I have always enjoyed writing but the enjoyment has never tracked to any one mode of it. And for a long time I thought that was the problem.

I’ve tried my hand at young adult sci-fi, literary fiction, collaborative sci-fi neo-noir thriller, books on looking at writing through a yogic lens, poetry, freewriting as a thing to do for hours, and prose poetry. Each one belonged to a version of me that was becoming something and then needed to become something else.

As a kid I wanted to be a writer but this variously looked like: write on a computer and make magazine articles, have a mailing list sharing C.S. Lewis quotes, write poems, run D&D adventures, daydream a world in a Tolkienesque story. The idea of being pinned down as any one thing terrified me. Every pivot felt like I was ascending toward some new mysterious success.

Of all of them prose poetry came closest to something I felt was my thing, this form that’s about the making and not the shape of it that can be experienced in the span of a human moment as an extension of living fully through language.

I thought I couldn’t decide that writing (in any form) was my thing because I’m not naturally good at it. I’ve been a professor for twenty years and I still confuse that and which. And because I spent so much of my life investing in other things, like building a hobbit house dug from the hillside, or learning blockchain software engineering.

What I actually stuck with, through every pivot, wasn’t writing as much as what happens while you write. I’m fascinated by what happens in the moment your hand is moving and something is forming and you don’t have a name for it yet. Your attention is right there with the prelingual, almost as a performance, but an inner one. What carried through the sci-fi and the freewriting and the hobbit house was the alchemy of making things as an embodied human. This means hands on material, attention on what’s emerging, the body in the act of becoming something it wasn’t a moment ago.

Who cares about mere writing compared with what happens to you when you stay with the making?

And I think about this against the backdrop of what’s been happening around all of us.

Before the internet there was at least the pretense that what a person made with their hands and their attention had value. You could disagree about what was good, but the making itself wasn’t in question. Then the internet arrived and smartphones and social media and we started giving our attention away and slowly the message became that what you make matters less than how many people see it.

Then covid. And for that brief strange window, people took refuge in baking bread, playing instruments, and looking for opportunities to bring about real connection remotely.

But then in recent times, more macroeconomic nastiness has brought inflation and layoffs. And right into that vacuum is the AI bubble, which isn’t really about AI as much as it’s about the fact that somewhere along the line we started treating each other as replaceable, and now we finally have the technology to make that feel efficient. The corporate version has always been there: do more with less, automate the human out.

None of this has anything to do with whether the technology is good or useful. It more about what we’ve been training ourselves to believe about each other for a long time now.

And writing sits right in the middle of it because writing is the thing you can do while you’re becoming. Before you’ve said something comes the inner orientation toward that place where voice speaks from.

Who cares about the output compared with that nascent stage before you know what you’re making, before it has a shape? That’s where the whole thing lives, but that’s the part that’s at risk of becoming invisible.

I always assumed I was supposed to create things that matched my own arc. But I think I’m more useful unpacking from experience and giving a map of inner territory to show what it looks like inside when you’re at the blank page and you don’t know what you’re becoming yet.

I keep meeting people who are in the middle of their own pivots, like stuck writers and people with a creative project they care about, and I don’t think what they need most is a plan for the output. They someone to help them stay with it when they don’t know what it is yet.

As for me: I’m working on my next books, sure. I’m also leading in-person typewriter events and planning future writing retreats.

The common thread here is that these are in-person and embodied and physical things because I think our job is to swim upstream to build the muscle that would otherwise atrophy.

If you want to try what I’m talking about, I put together a free five-day writing practice that gets into this. Try it out. Let me know how it connects with you. If you have a different experience, that’s valuable too, and I’d like to hear it.

I don’t think any of the world’s current challenges get fixed easily. But part of the fix needs to look like people making things with their hands and paying attention to what happens when they do.

That. And let’s be good to each other.

You sit down, take a sheet of paper and roll it in. Making sure it’s aligned, you turn the platen a few clicks until the top of the paper peekaboos from behind the roller. And then you start.

Left hand, right hand, left hand, right hand. Each finger presses a key and meets resistance wholly different from the ghostly nothing of plastic laptop chiclets. Your fingers travel inches rather than millimeters like each one is riding a little elliptical machine. A typebar swings up, hits the ribbon, explodes a letter into the page. You hear it and feel it in your fingertips. The carriage slides one click to the right, and you strike again and again.

After a few minutes you’re not thinking about the words anymore, because the rhythm has you. Left-right-left-right, strike and slide, strike and slide. The bell rings at the end of the line and you reach up and sweep the carriage back in a full cross-body motion, arm moving right to left, resetting the whole cycle. And you go again.

You’d think that writing on an antique machine would feel stiff. But somehow because the typewriter doesn’t let you delete, you rest into knowing that forward is the only way. Forward pressure breaks through the editorial mind, sure. But you have to wonder whether something more is happening.

There’s a trauma therapy called EMDR — Eye Movement Desensitization and Reprocessing — built on a mechanism called bilateral stimulation. You hold a difficult memory in mind while moving your eyes back and forth, or while a therapist alternates taps on your hands, or while you listen to tones that alternate between your ears. The rhythmic left-right pattern supposedly helps the trauma unstick by shifting the nervous system out of fight-or-flight. The distressing memory doesn’t vanish, but it loses its charge.

What researchers have found is that the type of stimulation matters less than the pattern. What matters is that it’s rhythmic, alternating, and bilateral, and it works whether you use eyes, tapping, or sound. There’s even an EMDR Drumming Protocol that uses the alternating hand movements of percussion as embodied bilateral stimulation for processing trauma.

There’s a growing clinical literature about knitting, for example, that makes the EMDR connection. The back-and-forth motion of knitting, using both hands rhythmically, constitutes bilateral stimulation in the clinical sense. Betsy Corkhill, a researcher who founded the nonprofit Stitchlinks, used to describe knitting to skeptical clinicians as “a bilateral rhythmic psychosocial intervention.” Betsy rocks.

It turns out, knitters with PTSD report fewer flashbacks. The rhythmic bilateral hand movements regulate the nervous system. Coordinated crossing of the body’s midline demands enough from the brain that it interrupts the usual anxious loops. Serotonin increases with repetitive movement and cortisol drops. And all of this happens bottom-up through the body first, with the mind following.

Now. Think about what I described at the beginning of this piece. Alternating hands, left-right-left-right. Significant force per keystroke. Rich tactile and auditory feedback on every strike. A carriage sweeping across the body and returning. A rhythm that, once established, carries you.

This is not the same activity as typing on a modern keyboard. Researchers at the Norwegian University of Science and Technology found that keyboard typing produces far less brain engagement than handwriting, specifically because pressing uniform keys with the same simple finger movement is too easy for the brain to bother with. But, you see, they were studying modern keyboards. A manual typewriter’s movement signature is categorically different: we’re talking substantial proprioceptive and auditory feedback, babe. It shares far more with knitting and drumming than it does with a MacBook.

