“At last it was evening. The lights in the street outside came on, and the Neon restaurant sign on the corner jerked on and off, exploding its hard red light in the air. Into Jim Nolan’s room the sign threw a soft red light.”

— John Steinbeck, In Dubious Battle

This is good prose, and it was a beautiful reminder of why I love John Steinbeck. He was an excellent writer dedicated to his craft, no matter how controversial his stories or opinions. I really needed to come back to good prose, and I have not been disappointed by In Dubious Battle. It is a good book for starting a new job (haha if you’ve read it). Speaking of which I am somewhat drained while I write this. It is a good job, but there is definitely extra stress when you have to meet new people and go to a new place. And yet every year is new, so experience can sometimes provide a false sense of security. Kids grow, people move, time rushes.

Writing

I have been writing almost every day, and I have crossed 40,000 words with my new book. If I can get to 50,000 it will be close enough to full length for me to call it a novel instead of a novella. It has been a fun project, and I will still have to do a significant amount of rewriting and editing. It has shown me that writing, just like any other art, ought to be fun. I think the past two books have felt like monuments that I needed to build for myself before I could really admit to myself that I am doing this for fun, not to be a Great Writer. There must be a balance between spiritual gravity and joyful whimsy. This project is definitely on the side of whimsy, or its weird and crazy, I honestly can’t tell the difference sometimes.

I am also making peace with Substack/Medium/Social Media, I think. I have accepted that it will probably never be a significant source of income, and that is freeing to me because it allows me to avoid a “half artistic profession.” Lots of writers and artists have had to earn their bread a different way, and not depending on it for income it means I won’t have to play to algorithms or trends. I am not precluding the possibility of “building an audience,” but I’m not really making it a goal. My goal is to make the best art I can make and write what I love to write.

I have had some positive interactions on Medium despite my frustrations with their recommendation algorithm, so that is nice. I haven’t had as much traffic from Substack and I don’t really like their social media approach. They are not as greedy and creepy as Facebook, but it is still the same model of trapping attention around things that you love. I appreciate that they focus on encouraging people to pay writers, but I find that there is a pressure (if you are really trying to get paid on Substack) to write something “relevant” and/or controversial. It is nice to connect with people over reading and books, but as with all social media, it is important not to let the means overshadow the ends. Going forward I don’t plan to paywall any of my stuff except for books. It just feels disingenuous. It is also kind of insulting how little the Medium Partner Program pays. I have some stories with hundreds of claps, but they don’t seem to value claps anymore because the profit hasn’t even broken a dollar. The fact that you have to pay to become a Medium Member in order to write for the partner program doesn’t feel great, either.

As always, a huge thank you to those who have bought me a coffee. I really really appreciate it! I’ve been trying to add some behind the scenes photos and music stuff for anyone who chips in, as I am able. I’d say the biggest actual “perk” available on there are the recordings that are done for Lit Songs that I haven’t released anywhere else yet. It is probably going to be long time before the album sees the light of day publicly, but I add them on Buymeacoffee as I finish the mixes. There are currently two.

Music

I haven’t done as much music as I have wanted to, or at least, I don’t have much to show for what I have been practicing. I have mostly been playing the same things over and over. One of them is a riff that I am trying to get just right before I settle on recording the vocals for the song, the other is the song People Get Ready, written by Curtis Mayfield and performed by the Impressions as well as Jeff Beck et al. through the years. It is a beautiful song with a beautiful melody and it is really just a song that gives some relief to me. I’m guessing the people around me who have to listen to it get a little sick of hearing it, but I try not to push it too much. I think the lyrics are really timeless, you should go have a listen to both the original by The Impressions and to Jeff Beck at Ronnie Scott’s.

People get ready, there’s a train a comin’
Don’t need no baggage, you just get on board
All you need is faith to hear the diesel’s hummin’
Don’t need no ticket, you just thank the lord.

There ain’t no room for a hopeless sinner
Who would hurt all mankind just to save his own.
Have pity on those whose chances grow thinner.
There ain’t no hiding place against the kingdom’s throne.

Podcast

Eric and I will be returning for our fourth season of Raise a Glass. We actually have two episodes recorded already, which I am in the process of editing. We’re going to be doing a read through of Lord of the Rings. So if you want to follow along you can join the Patreon for free. There are also actual perks in the form of bonus episodes and blooper content for the different tiers — But I don’t think either Eric or I have a single entrepreneurial bone in our bodies so it’s very much what we enjoy and ways we can try to make it fun for listeners.

Reading

Aside from In Dubious Battle I have been reading way too many books simultaneously again. Death’s End (Three Body Problem book 3) in Chinese, Don Quixote, some Edith Wharton short stories, Kant’s Critique of Pure Reason, Augustine’s City of God. This month, Wharton’s Xingu stands out in my mind. It tells about a hilarious little joke pulled on some stuffy English ladies and their book club. I don’t want to spoil it because it will be better to read it for yourself, but it is one of the funniest things I have ever read and I’ve read Kurt Vonnegut. Edith Wharton was a sharp woman, and I feel like she must have been getting some revenge for something.

I am also almost done with Death’s End in Chinese and I can hardly believe it. It is about 500 pages and it has been several years since I started working through it. I feel like my reading level has definitely gone up, but that really depends on how well I can keep up with my flashcards. Rather than go for 100% comprehension, I look up about five words and add them to a flashcard app. I think it has genuinely helped my vocabulary grow because I am understanding a lot more than I did at the beginning. I also read the English simultaneously just so I can know what really happened and fill in the gaps because there are some pretty crazy things that happen in it. I think Three Body is a special series. It is not very well written in terms of the prose, and neither are the characters particularly deep, but the ideas and the execution of them is astonishing. There are some fresh insights about space and time and our relationship to the cosmos and the earth that I think makes the series worth reading.

#update #September #2026

Thank you for reading! I greatly regret that I will most likely never be able to meet you in person and shake your hand, but perhaps we can virtually shake hands via my newsletter, social media, or a cup of coffee sent over the wire. They are poor substitutes, but they can be a real grace in this intractable world.

Send me a kind word or a cup of coffee:

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