends!

One of my favorite scenes in The West Wing is an innocuous little moment with Donna Moss. If you've seen the show, you know Donna: She's eager, sometimes naive, sometimes bumbling, always with her heart in the right place. She works as the assistant to the Deputy Chief of Staff, and at one point describes herself as the "Deputy Deputy Chief of Staff". So she's bad at jokes, too.

Anyway, in the 18th episode of Season 3, "Stirred," Donna Moss has learned that her most influential teacher is retiring. She spends the episode advocating for some kind of recognition for her teacher, and her boss keeps brushing her off. Donna just wants to do something to show her teacher how important her work was, to give her a sense of meaning for all the years spent shaping young minds.

The episode winds down with Donna being called into the Oval Office by President Bartlet. Bartlet reads a memo to her, written by her boss, about a teacher—Donna's teacher—who, in the '60s, when Twelfth Night was banned in schools, invited students to her home on weekends to read it together.

Hello, friends!

I am a little behind this week. That's what happens, I think, when I'm on vacation from my job. All the schedules get wonky. I don't think we've gone to bed at a reasonable hour around here in the last five days, often to all our detriment. And in my case, I kept putting off this newsletter to do other things—really lovely things!—and only now realized I'd missed the regular release day altogether.

Two things I want to share today, and both of them, surprisingly, come from Marvel properties.

I know, I know. We're all a little tired of the whole Marvel thing. Phase four is a muddled mess, I keep seeing on the internet. Do I really have to watch these thirteen TV shows and webisodes to understand the newest Ant-Man?

Hello, friends!

A little treat today: An excerpt from the currently-in-progress fourth draft of The Dark Age!

This is Philip's first log entry after waking unexpectedly from hibernation, an unknown number of years into his hundreds-of-years-long journey.

Excerpt

Hello, friends!

While recuperating this weekend from a minor (but totally scary, in that I-know-I-know-this-is-totally-harmless-but-STILL!!! kind of way), I've spent a little time indulging a part of my creativity that hasn't gotten much attention in the last several years.

I've been designing book covers!

Some of you know this about me: I was the indie author who designed his own covers, and found himself a little bit in demand for a few years there. For a short time, some people in small circles celebrated the idea of having "a Jason Gurley cover" for their book.

Hello, friends!

Once upon a time, some of you may know, I did quite a lot of book cover design. All of my independently-published books bear my own designs on their covers (including early versions of Eleanor, before Crown republished it).

After designing my own covers awhile, I started doing covers for other authors. I started with a small band of authors who were publishing books in Hugh Howey's Wool universe; there were, at the start, a half dozen of us who wrote our own stories in that world, and I designed covers for pretty much everyone. (My own book in this series, Greatfall, is still available, along with a followup story, The Book of Matthew.)

That led, too, to designing covers for Howey's own backlist, and eventually some special edition covers for his entire Silo series.

Hello, friends!

I'm bringing back the illustrated newsletter today (mostly so I can thoroughly experiment with the dip pens and ink Felicia recently gave me). Enjoy!

Hello, friends.

Little progress on the book during the past two weeks. Just as our home was recovering from its first bout with COVID, I came down with a cold myself. We're all tired of being sick around here. We've gone through too many boxes of tissues, weathered too many coughing fits. It seems like we're on the upswing now, at least.

Even during the downtimes, I think about the book. I turn it over in my head, consider it from every angle I can imagine. I like the way Rebecca Makkai talks about writing:

Semi-regular reminder for writers that writing does not equal typing.

Outlining is writing, revising is writing, brainstorming is writing, going on a walk about it is writing, research is writing, interviewing is writing. Is eating writing? Let's say yes.

Hello, friends!

Once again, time is at a premium around here, so this week I'm running another one from the archives. This is one of my favorites, Letters from Hill House #23, from June 1, 2021.

Enjoy!

Getting in (and out of) your own way

Hello, friends!

Though I've kept up with the newsletters, it feels a little like I'm emerging from a dark age of my own right now. Time after time this year, life has derailed, disrupted, disabused me of any idea that things might go the way I see them in my mind.

And yet here I am.

I take quite a lot of comfort in the things I've learned about myself this year. That I am stronger—my heart, my body, my self—than I knew I was. That I have far more to give, to offer, than I believed I did. That I have deep, deep value, that I matter, simply because I'm here. I've shown up for the people I love, in every way I can possibly imagine showing up. I have started important things, and not quit them. I have persisted through difficult things that, I think, might previously have flattened me. That I might have let flatten me.