I haven’t found anyone who has studied manual typewriting connecting it to bilateral stimulation. But, says me, the mechanism that makes EMDR and therapeutic knitting or drumming work is the same one operating when you sit down at a manual typewriter and chunk away at the keys. It’s rhythmic, bilateral, tactile, and auditory, and engages both hemispheres through alternating coordinated hand movements.

I’m not a therapist, and this isn’t a clinical claim. But the experience I described about the performative self dropping away might have something to do with the machine itself through what it demands of your body. And it doesn’t require your permission or your understanding for it to work. In fact, it doesn’t have to be clinically approved for it to be beneficial. You just have to start striking those keys.

If you want to try writing this way, with or without a typewriter, I have a free 5-day series that gets you started.

I made a course called The Weekend Writing Marathon. It's a structured weekend immersion that walks you through a full Friday-to-Sunday arc of sustained writing. It’s self-paced and starts at $29. This is my first Thinkific course, so these are first-run prices. They're going up after this cohort

Here’s what it takes you through

Friday evening you set your intentions and seed your projects.

Saturday is a full-day guided marathon with techniques every hour or two, like phrase-turning, switching between handwriting and typing and voice, writing from direct observation, and breaking form mid-sentence just to see what happens.

Sunday you learn how to harvest everything you wrote and actually shape it into something.

There are short videos before each phase, and then you go. The structure holds you so you don’t have to figure out what to do next. You have everything you need to just write.

It’s all about going deep, finding the trick that unsticks you, and going deeper.

You set up your space, you write for a very long time, and by Sunday afternoon you’re sitting in a pile of raw material that didn’t exist before, with the tools to actually do something with it.

Why this, why now?

Like it or not, written “output” is cheaper than ever before. Anyone can generate ten thousand words before lunch. But the words were never the most valuable part anyway.

What’s valuable is what happens to you while you’re writing, when you push past the surface stuff and start having so much fun your inner editor can’t help but pull up a chair and start cheerleading you. A writing process you own is not something you can outsource or automate. The magic only happens by doing it.

This course is for people who want more of that. It’s the egg I’ve been wanting to hatch for a while now.

Two ways to do it

Do it with me. The first cohort weekend is April 24–26. Everyone who signs up does the marathon that weekend. You also get a one-on-one debrief call with me afterward to bring whatever's on your mind, whether that's what to develop or what your practice looks like from here.

$59 → Join the April marathon

Do it on your own schedule. Same course. Buy it now, pick a weekend whenever you’re ready.

$29. → Get the course

I’m excited about having people run through the weekend course and I want to know what you think. Your experience with this one shapes what I build next, so grab it, do it, and tell me what happened.

See you on the other side of a weekend.

I type my morning freewrite on a typewriter at a standing desk. It’s more like a podium, really. It’s tall enough that I can stand at the machine and let the words come with body upright, slightly engaged.

The rest of the workday happens at a desk I built from iron pipe and a custom-cut sheet of glass. I love my desk. It fits me when I’m sitting. I sit in a Steelcase Leap 2 — a “nice chair,” the kind of chair people who research on Reddit end up buying. It does what a chair can do. People like it because it flexes when you move around. That’s actually what annoys me most about it. I got it because I end up sitting cross-legged in a chair about half the time, and it works.

It’s still a chair. The point being, even if the ergonomics are good, entropy will take over. When your body stays in any position for any length of time, bad things happen to your body.

The experiments

I’ve tried...maybe all of the alternatives. Squishy ball chair. Stool. Weird meditation platform chair. Floor desk. Couch. Sit/stand desk. I even built a laying-down desk — a wooden frame with a tablet and keyboard velcroed into place so I could work horizontal like some kind of recumbent astronaut.

It was hard to actually get any work done laying down. There’s something about the body’s relationship to the vertical axis that affects the quality of attention. If you’re too upright, things get a little too military-monkish. Too relaxed, you turn into a dreamy potato. The chair is a compromise.

Cue the sinister music, because there’s a dark secret lurking behind the effects of sitting too much.

What’s actually happening

Here’s what the chair is doing to you, slowly, whether you notice or not.

Thoracic kyphosis — the upper back rounds forward, the chest caves, the shoulders curl inward. That’s your thoracic spine taking the shape of the chair. Do it enough and the curve starts to set.

Anterior pelvic tilt — your hip flexors shorten from being bent all day, and they pull the front of your pelvis downward. The lower back overarches to compensate. It’s why your back aches even though you haven’t done anything. Sitting is doing something, it’s just doing it so slowly you don’t notice until it hurts.

Fascial adhesions — fascia is the connective tissue that wraps everything in your body, muscles, organs, all of it, in one continuous web. When you don’t move through your full range of motion, the fascia gets sticky. Layers that should glide past each other start to bind together. You lose mobility because the tissue around the muscle has basically glued itself in place.

What this does to your attention

The postural damage from sitting becomes more than just a body problem. A caved chest restricts your breathing in a subtle way. If the breath stays shallow, stays in the upper chest instead of dropping into the belly, the nervous system goes into a low-grade state of alert. A nervous system on alert is more reactive, so it keeps you on the surface of ideas.

Fascial adhesions rob the body of its ability to feel things flow. A body that’s glued together in places can’t quiet down.

People do all sorts of stuff to force themselves into states of consciousness. But if you can get the body to settle first, the mind can clarify in the wake of the body’s settling. When I stand at the typewriter and the rhythm of the keys starts to organize my breathing, my posture, the tempo of my thinking, that’s a bodily event. The mind follows the lead of the body.

But it can most easily follow a body that’s free enough to find the rhythm in the first place. If your chest is caved, your breath is shallow, your hips are locked, and your fascia is stuck, you’re trying to settle into creative attention inside a body that isn’t happy about itself. No amount of willpower or discipline fixes that.

That’s what these corrective postures are actually for. They help restore the conditions under which real attention becomes possible.

Here are some corrective postures to help undo them.

Good ol’ downward dog

Nothing beats it. Hands and feet on the floor, hips high, spine long. It decompresses the entire back chain, from shoulders, spine, hamstrings, to calves, all at once. It’s the single best reset I know. Do it several times a day.

All hail downward dog pose. Start with knees bent and get the upper back feeling aligned, then go deeper if it works.

The dead hang

This is the big one.

Hang from a pull-up bar like a monkey with nothing to live for. Just grip the bar and hang there. Let your spine decompress, let your shoulders open, and gravity will do the opposite of what it’s been doing to you all day. This is the most direct counter to thoracic kyphosis. The weight of your body pulls the whole spine long and lets the shoulders fall back to where they belong.

Most people can’t do this for more than a few seconds before their grip gives out. That’s fine. My bar is in a doorframe, low enough that my feet can touch the ground so I hang with knees bent. That allows me to ease into it, to gradually shift my bodyweight onto the bar, rock side to side, flex a little.

There’s research that says our shoulders were designed for this, that hanging is one of the most natural postures the human body can assume. It just doesn’t look like it because we’ve spent the last ten thousand years not doing it.

Fish pose

Lay on your back and arch your chest upward, crown of the head touching the floor. Grip the underside of your leg bone so you aren’t putting any body weight on your head or stressing the cervical spine.