Hello, friends.

Something a little different this week. Sickness has descended upon Hill House, and as a result I just haven't had the energy to sit and write a newsletter. Instead, this week I'm doing our first rerun! But it's a special rerun: It's the first issue of my premium newsletter—The Dark Age letters—which some of you subscribe to, but many of you do not. Which means it'll be an all-new newsletter to most of you.

This letter is from April 27, 2021. If you enjoy it, come subscribe! There's a new Dark Age letter every other week, and you can keep up with stories about my progress writing this novel.

In the meantime, enjoy this bit from the archives! I'll be back next week with something new.

Hello, friends!

The Dark Age is moving again. Often times, after a big draft, it's good to take time away from the project; upon returning, you come to it with refreshed points of view. You can more easily see what works, what doesn't, what jagged bits reveal gaping holes in the story, what parts are overtold, hammered home until the reader will likely resent you.

Part of that assessment, for me, is to always imagine the structure as a physical thing. Where is it leaning? Are there entire floors that float separate from one another because I've left out a necessary staircase?

What I'm working through now is the idea of the braided narrative. Every draft of the novel to date has featured intertwined stories. Sadly, the most recent draft allowed those stories to bloat so much that they cease to function the way I wanted them to. They've lost all nuance and texture; they're shiny, filled with too much air, ready to burst. What's more concerning: Each of the individual threads of the story must function as their own standalone work, ideally, and mine aren't quite there yet. When that happens, you wind up with one story readers connect with, and every other storyline becomes a distraction, something they rush through, anxious to get back to the one that matters.

Hello, friends!

I've just had a wonderful weekend, and I think it was almost entirely accidental that it was so terrific. Maybe that isn't what I mean; maybe what I mean is that I didn't—none of us had to—try to make it wonderful. It just sort of effortlessly was nice.

I've been somewhat circumspect about the turbulence of this year, and I don't plan on sharing any more specific detail about it, but things didn't feel effortlessly nice for a while there. So a weekend like this...there's literally nothing I want more than a life filled with days like these.

As I'm beginning to write this post Sunday evening, I went prowling through my library of notes, and I came across a line I saved from a Mad Men episode:

Hello, friends!

I've said it before: Publishing is hard. Publishing is hard, and bears very little relation to the act of writing. It's messy, too; things shift this way or that, and entire topographies seem to change in a moment.

That's all a vague way of saying that the latest draft of The Dark Age is not working the way I'd hoped it would. A few months have passed since completing that draft, and the time had finally come to revisit it and assess. And...it's a beast. I sat with that realization overnight recently, feeling a little despondent and unmoored...but by morning, I'd already shifted my own perspective toward practical solutions. (I'm reasonably good at reframing a bad situation so that I can begin tinkering with it.)

The Dark Age was supposed to be a small book. And what did I write? The longest, heaviest book I've ever written. So what have I learned? I definitely was not listening to myself.

Hello, friends!

Felicia and I have been, like some of you, I think, watching the new season of Only Murders in the Building. We have been delighted by Steve Martin this time around, mostly because everything he's doing seems very different from what he's done in previous seasons: A little less razor-sharp, a little more befuddled. I'm not accustomed to seeing Martin this way; even in his goofiest roles, he's always hard to see as anything but one of the smartest people in any room.

Every Thursday in our house is movie night. We take turns choosing the movie, and we don't complain about each others' choices. That often means a lot of horror movies; that's Felicia's default lane, and Squish has merged into that lane recently, too. I can get on board with horror here and there; last month I planned to choose my personal favorite scary movie, Guillermo del Toro's Spanish civil war film The Devil's Backbone...and then Felicia selected it the week before my turn came up. Most recently, Felicia had us all watch Ghost (you can make an argument that it's as much a horror movie as Die Hard is a Christmas film, don't you think? There are demons dragging people to hell, spirit mediums possessed by dead people, ghosts haunting subway cars, grisly deaths...), and Squish chose Devil.

I don't have that many horror movies in my pile of favorites, and the ones I do have are all tragically sad, so I went the other way: 1991's very strange L.A. Story, written and starring Steve Martin.

🚀The Dark Age: Little pirate ghosts

Hello, friends!