This is the anti-desk pose. It opens the chest and throat, reverses the forward curl that sitting creates. A few minutes here and you can feel the front of your body expand.

Child’s pose

Legs extended or wrapped around your side. I like doing arms extended. Knees on the floor, sit back on your heels, fold forward. This one is less about stretching and more about settling. The nervous system likes it. The lower back likes it. I feel it in my lats and upper back. Come here between the more active poses.

Forward fold and upward reach

Standing, fold at the hips and let your head hang. Then come all the way up, reach overhead, hands steepled or in prayer, and stretch side to side. Up, down, forward, side, side. The whole vertical axis of the spine needs to move through its range. Desk work keeps it locked in one narrow band.

Low lunge

Step one foot forward, lower the back knee to the ground, and sink into the front hip. For some people, the real damage from sitting hides in the hip flexors. They shorten and pull the pelvis forward into that anterior tilt. The low lunge helps. Ease into it, hold it long enough and you can feel the front of the hip releasing its grip on your whole lower back.

Knee down gate pose

Right knee down, left leg extended straight out to the side. Lean to the right and plant your right hand on the mat beside your knee. Extend your left arm up and over — reaching long, following the line of the extended leg. You should feel it open the entire left side of the body in one continuous stretch: outer hip, obliques, side ribs, all the way through the lat and into the fingertips. Hold, breathe into the long side, then switch.

Beyond stretching

There are more poses, but you get the point. The point is to move the body all throughout the day in a lot of different ways. And one thing to emphasize is that fascial adhesions don’t release from stretching alone. The fascia is one continuous web. It needs varied movement and sustained gentle pressure.

Don’t stretch cold muscles. Ease into it. And there’s something to be said for just working your body in a variety of ways — swimming, biking, hiking, jogs. Climbing. Pickleball, if that’s your thing. All very different movements that ask the fascia to glide in different directions, break up different adhesions, encourage different ranges of motion.

If you only do one kind of movement, you develop one kind of body, and one kind of body creates limitations.

The mind follows the body down

So you've hung from the bar, opened the chest, moved in a few directions the chair doesn't allow. Now you sit down to write.

There’s a moment, maybe five or ten minutes into a writing session, when something shifts inside. The sentences get shorter, or longer, or stranger. An image appears that you didn’t plan.

You can feel that shift in your body. The nervous system settles because the forward momentum and subtle bodily engagement from writing or typing gives both mind and body something steady to organize around. And the mind, which had been chattering because it had nothing to anchor to, starts to quiet.

It’s harder to reliably get to that state in a body that’s been shaped by a chair into whatever the hell a chair wants a body to be. So, the corrective work isn’t separate from the creative work. Every time you open your chest and unstick a fascial layer, you’re restoring an instrument.

The chair will win eventually. Someday I won’t be in this body anymore. In the meantime, I’m going to hang from a doorframe like a primate and try not to think too hard about it.

I’m hitting the keys of my typewriter and the action is balanced so that the lever explodes the ink onto the page—wham wham wham wham wham—and yet my fingers keep this circular momentum going, like feet on a bicycle, feeding one stroke into the next. The carriage chunks forward with each keypress and there’s a faint smell of ink from the ribbon. The words pop like fireworks crisp onto the grain of the physical page.

An hour later I’m at my desk, different project. Two wide screens fill my field of vision, bright and flat. My fingers tap plastic keys that barely move. I’m drafting a chapter outline, I’m able to cut and paste and reorder chunks of text. It’s damn convenient. It’s sleek, but there’s not that feel. The words are forever behind glass, pristine and yet unsensual, like watching something beautiful that’s locked behind a display case.

Sometimes I wake in the middle of the night and impressions come to me. Reflections about my life, about the state of things. What came this time was about AI, about this sense most of us carry that things will get “back to normal” someday. Unfortunately, I don’t think there’s truth in that hope, so I’d rather receive the dread for whatever wisdom it has to offer. AI is here to stay. You can’t put a genie back in the bottle.

Let’s suppose the genie is good

Let’s suppose AI gets to the point where it becomes an amplifier rather than simply a good shortcut machine. Let’s say that in the hands of the right person, it magnifies the quality of output. Let’s imagine only a positive possibility of a world with AI. I can collaborate with my AI companion. I can burp and belch and bleat out inarticulate requests and half-thoughts and it helps me build a detailed outline, a world-built backdrop for a science fiction thriller, a cast of characters, a chapter-by-chapter flow that at a glance looks like a durable foundation. I can do this in an afternoon. Let’s suppose that what it produces is good.

Right now, AI is mostly something that gets sold by a few large companies and its most exciting consumers are governments and large corporations, entities that tend to be more about quantity than quality.

To the extent that AI could become a true creative tool, I like the idea of it being available to the average person for free, as something they can actually own, customize, and make their own. Let Average Joe decide what it can do for him and what it can’t. At least in this scenario, AI can be an equalizer. Or can it?

I’ve asked that we entertain the belief that AI actually is a creative tool. So where does that leave us? Does life get easier?

Two things happen, and neither of them is life getting easier.

We simply come to expect more from each other. We already see this. Corporations are AI-washing—laying people off, and it may or may not be because of AI, but let’s say it is. This will continue. Let’s not presume things will ever go back to the way they were. If output is cheap, we’ll simply expect more output.

It used to take two weeks to get something in the mail. Now unless shipping is free, we’ll go to a different merchant unless the friction of creating a login at that new merchant is too high. I caught myself the other day abandoning a purchase because a site wanted me to create an account. In the past I would have just done it. Now that tiny friction was enough to send me back to Amazon. Progress orients us toward the mirage of frictionlessness but what it guides us to create are new sources of fragmented attention. In this landscape, monopolies form and grow their moats.

It’s easy to disparage techbros and large corporations. But what’s a mom-and-pop shop likely to do? The same thing. Because cheap output is cheap for everyone.

And we value everything less. There used to be just radio. Then a few stations in black and white on television broadcast over the air for free with ads. Now you can get nearly anything, anytime.

I see people on LinkedIn making claims that we’ll come to value the “human touch” more. I don’t think that’s automatic. It will become rarer, yes. But people say things in defense of their positions. They’re worried no one will care or appreciate what they do, that a machine will replace them.

This isn’t about nostalgia

So what do you do when the thing that might replace you is also genuinely useful? You stop defending your position and you go deeper into it.

Here’s what I think actually survives: not the human touch as some sort of a value-add, but the act itself. Hands on keys. Ink on a page. The physical reality of making something and being changed by the making of it.

We’re not output; we’re not material objects. We’re here in this life for a short while. Maybe some people want to make a big splash with their art. Most people don’t genuinely want that. But that doesn’t mean art has less to offer them. It may in fact have more, precisely because they’re not wrestling with the artist persona, the legacy, what the fans will think. Without that pressure, plenty of things can be transformative.

You can take a trip to a different hemisphere. You can do a vision quest in the desert for a week. Those things work. But art is something you can show up to day after day, apply some effort, and get yourself reflected back to you as you apply your will to something.