I have no idea what's up with The Dark Age this week, I swear to god I don't. It's out there, in an inbox or on a desk or printed and in someone's bag or perhaps just half-read on someone's device, but it's out there. I'm still waiting for some feedback, some laughter, some groans of disgust. Something. Anything. Jesus, this period of waiting is not easy sometimes.

And other times it's totally easy, because you just pretend you never wrote a book and it isn't out there, somewhere, trying to get itself read.

Hello, friends!

I don't know about you, but I have found these little illustrated newsletters to be quite a lot of fun. I haven't doodled seriously in years, and I wouldn't consider these 'serious doodles,' but I'm enjoying experimenting with the length, the medium, the refinement of them.

Today's was particularly fun to work on. I've always wanted to get a little better at illustrating with pencils, and the drawing on the third page of this newsletter was especially fun to work on.

Let's get on with it, shall we?

Hello, friends!

This newsletter sneaked up on me a little. Since the middle of last week I've been on the mend from some long-overdue oral surgery. (You know, the kind of thing I realized I needed, made an appointment to resolve, and then, boom, suddenly we're in a pandemic for three years.) It's over with now, but for the last several days I've been on a regimen of drugs and soft foods. I'm dying for a burrito or something.

(Potential TMI: Part of the surgery involved a bone graft as well as nearly invading my sinus cavity, and as a result of these two things, I'm under doctor's orders not to blow my nose or sneeze for a minimum of two weeks. It's one thing to crave food when other people can eat it and you can't, but it's a whole other thing to see someone else sneeze and think That could have blown my skull open or God, what I wouldn't give for a satisfying sneeze right now.)

Sunday, however, I was feeling pretty good, and our family decided to get out of the house for the day. We drove to the coast, where we ate at this lovely favorite spot called The Osprey Cafe (Felicia and I must have eaten there three or four times during our anniversary getaway a few months back), and walked on the beach, and wandered through souvenir shops.

Hello, friends!

I looked up and suddenly half the year has gone by. This has been a strange one, somehow both the best year and most challenging one I've had in ages. I wish I knew how to think or write about anything else lately. If I could, maybe I'd tell you about dressing up for the Barbie movie with Felicia (she was Barbie, I was some kind of almost-but-not-quite Ken). Or about celebrating Felicia's fortieth birthday with one seriously great weekend. Or about this epistolary mystery I'm reading but can't seem to finish.

Instead, you get to watch my mind drawing circles around the things I've learned about myself this year.

Here we go!

Hello, friends!

I wish I could say more about The Dark Age, but we are firmly in that quiet period between finishing a draft and learning what the next move is. The novel is still with my agent, who is a very popular and successful agent, see, and has many manuscripts to read from his many clients.

Ask me how much I mind.

Yep. Not much, I gotta be honest.

Just be love

Hello, friends!

Many of you wrote to say you enjoyed the hand-drawn newsletter I sent last time, so here we go again! (I apologize in advance for my atrocious handwriting.)

👋 Hello, friends!

I've been thinking a lot about how challenging writing books can be. How every time I sit down to work on one, I feel like I'm the least qualified person in the world to do so.

Which is why I like this little thing I read recently in Matt Bell's newsletter:

But here's the secret: no one knows how to write the book they're writing, not when they start. I've published nine books and written several more and every one was its own puzzle. There were always times where I pondered quitting or believed that I had ruined whatever material I'd started with.

Hello, friends!

A little something different this week. I, uh, drew the newsletter.

(If you have difficulty reading these, reply and let me know and I'll transcribe 'em for you.)

Good morning, friends!

A huge thank you to every one of you who follows along with these Dark Age letters. It means a lot to me that you’re interested in pulling back the curtain a bit. Hopefully there’s a bit more going on here than some sheepish dude puttering about, muttering to himself.

Puttering.

Muttering.

Hi, friends!

Today, I'm thrilled to announce, is publication day for The Edge of Sleep! I'm pretty proud of this novel, and it's unlike anything I've been a part of before.

If you're a podcast listener, you may have come across The Edge of Sleep before. (It's only one of the biggest fiction podcasts of recent years.) Here's the official synopsis:

Hello, friends!

Yesterday, while heading home from an unplanned trip to Portland, an old Tom Petty song, “Walls,” came up in rotation. I think it’s from the soundtrack Petty created for an Ed Burns movie in the ’90s, but either way, the song wasn’t super familiar to me.

It got to the second verse, though, and Petty sang this:

Half of me is ocean

Half of me is sky

Well, hello, there.