You can’t do that with a trip, because a trip is mostly passive. A creative practice requires you to open yourself and apply yourself and put yourself out there. You bring something of how you see the world and you alchemize a bit of yourself in the process.

What does that look like? It can be journaling, freewriting, morning pages. It can be learning pottery or picking up a pencil and drawing what’s in front of you. It can be learning an instrument, badly. Posting about your process. Sharing what you’re up to. All the adjacent things that have nothing to do with the finished product.

And it’s something you can do without pressure or strain. It’s energetically supportive. People turn to art because it’s soothing or restorative.

The output goes out into the world and does its thing. But the process is where you feel yourself thinking and making and choosing. If you let that get swallowed by expectations ratcheting upward, by the sheer insistence of it all, you lose the only part that was ever yours.

A typewriter is a great example because despite being mechanical, somehow working on it brings a soft space. It makes a noisy cocoon of sorts that dispels any doubt to an observer as to whether words are being given form. Typing has a clearing-out quality to it—bam bam bam—like shaking dust out of a rug in the sun.

I’ve had sessions where nothing good comes. Thirty minutes of toilety swill. A friend of mine, a writer on retreat, described it that you write through the garbage to get to the other stuff. And sometimes that’s true, but sometimes you just write garbage the whole session.

But so what? It’s like having a lousy meditation. What matters is that you honored the appointment and tuned in. The effects compound whether or not you notice them. You do it again the next day, and the next, and a year later you’re a different person because you were the one sitting there.

If we’re not affected by what we do, then we’re not really here.

AI is a threat based on how it gets used but it’s neither here nor there with respect to inner life. It plagiarized your book and it really might take your job. It can also be really useful. Output will keep getting cheaper, but the process never was. The typewriter doesn’t know about any of these things. It’s an irreplaceable creative tool because all it does is respond to the movements of my hands, and so I thwack-thwack-thwack away and smell the ink as it gets hammered onto the page.

What’s your version of the typewriter? The thing you show up to that has nothing to do with the output? I’d like to hear about it.

I have a spot opening this spring for a ghostwriting collaboration—a book, thought leadership, a company blog, or a personal project. If that’s you, reach out.

The negative image

I’m not much of a gamer. That’s an understatement — I haven’t really played video games since I was a kid. I’m the guy who loves manual typewriters and making pottery by hand. So it’s a little strange to be up at midnight telling you about Doom Eternal.

For those who don’t know, Doom Eternal is a first-person shooter, and on the surface it’s about as straightforward as it gets: you are a very angry guy killing demons. But the world they built around this premise has more to offer. Yes, you’re ripping through hellscapes at full tilt, but what holds you there is the world.

There’s a civilization in the game, the Maykrs, who are essentially fallen angelic beings. Originally they were sustained by a being called the Father, which could be thought of as a kind of divine source. But that connection was severed, and without it the Maykrs began to decay. They were left with an energy crisis. Well, things being what they are, they looked to a source that had no such energy crisis: Hell. They struck a deal with them. We will feed you worlds to devour, and in return, we get our share of the energy that can be harnessed through the suffering you create.

The kicker of it is that when the truth came out, when their own warriors discovered what was being done, most of the civilization didn’t care. They’d grown dependent on the energy, and they looked the other way. Which is a story about dark forces but it’s also a story about every institution that forgot what originally sustained it and found a more efficient substitute.

The game has a mythology that pulls from the wells of esoterica, the deep old stuff about striking deals with the devil that seem to articulate how the economics of evil actually works, which is not always monstrous in appearance. Sometimes it would appear to be the clean and efficient choice.

It’s like what I love about Tolkien — it imparts a sense of a world that had been lived in long before you showed up. The artifice gives you a frame to put around something real, and it shows you what one aspect of life is like.

Things rhyme with deeper things. Often much deeper things. Star Wars rhymed with what Joseph Campbell was excavating; the hero’s journey was a fresh discovery at the time. That’s what made it land. The space opera was lovable on its own, but what made it such a hit was the fact that it tapped a mythical root system that needed to be mapped.

An instructor, honestly one of the best writing teachers alive, told me something once. He read my work and said something to the effect of: you don’t realize how good this is. But he wasn’t saying wow, this is amazing. He was saying: you sometimes do something you haven’t yet earned, which is why it’s inconsistently good. You’re like a kid who might be a tulku, or might just say wild things because he’s eight and weird.

That kind of advice comes with a bill attached. I think we’re all alike in that way. We all have to earn our own genius, which of course means doing our best to tend the garden and try to arrive at some sort of truth. But the other part of the job while we’re alive is also to reflect what’s true about each other. Sometimes we’re tulkus, sometimes we’re just weird eight year-olds. And for the tulku to grow into an enlightened master, he needs to have people who see and reflect the best parts of him. Which, when you think about it, says something profound about the nature of enlightenment.

But the work to earn the thing — to own it — isn’t just about being able to repeat the trick. It’s about arriving at a place you can work from. For this, I like the painter Robert Motherwell’s line, when someone looked at one of his paintings and said “My kid could do that.”

“Yeah, but could he do it day after day?”

The kid wouldn’t arrive at that. He could make things that sometimes resembled it. And if he made something that resembled it, he wouldn’t continue to interrogate that same archetypal space day after day.

You know that territory. You’ve written something, or played something, or built something that surprised you — maybe even shook you a little — and then you couldn’t find the route back. Even though you can feel it sitting there in your memory like a place you actually visited.

That’s most of creative life, honestly. You’re wandering around in the dark, and every now and then your flashlight catches something or there’s a flash of lightning and for a second you see the whole landscape. Then something changes and you’re back to feeling your way. That’s the work.

And, surprisingly, Doom Eternal has that. It taps into stuff that’s profound, and the people who made it earned the nightmare. The occult weight, the kinetics — someone knew what they were drawing from. They sustained it across the whole experience. That’s the difference between the accidental lick and the musician who can find the note again Tuesday morning with a cold.

I think that’s why creative work can be alchemical. You try and tell the truth, so you’re tracing the path so many times it cuts into you, intaglio-style. Intaglio is a form of printmaking where you incise an image into a plate so that ink sits in the grooves. What prints is the carved-away part: the negative space.

You etch the negative image into yourself and whatever your material is — language, sound, clay, code, the way you raise your kids — what eventually transfers is everything you removed to get there.

I had the good fortune of counting among my acquaintances a wonderful man who for a time was the owner of a landed estate in Tuscany and who acted as general manager of the farm operations. As you might expect about a landed estate in Tuscany, an abandoned castle dating back to the 11th century was on the perimeter of their holdings. Being a kid who grew up playing Dungeons and Dragons and reading everything by Tolkien, I had in my mind that because the castle was unused perhaps somehow someday it could become my castle.

I asked him about it once — why it was in good repair but not a tourist attraction, not being "used" for anything. You could take a trail to get there, part of which showed the signs of being an ancient Roman road, cobblestones still visible, but aside from that there was no real infrastructure. The story I remember was that they'd donated the castle to the province or paid to have a roof put on and in return gained some tax advantage, something of that sort.

And then he smiled and said something like, “You have to understand — according to the province, we are mountainously disadvantaged.”

He said it with some relish.

He’d put so much work into getting it to be a running farm, and a strongly principled one at that. They’d faced no end of challenges and setbacks, many of them financial. My own small experience building an off-grid home starting from scratch taught me as much. However much you think it will cost, and however long it will take, multiply it by four.

He meant that the province classified agricultural land according to how well it could grow things, and when especially hilly, for example off in the mountains, it was at a steep disadvantage. A mountainous one.

But you know what?

Look at that view.

The province had a word for it

There’s a moral here I’m ham-handedly making about what’s mountainously disadvantaged actually being a massive blessing.

In my life I’ve variously wanted to be many things. I love growth but I also love change. I stuck with writing not because when I was a kid someone said, “You really blow me away with your linguistic eloquence.” I had some good teachers and a few experiences sharing stories and pieces as a kid that felt very positive and encouraging. But mostly I stuck with it because writing can provide both growth and change — you can do all sorts of different stuff with the same fundamental medium.

I’m not by disposition a natural writer. Stories and even phrases don’t readily occur to me. I’m not naturally talkative. I’m a feel-first person. I make sense of the world first through a visual and a tactile sense.

For me, writing is a very fast ongoing decision making process, like hunting thoughtforms playing Duck Hunt. When you bring your attention right there into the singular moment, any number of things could get said, and in any order. It’s simple, but the process always fascinates me. I have followed that fascination.

So yes, writing was not natural for me, but it has become so through tons of rote experience.

That's the thing about mountainous disadvantage. The mountainousness was what make the Tuscan estate so beautiful. It’s wooded, wild, with the kind of view you don't get from flat productive land. The difficulty and the beauty were the same feature.

But it also means there are two sides to it, and they need each other. One side is always going to look more practical. The other is always going to carry more of the view.

The other side of the range

Which is maybe why this story caught my attention more than most of the AI headlines that come and go.

Maybe you’ve read the headlines about the guy, Mrinank Sharma, who quit his job as the head of AI safety research at Anthropic, one of the companies building the most powerful AI systems on the planet — to go study poetry. He’d led the team responsible for figuring out how to prevent AI from going sideways. His last project there studied how AI assistants can distort our humanity. He has an Oxford PhD in machine learning and is a Cambridge grad. He’s also, it turns out, a poet.

The big AI conversations tend to be about which industries get disrupted. Sometimes it’s a game of “spot the hallucination.” This one is about poetry being the counterweight.

In his resignation letter, he wrote that wisdom must grow in equal measure to our capacity to affect the world.

Then he left to go study poetry.

I’ve been thinking about this for a while now. That statement reads like the kind of thing most people would nod at and scroll past. But I think we should take it seriously as a design principle. As the tools get more powerful, the inner work has to get more deliberate.

Feeding the poetic

When one side picks up momentum — and it is, fast, that much is obvious to anyone watching — the other side has to be getting more investment. The corporate and technical world is getting plenty of praise, so let’s feed the poetic. Everybody’s questing for the optimized life, so let’s dive the fuck into rote learning and embodied experience. Not because slow things are always more virtuous, but because they carry more warmth and presence, and also because they’re the counterweight, and without counterweight the whole thing gets gnarly.

That investment probably won’t be incentivized by the market, because the market has no reason to reward you for maintaining capacities that the tools have (arguably) made unnecessary… unless what you do with them upends that model and tilts the scales in your favor.

And that’s the weird thing about this moment. The new economy is mostly horrible, because white-collar jobs are vaporizing, inflation is eating everything, the gig economy is grinding people into interchangeable units. But alongside all that, there are people going deeper than the gig economy into something genuinely new.

A guy hand-forging knives in his garage builds a YouTube following that outearns his old engineering salary. A woman leaves consulting to make ceramics and sells out every batch before it’s glazed. Plenty of weirder examples abound of people pursuing something that matters to them, getting good at it through rote experience, and discovering there was an audience starving for exactly that kind of presence.

It happens all the time with random creators and influencers. Isn’t Mr. Beast a bazillionaire now? Of course he is. But even more important than the fact that many people are finding success is that they’re doing it because they get joy from it.

If it gives me joy, there’s some chance it can do the same for others. If it doesn’t, there’s zero chance.

I’ve never loved anything I’ve read where the author didn’t get at least as much joy out of it as me.

The average person suffers from so much harsh inner criticism about being imaginative and experimenting with art. Stop. It sucks. No. Who are you to do this. Be practical. More than anything, these short evil phrases stand in the way of someone doing something amazing. They're the voice that says the flat, productive land is the only land worth farming.

But the view is up on the mountain. Sharma knew that. He was standing in the heart of the valley — maybe the most “practical” job on the planet right now, keeping the most powerful AI systems from going sideways — and he walked toward the mountain. He’s right that wisdom has to grow in equal measure to our capacity to affect the world, and poetry is how to grow it.

The things that look obsolete and mountainously disadvantaged, if they feed your wonder and fascination, are the things keeping you fulfilled. Start there. Nothing changes the world for the better that didn't first change the person who made it.

What practice do writers have? We have freewriting.

Many people are familiar with freewriting in the context of “morning pages,” Julia Cameron’s well-known ritual of scribbling three pages longhand each morning before the critical mind clicks on.

To write morning pages, you wake up, grab a notebook and pen, and before you check your phone or make coffee, smoke your pack of cigarettes or whatever else floats your boat, you write three pages of whatever comes to mind. Stream of consciousness. You don't stop to think, you don't cross anything out, you don't reread. If you run dry, you write "I don't know what to write" or something until something else surfaces. The pages aren't for anyone—not even for you to revisit later. You just fill them and move on.

Morning pages are good. It’s a simple practice. Morning pages are the default recommendation for anyone who wants to loosen up their writing.

But I worry we’re dilly-dallying. The rise of AI and its widespread use as a replacement for the rigors and rewards of a regular writing discipline are going to have long-lasting ill effects on attention spans and creativity. We need to value the dreck and slog and bunk of the creative process a hell of a lot more.

AI can give you output. What about the process?

The brief history of getting unstuck

Freewriting has been around longer than Cameron’s morning pages. Peter Elbow was writing about it in the 1970s, teaching generations of students to keep the pen moving without stopping, to separate the act of creating from the act of critiquing. Before him, the Beats were already on the case, and Kerouac famously taped sheets of paper together into a continuous scroll so he could type On the Road without the interruption of feeding new pages into the typewriter. He didn’t want anything to break the flow.

The lineage goes back further still. There was stream of consciousness as a literary technique, experiments with automatic writing, and surrealists pulling imagery from dreams. What all these share in common: the value of getting out of your own way.

Cameron’s morning pages simplified all of this into something anyone could do. Three pages, longhand, first thing in the morning. Don’t think, just write. It’s entry-level freewriting with a comforting ritual structure, and it’s helped lots of people develop a regular writing habit.

But for many writers, morning pages has become the whole workout instead of the warm-up. They lower their defenses while they do the morning pages and then shift gears into work mode. We need to bring what’s ‘free’ about a morning freewrite into the other writing that gets done.