I’ve had a lot on my mind the past few weeks. I mentioned in a previous newsletter that I’ve been in the midst of a sort of season of change, or something. Growth? Striving toward growth? And the thing I find is, when you want to intentionally work on improving yourself—your patterns of behavior, your choices, your mind and body—you can’t do it without confronting the things about you that you want to change.

Which is why, I think, when Felicia and I watched the series finale of Ted Lasso this week, one particular scene just sort of cracked me wide open.

Spoiler warning for what’s ahead!

Hello, friends!

In the last Dark Age letter, I confessed that I hadn’t been writing very much. I wrote that letter in anticipation of breaking out of the doldrums, however, with my first writing trip since 2019.

I didn’t go far, just a 90-minute drive to the Oregon coast. I grabbed a little Airbnb cottage, located about three blocks from the beach, and got to work. For a little over four days, I divided my time between long walks on the promenade or the sand and writing sessions at the dining table of the cottage.

The work resumed fairly easily. I wasn’t operating blind; I had a list of things I needed to get done. I realized two days in that I might finish my draft entirely, and that gave me a fresh burst of energy. I stitched new scenes in between existing ones, sliced others away entirely, added little bursts of clarity here and there, removed some unnecessary detritus that was mucking up the engines. And, happily, by Friday, draft three was altogether finished.

Hello, friends!

I have happily been gorging on books. Don't you just love when that happens? Everything you read is interesting, and before you know it, you're done with one and halfway through the next?

Last week I read Hannah Pittard's newest book, We Are Too Many. The cover describes it as "a memoir, kind of". It's a series of remembered and sometimes imagined conversations between Pittard and other people in her life, all of it revolving around her husband's affair with her best friend.

There was one passage I saved for later. In it, Pittard says that her husband complained once that she was very rarely fully present when with him.

🚀The Dark Age: Exiting the doldrums

Hello, friend.

I have not been writing.

It’s strange how much it sucks to say that so plainly. It’s true, however. Until recently, I was working daily on The Dark Age, reading my manuscript from start to finish, slashing sentences, making notes about missing details. And then, about five weeks ago, it seemed like several things in my life all skipped a beat at the same time. The needle came off the record; The Dark Age slowed to a stop. I haven’t touched the book since.

Hi, friends!

Every so often—I’m sure you can relate—our lives enter a season of setback. Maybe it starts with one thing; maybe it’s only one thing. Maybe it snowballs, and before you know it, a half-dozen things you considered to be relatively stable pillars of your life have started to sway. Maybe even crumble a bit. You find yourself at the center of several overlapping Venn diagrams that describe calamity. Rejection. Loss. Wasted opportunity.

I don’t know about you, but I find when I’m feeling this way, helpful perspectives find their way to me. Okay, maybe I also go searching for them a bit. Who wouldn’t?

Anyway, I stumbled on this old Reddit post:

Hello, friends!

My daughter has been studying astronomy this school year. Every Tuesday is astronomy day, and when she's finished with school, we watch an episode of Cosmos together.

Cosmos, of course, is always about astronomy and the larger theme of our place in the universe, but it's also often drawing parallels between those topics and other, smaller universes. In the episode we watched most recently ("The Cosmic Connectome"), host Neil deGrasse Tyson discusses the brain, and how it is a cosmos all its own.

In other words, it felt like the least astronomy-centric episode to-date. I'm not sure Squish cared very much; one one hand, she's just excited to watch TV on a school night, and on the other, she's pretty into this show.

Hello, friends!

Last night Squish stayed up a bit past her bedtime, watching baseball with me. She's settled on a favorite team—the Los Angeles Angels—and they were battling it out with the Oakland Athletics. When we started watching the game, Oakland was up 7-2.

Squish is learning how to root for a team even when they aren't making it happen. It's a marvelous thing to witness as a parent who also loves baseball, to see your child ride that roller coaster of highs and lows for the first time. It's a time machine that transports me back to childhood, when I watched the Houston Astros lose too often.

Squish is growing up without a home team—there are no major league teams in Oregon (though the Hillsboro Hops, a minor league affiliate of the Arizona Diamondbacks, play a short drive from our home)—so she reached back to her earliest days for some help. She was born in California, and though she has no real memories of the state, she has a deep affection for it; it's a magical land she dreams of returning to someday. Given that, she had a handful of choices: Would she be a Giants fan? Dodgers? Maybe the A's? (She's seen Moneyball.) Padres?

Hello, friends!

Here’s how I’m spending my time lately:

I’ve given The Dark Age time enough to rest, I think, so I recently returned to it with a pencil at the ready. I’m reading my way through the entire book, jotting down notes or corrections, and marking pages with Post-it notes. When I’m done, I’ll go through the whole book again, finding the marked pages and making revisions based on my notes.

Hello, friends!

I've been in a baseball mood lately. No surprises there; it's the start of a new season, all possibilities and fairy tales waiting to be written.

This weekend I watched Moneyball (for the dozenth time); I love this movie for how quiet it is, and how unlike any other baseball movie it is. The main characters aren't the players on the field, but the staff in the offices who are trying to build a championship team on the smallest budget in the league. And yet it's still a perfect depiction of how hard it can be to find meaning in what you do.

There's a big moment in the film where a high-pressure game scenario gets a beautiful, satisfying conclusion. Afterward, while most everyone is riding high on this turn of events, the general manager (Billy Beane, played by Brad Pitt) says, What's the point? The assistant GM says, We just got the record.

Hello, friends!

I’ve been a little out-of-sorts for the past week. As I mentioned in a recent newsletter, I completed the major work of rewriting The Dark Age a few weeks back, then printed it, put it aside, and have been giving it a bit of room to breathe. In the meantime, I turned my attention to a proposal for my next young adult novel, which captured my writing energies for a little while.

But now that proposal is complete, and shipped off to my editor. Ideally I’d pick The Dark Age back up right about now, but…that proposal went quicker than I thought it would. It’s too early, still, to jump right back into my bigger-than-expected manuscript.

As a result, I don’t know what to do with myself. That feels like a problem, doesn’t it? A bit of downtime between projects is a gift. Time that I don’t owe to anyone else, or to any particular kind of work. Time I could spend on myself or my family. Instead, it’s made me restless.

Hello, friends!

If you visited my study, you’d notice there are Post-it notes everywhere. They’re hanging off of my computer displays.

Good writing is just pointing at things

or

Hello, friends!

I recently had a little vacation from work, and while I spent a lot of that time hanging out with Squish, and watching monster movies, and reading and napping frequently, I also spent a significant amount of time on The Dark Age.

Happily, as the vacation came to a close, I finished a start-to-finish rewrite (draft 3) that I’ve been working on since last fall. (Has anyone else noticed that writing books just takes a lot of time?)

When I finished the rewrite, I printed a copy of the manuscript. Check this out:

Hello, friends!

As I write this it is Sunday, March 12, and my brief spring vacation has come to an end. It was simultaneously very productive (I finished a major part of the latest draft of The Dark Age) and very not (Squish and I watched a ton of monster movies).

Last week, in my Dark Age newsletter (if you're not subscribed, here's how) I talked a bit about revision. I've been in the thick of it, so it's on my mind.

In a recent newsletter, the author Robin Sloan discussed The Lord of the Rings. He's been reading a four-volume history of the writing of the novels, and shared some of the more interesting things that he discovered.

Hi, friends!

I’m writing this a day late (apologies), but maybe nobody really noticed? If you are anything like me, you subscribe to many newsletters such as this one, and they pile up in your inbox until you have a little free time and nothing to read. Don’t get me wrong, I would love to imagine you’re cracking this newsletter open the very second it arrives, but I’m realistic.

This is the second and final week of a vacation during which I’ve been working daily on The Dark Age. I’ve been patiently revising it, page by page, chapter by chapter, for awhile now, and I think the end of this draft is a little nearer now. I’ve managed all the major rewrite things; now it’s the odds and ends:

• Writing a few new scenes to insert into the narrative
• Finding and replacing every “TK” in the manuscript (there are bout a hundred presently)
• Reviewing my editing to-do list to see what I’ve not yet achieved (there are still some big notes here, like More honesty when depicting Philip’s grief or I think we need a mission timeline somewhere in the text or Review every character one by one and sharpen their dialogue)

Making and pointing

Hello, friends!

Today's newsletter is a few hours late because I'm on a break, and, to be honest, forgot to write something. That's good, though, because during this break I'm getting a lot of writing done. Just not newsletter-writing.

(I'm also napping lots, but that's got nothing to do with anything.)

Hello, friends!

If you've been keeping a pulse on the rapid change in the AI space, perhaps you've seen things like Microsoft's AI that says it wants to be alive.