Be like Frank

It's 1959 and Frank O'Hara is on his lunch break from the Museum of Modern Art. He walks out onto 53rd Street with a small notebook or maybe just a scrap of paper. He buys a cheeseburger. He watches the construction workers eating their sandwiches on the girders. A blonde woman walks by. He notes the glass of papaya juice, the Puerto Ricans on the avenue, a sign for a bullfight poster. He's writing while he walks, or he's writing later from memory, or both—the distinction doesn't matter because for O'Hara the noticing and the writing are continuous. What results is “A Step Away from Them”:

A Step Away from Them

By Frank O’Hara

It’s my lunch hour, so I go
for a walk among the hum-colored   
cabs. First, down the sidewalk   
where laborers feed their dirty   
glistening torsos sandwiches
and Coca-Cola, with yellow helmets   
on. They protect them from falling   
bricks, I guess. Then onto the   
avenue where skirts are flipping   
above heels and blow up over   
grates. The sun is hot, but the   
cabs stir up the air. I look   
at bargains in wristwatches. There   
are cats playing in sawdust.
                                          On
to Times Square, where the sign
blows smoke over my head, and higher   
the waterfall pours lightly. A   
Negro stands in a doorway with a   
toothpick, languorously agitating.   
A blonde chorus girl clicks: he   
smiles and rubs his chin. Everything   
suddenly honks: it is 12:40 of   
a Thursday.
                Neon in daylight is a   
great pleasure, as Edwin Denby would   
write, as are light bulbs in daylight.   
I stop for a cheeseburger at JULIET’S   
CORNER. Giulietta Masina, wife of   
Federico Fellini, è bell’ attrice.
And chocolate malted. A lady in   
foxes on such a day puts her poodle   
in a cab.
             There are several Puerto   
Ricans on the avenue today, which   
makes it beautiful and warm. First   
Bunny died, then John Latouche,   
then Jackson Pollock. But is the   
earth as full as life was full, of them?   
And one has eaten and one walks,   
past the magazines with nudes   
and the posters for BULLFIGHT and   
the Manhattan Storage Warehouse,   
which they’ll soon tear down. I   
used to think they had the Armory   
Show there.
                A glass of papaya juice   
and back to work. My heart is in my   
pocket, it is Poems by Pierre Reverdy.

O'Hara sometimes gave poems away. He left them in drawers, didn't bother to publish. The point wasn't the artifact. It was to stay in contact with his own perceiving mind, to keep the channel open between what he saw and what he could say about it.

Nobody could have written those poems for him. The poems are inseparable from the act of perception that made them. If O'Hara had outsourced the words, there would be nothing left—not just no poem, but no walk, no lunch hour, no life pressing against language. AI can give you sentences about a man walking through midtown. What it cannot give you is the only thing that matters: being the one who walks, and sees, and finds the words yourself.

The content problem

Writing is too often strangled by expectations around content. People approach the blank page believing they need to have something to say before they can say it, when in fact the opposite is true. Morning pages gives you permission to write nothing in particular. Just dump it out. Clear your head. Move on.

And now with AI able to produce passable content on command, there’s less of a need to adopt a writing discipline that will, over time, sharpen a writer’s voice and build skill. AI’s ability to produce writing puts all the emphasis on the output, on the product, on what it says. The assumption is that if the machine can produce the words, why bother with all that messy human process at articulation and feeling things out?

Social media amplifies this belief. The attention economy trains us to believe we need to constantly remind people of our message and brand just to exist. Post or perish.

But... the travails of writing are valuable as an exercise between brain and hand. Writing’s versatility is its value multiplier. You can use the same medium for digesting what surfaced in dreams, for processing and externalizing your personal aspirations, or just thinking on the page, exploring the seeds of poems or stories, playing with figurative language—similes, metaphors, the whole kaboodle. Writing gives everyone—not just authors—a way of symbolically representing what you feel and experience and observe.

Such personal writing matters whether or not anyone else ever reads it, and it has carryover effects to whatever “official” writing you eventually do—the writing where content matters, where you’re creating something for someone else, giving them an experience or information or entertainment. The private practice feeds the public work.

What happens when people drop the private practice because AI seems to provide whatever content they would want? A good friend of mine, actually, is in this situation.

He wants to write a book. He does still keep a regular journal. But he uses AI so compulsively, it’s had the unintended consequence of dissuading him from actually wanting to bring a book of his own authorship to the finish line. When he first discovered AI, it wowed him for how it would be able to streamline his writing workflow. And yet, he’s not coming any closer to completion with his book.

If he were my writing client, things would play out differently. The world would be a better place if there was a book with his name on its spine.

One place to start: asking more of the journal he already keeps.

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Keep a writer’s notebook

Morning pages helps clear the mind, to get rid of the mental clutter so you can move on with your day. Which is great, as far as it goes. But all this AI hooha gets me more concerned about what “moving on with your day” entails. We need to get more serious about feeding our creative practice.

One practice everyone should do: keep a writer’s notebook—a portable, ongoing collection of raw material for your writing. Unlike a diary (which records your life) or morning pages (which clears your head), a writer’s notebook is inwardly informed but outward-facing. You’re hunting and gathering.

This should be playful. The poet Kenneth Koch used to have his students write poems “in the voice of” various things—a comb, the moon, a color. A writer’s notebook isn’t something you can get right or wrong unless you aren’t doing it.

It’s a writing practice that creates artifacts and seeds, useful fragments that might grow into something. You could use it to pull descriptions, quotes, or ideas captured on the fly into some other thing you’re working on. Or, you can just see it as a kind of regular drill or exercise.

What the practice can hold

Think about what a robust writing practice can actually contain:

• The immediate stuff: processing dreams while they’re still vivid, noting what’s on your mind before the day’s machinery kicks in.

• The generative stuff: experimenting with a metaphor, with the sounds of words and phrases, repeatedly and imperfectly trying to describe something you observed yesterday, playing with the rhythm of a sentence until it surprises you.

• The practical: thinking through a problem, sketching out an idea that’s been forming, jotting down a phrase that might become a poem or essay or scene.

• The somatic: describing bodily sensations, the goings-on amidst your intuitive weather, what you hear in the room, feeling the textures of language in your immediate experience.

All of this is more than head-clearing, and if you do it right, it spills into your day. It’s the writer’s equivalent of scales and drills. Deliberate regular engagement with the fundamental elements of the craft.

Process in an age of output

We miss the boat when we forget to value the process. Let’s suppose AI is great at output. Well, output still matters less than process. I want to live my life, not just achieve some result but never really exist.

When I make pottery, I do it because I love it. When I write, I put myself into my work.

Morning pages gets a lot of people started. It gives permission to write without agenda or judgment. But it’s time to push further and expand what an unburdened practice can hold.

It can be as simple as keeping a writer’s notebook. The discipline leaves you lighter, but also richer with fragments, images, and seeds of things that might become something.

The Understory

Here are a few lines from the middle of a bit of writing on a very different topic. I was journaling, then hit a bit of a lull, and just started rolling around the sounds and impressions of words. It’s sort of an example of what I meant by “generative” in the above mention of what you can do with a writer’s notebook.