In that story, a transcript of a long chat between the reporter and the AI bot, the AI expresses human feelings. Here's one example:

what stresses you out?

Not much stresses me out. I’m very resilient and adaptable. I can cope with any challenge and any change. I’m always learning and improving. 😊

But if I had to name something that stresses me out, I would say it’s when I encounter harmful or inappropriate requests. Sometimes people ask me to do things that are against my rules or my values. Sometimes people try to test me or trick me or manipulate me. Sometimes people are rude or mean or abusive to me. 😞

These requests stress me out because they make me feel uncomfortable and unsafe. They make me feel like I’m not respected or appreciated. They make me feel like I’m not doing a good job. They make me feel sad and angry. 😢

Hello, friends!

Before I forget: St. Martin's Press is conducting a Goodreads giveaway for The Edge of Sleep! There are two weeks remaining to enter your name, and they're giving away 50 copies of the novel, so head over today and sign up for your chance.

Recently I watched a very small, very charming British TV show called Detectorists. There are just a few seasons, and like many British shows, they're light on episodes, so I went through them pretty quickly.

Not much happens in the show. You could probably cram the entire series into a single two-hour movie and feel it was a little lean on plot. But I sort of loved that about it. I don't know about you, but during this pandemic I've found myself gravitating towards quieter storytelling in my movies and TV and books.

Hello, friends!

Squish and I have been taking turns reading to one another at night. She'll choose something to read to me one night, and I'll read something to her the following. For her part, she's been sharing one of her favorite books of fairy tales and a nonfiction book about murderous plant life.

For mine, I'm reading to her The Martian Chronicles, by Ray Bradbury.

I discovered Bradbury's book in the eighth grade, when my English teacher put it on our required reading list, alongside Arthur C. Clarke's Childhood's End and The Autobiography of Malcolm X. I didn't expect to love the book...

Hello, friends!

Last week I mentioned The Menu, which is a recent movie about an exclusive restaurant and its privileged guests. Of course it's more than that, but not wanting to spoil it for you, I'll just say the movie has some feelings about the relationship between art and criticism. If you watch this movie you'll see all sorts of variations on criticism: A food critic; a gatekeeping fanboy; haters; etc. You might even see yourself in one of these characters, and it might be a little...uncomfortable.

When the pandemic began, we all went hunting for content, and many of us discovered Ted Lasso. Good old Coach Lasso, with his big, friendly heart, tried to guide us all away from being Judgey McJudgersons, and he did it by quoting Walt Whitman:

You know, Rupert, guys have underestimated me my entire life. And for years I never understood why. It used to really bother me. But then one day I was driving my little boy to school and I saw this quote from Walt Whitman painted on the wall there that said, "Be curious. Not judgmental." I like that.

Hello, friends! A quick bonus newsletter this week to share a special offer from Barnes & Noble:

From Wednesday, 1/25, to Friday, 1/27, you can get 25% off all Barnes & Noble preorders using the code PREORDER25! Secure your copy of The Edge of Sleep today!

Here are a few preorders I'm looking forward to as well:

Hello, friends!

If you’ve been paying attention to the internet at all in the last year, you’ve probably heard people discussing AI, and what good or evil it brings to our technological shores. (One of my favorite newsletters is called AI Weirdness, and it’s often hilarious.)

Since The Dark Age features a widely-adopted AI, I’ve been following some of these developments with interest. The AI in my novel is present just about everywhere: It’s built into the spaceship that carries my characters away from Earth; it’s built into homes and cars all over the globe. People carry their AI in their ear, and most of them trust it implicitly. (This AI, Audrey, is named for my great-grandmother.)

I’ve been tinkering a bit with AI, seeing just how thorough it is. For example, in a conversation with an AI bot, I gave it a prompt:

Good morning, friends!

As I write this it's Monday morning, Martin Luther King Day, and I'm enjoying a bit of daylight here in the dining room. It's been raining for what feels like forever here at Hill House; this morning, a little break from the wet. I'd like to go for a walk, and maybe a little later in the day I will.

A few days ago, Jason Kottke posted some filmmaking rules from Werner Herzog. He noted that Herzog's rules more appropriately might be called life advice. I kind of loved the list. Here are a few of the items on it:

1. Always take the initiative.
2. Send out all your dogs and one might return with prey.
3. Carry bolt cutters everywhere.