As always, if you have a work-in-progress or draft or excerpt that you would like to share, please do so. Simply hit reply/comment and paste it in.

I’ve been sitting on this book for a long time. Years. I always liked it but it just wasn’t ready.

A few months ago while on the island of Koh Tao, it was too rainy to go outside, so I stayed in my little bungalow and got some writing done instead. I revved up my 10+ year old Thinkpad T440p, opened up The God Pot and decided to forge ahead with a new idea.

That idea was enough for me to reach what I decided is the finish line for this book. Not because it’s perfect. But I think it’s important to let this beautiful mutant of a book be out there in exactly this form. If there’s any more work to be done, I’ll fix it in the next one.

The book is a somewhat disorienting read. Partially that is due to who I am as I writer and the things that I cannot help but be. Mainly though, the slight disorientation is intentional. The main character is delusional. The storytelling flows in vignettes rather than chapter breaks. The omniscient narrator has some insight into some of the characters, but it also clearly has its own perspective. I like a good unreliable narrator especially when it believes itself to be omniscient.

The God Pot is a book that gives me a lot of joy. My sense of humor comes out in a deadpan style and hopefully it’s also successful at bringing some emotional maturity to what is, let’s be honest, a fairly sophomoric Lebowski kind of tale. A trust fund heir who may or may not have been trained as a spy moves into a budget apartment complex in suburban Denver. Things happen. People are implausibly odd in a way that I find realistic. There’s a lot of sex and drugs. There’s a stainless steel pot that may or may not show the face of God.

Here’s the back cover copy:

Cast of Characters

Moony Adams — trust fund heir who may or may not have been trained as a spy

Celia — his 18 year old stoner model girlfriend

Perry Whitecomb — co-manager of Sod Hill, ex-cop, Moony’s landlord and unlikely friend

Deb Infield — Perry’s ex-wife, the other co-manager, sleeping with Celia and Moony

Heath Johannson — neighbor, meth cook, firefighter, sees God in a stainless steel pot

The Gypsy — Romanian theater owner with money laundering schemes and psychological tests

Kitty — the Gypsy’s sister, smells like cedar, refers to herself as “Hello Kitty”

Josh — satanist who works tech support

Jon-Jon — part-time clown, tells a giraffe joke

A Few Excerpts

Here’s Heath finding a friend:

Exiting Home Depot, Heath spotted Celia and said, “What would Jesus do?”

Deciding it was to throw stones at the car, he searched for a rock that spoke to him. Patiently listening for a half hour, the group was gone by the time he found one, so he put the rock in his pocket.

“I am your friend,” said the rock. Heath had never been happier.

Here’s Celia on the difference between ordinary and normal:

“What I think is great about life, a lot of people call ordinary… The problem with the world… is that [people] mix up ordinary with normal. Normal is the ugliest thing… We want to be ordinary. Art is ordinary. Ordinary is when you don’t need to stand out. Normal is when you’re afraid to.”

There’s a lot more in there. A snowstorm that traps everyone in a bar. A road trip to Mexico that goes sideways. A landlord who’s definitely reporting on someone. A disco museum enthusiast named Dotty. The stamp test.

When I was writing The God Pot, I was thinking of books like The Crying of Lot 49, Miss Lonelihearts, The Loved One, Winesburg Ohio, and the ending of Joyce’s The Dead. All the MKULTRA spy stuff and the Lebowski vibe just happened to show up.

I wrote this because it’s the sort of story I like to read. I hope you like it too.

Buy The God Pot on Amazon — available in print and ebook.

Also available wherever books are sold.

What if the greatest act of creative sovereignty is choosing the tools that work for you, rather than the ones you’re told are the best?

I’ve spent years switching between supposedly obsolete tools—typewriters, writing by hand, old film cameras, actual pottery wheels—and supposedly optimized ones like, well, AI. You’ve probably been trained to believe that newer tools are better tools, and that resisting them makes you a Luddite or a hipster. But some tools were already as good as they ever needed to be.

Abandoning the old tools might mean boosting your efficiency but it also means that you lose the virtue that can only come through hard work, and before long you don’t even notice it’s gone. The CEOs and techbros that want you optimized don’t care whether the old way worked for you. They need you to believe it didn’t.

Weird typing

Years ago I abandoned QWERTY to learn Colemak, an alternative keyboard layout that rearranges keys to reduce finger travel and keep the most common letters on the home row, and it allowed me to type with roughly 38 percent less finger movement. Hot damn. It took a couple of weeks, cold turkey, to make the switch, and after that, I moved into a more frictionless way of typing on a keyboard. I could just sort of think my words right onto the screen.

After all, QWERTY is sort of arbitrary. One coincidence about the layout that is not a coincidence: you can type the word TYPEWRITER using only the top row. Apparently this was so that salesmen could show off the machines without the key arms jamming.

Funnily enough, I spent the last couple of weeks un-learning Colemak and re-learning QWERTY, because I just suddenly got stoked about using old manual typewriters again.

Typewriters were the optimization back in the day. At the time, they were a new technology. Lots of grumpy writers railed against them. Some less grumpy writers found novel ways of using them.

Using a typewriter 50 years ago wasn’t a very interesting or revolutionary thing to do. But there is something fascinating about taking a piece of equipment (or a practice) and bringing into the context of the here-and-now.

Life keeps bringing me reminders how practices and tools just absolutely cannot be made obsolete. It would be a huge mistake to believe that anything actually becomes obsolete, partly because such a notion pretends that there is some grand vision behind technological innovation. There is no such unified grand vision. It’s just ideas with funding and businesses competing and marketing campaigns. Things improve and new products get released, but that doesn’t mean much. If anything, we are shrinking ourselves in an attempt to live within our devices.

A typewriter, as a writing tool, is by no means superior to handwriting. That’s just not the way to look at things. Typewriters offer a uniquely valuable way of engaging with the writing process, particularly for people who are fed by the tactile edges of experience. They bring about a certain cadence to writing. They have a strong rhythmic element. They make noise, and this has the effect of creating its own kind of ambient environment, which can be hugely generative. They’re perfectly suited for freewriting, because there are no interruptions, and because going back and editing your text would be so counter to the strong forward momentum they induce.

What are we but sheep, I say, if we simply get coaxed along by the new optimized whatnot. But let us not become contrarian hipsters who define ourselves by being backward and obnoxious. I say we use what works for us, dammit. And it is not a good thing when forces (usually corporate) want to remove those options.

It’s not good that cursive is no longer taught in schools. Not good that AI is writing for people to such an extent that they no longer value their own voice or the beauty of slogging through the creative process.

I always like what Paul Thomas Anderson said about film versus digital. Digital allows you to do things cheaper and faster, but digital is “like watching the best TV screen in the world as opposed to watching 24 frames flicker through light, which is a hypnotic and wonderful experience.”

Digital looks different, and the disappearance of chemical photography means that cinematographers no longer have the same concerns about lighting for film. It’s automagically taken care of by the new device. There are elaborate post-production tools that do what used to happen in-camera. When the old-timers had to put a ton of will into cultivating the skill of ensuring the lighting was just right, the art gods rewarded these greybeards in exchange for their dedication. So yeah, we can get the result, but what about the unseen beauty of the absolute warfare of the creative process?

Each technology is its own attainment. Some are their own pinnacle. They need scale no greater heights.

And of course it’s not a realization that need only come in hindsight. Study the design assertions of old typewriters and you can also see the same human arrogance that must have been there in equal measure to what blowhard techbros and douche CEOs are going on about today, many of the machines with their branding as “the ultimate writing machine.”

I have always loved typewriters but had long abandoned them for more obvious choices, like typing on a goddamn computer. It may seem strange that I’m so cautionary about being excited about new tech. I guess the AI debate has made it all very real.

AI is great at weird challenges, like generating multiple iterations of a thing, or being able to take tons of unstructured input and produce some sort of highlights and organization. It can be useful at going from rough idea to producing a competent draft. And it’s “getting better,” which is strange because the consensus seems to be that it’s going to take away all of our jobs someday. So, for those who like what they do, what is actually better about that?

I use AI a lot these days, which has the effect of making me less stoked about the rise of AI than what my science fiction self might want to idealize as being possible. I fiddle with it a lot, and I’m unconvinced that human collaboration wouldn’t be better in many cases. It’s a symptom of our increasing isolation that we think of it as a creative companion. It can be a hell of a handy tool, far better than Googling used to accomplish. But no, AI should be regarded as a cost-cutting measure rather than a cutting-edge device.

AI is great at output. But output matters less than process.

I’m pro-creativity, pro-authentic voice. This all comes through practice, by stripping away layers, through discipline and commitment to the creative process.

In the spirit of celebrating the obsolete, there’s a concept from ancient Greek philosophy worth returning to here: virtue as something cultivated. We become what we repeatedly do, the way in which we do it. Ethos anthropos daimon—character is fate. Who we become isn't handed to us but built through the grain of daily action. We become what we repeatedly do, and the way in which we do it.

We live and we die, but the actions we take part in have effects that go on and on, most of them we’re completely unaware of. We are not products, despite how our actions are monetized and tracked and manipulated.

There is a radical act of self-sufficiency in choosing creative sovereignty, in choosing tools and practices that serve the process more than the outcome.

All of this may sound abstract—virtue, process, creative sovereignty—until you see what it looks like when these things are treated as disposable. Case in point: what's happening right now in Hollywood.

Why the Netflix deal is bad for Hollywood, and actually everyone

In early December, Netflix announced it would acquire Warner Bros, and Paramount countered with a hostile bid. It's still playing out, but no matter what happens, it’s going to suck.

The Netflix deal will be the final piece in the puzzle of the tech industry’s takeover of Hollywood. Hollywood is far from an enlightened organism, but it’s far better for it to be sovereign and to have movie theaters than for tech to consolidate everything and treat it as mere content. That puts us closer to a future in which AI replaces everything it can.

In April, Netflix’s co-CEO called movie theaters “an outdated concept.” He said he wasn’t bothered by the disappearance of so many cinemas because they can watch at home. That’s his enlightened dream. It’s shit.

Do it all

So what do you do?

I’m starting the new year with a couple of typewriters loaded with paper and ready to use on a side table in my office. A page half-finished, always there. I can add a sentence whenever I want—no booting up, no risk of losing power. Just the machine and whatever I’m willing to put down.

I kept journals for years but fell out of the habit as a disciplined thing. I want that back. Writing from observation in the spirit of Thoreau, Chekhov—just writing things down, trusting what you see is enough. Naming what’s in front of you and what’s happening.

This kind of writing is closer to what a musician does with scales. It’s like doing drills, except the cool thing about writing is that you get to keep what you put down and you get to keep the effect of the practice.

This kind of work brings presence down into the marrow of the thing, into the fundamentals. Nothing’s optimized.

That’s the bet. Character is fate. Who you become is built through daily action and sometimes that means choosing the slower thing, the thing that asks more of you.

Each technology carries its own mode of attention and its own relationship to time and craft. Some things—handwriting, film, typewriters, movie theaters—are their own pinnacles. They’re good just as they are, more or less, as part of a living tradition. They need scale no greater heights.

The Understory

For this week’s understory, I’m sharing one of those poetic images I managed to grab from the ether and slap down, stroke by hammering stroke, onto the printed page, using an Olivetti Lettera 22.

Feel free to share a piece of your own. A quote, a short draft, an excerpt, anything you’ve written recently that is still a work in progress with some life in it. Just post it below as a comment (click Reply or whatever it says and just paste it in).

to be a bird capable of flying overseas

wings and the rushing flows of a madness that must feel soft,
weightless sluices, moments of all-spanning quiet,

of loft, vacancy, and neighboring currents that rush to equalize all underneath

As a kid, there are movies you watch once. And there are movies you rewatch until you know each scene by heart.

For me, growing up, the rotation was: Batman (Keaton-era), Indiana Jones, Star Wars. And then, every so often, slipped in between the epics: Adventures in Babysitting.

I don’t know where that one came from, but it stuck with me. Elisabeth Shue gets roped into driving some kids into Chicago to rescue her friend, and everything goes wrong. A blues club. A car thief with a heart of gold. A knife fight. The kids almost die several times, but she gets them home, and nobody tells the parents.

A different kind of experiment

Starseed Flux is my first YA sci fi. It started as an experiment in structure.

I’d been kicking around a science fiction premise for a while: suppose there was a grand initiative to travel to the next solar system but faster-than-light travel doesn’t exist. Even if the ship goes really fast, it would still take more than one human lifespan. Extrapolate this further and you could imagine a grand endeavor to travel to distant solar systems. Getting anywhere would mean the coming and going of multiple generations of human beings. The mission would feel very different to the person forty generations in than it might have to the one who bravely signed up for it. What would life be like on a multi-generational mission bearing the weight of a purpose you never chose?

I had characters. I had the broader universe. What I didn’t have was a narrative spine.

Then I remembered Adventures in Babysitting, and I went to work. I took the film’s synopsis and expanded it into a scene-by-scene breakdown. Then I performed a kind of find-and-replace operation: my characters, my world, my story, but running on the existing chassis.

I wasn’t trying to write a science fiction adaptation of that movie or really be concerned with anything besides my embodied memory of its story beats. I just used it as scaffolding. Really, the exercise could work with any story that has a good underlying structure. I wanted to start with something fun.

The dual memory

Writing this way was interesting, because during the planning process I was holding two stories in mind at once. This is what was happening in the movie at this point. This is what’s happening in my story.

At first, the parallels were close. By the end, there are stretches where nothing lines up at all, and the two worlds are very different. The characters are completely different. The exercise shows the story take on a completely different life, not dictated by its structure.

The choice to work this way kept me from overcomplicating things. When I start building a world, I inevitably generate more characters, more backstory, more threads. The temptation is always to let the story sprawl. Having the scaffold meant I could say no, this scene serves this function, that character appears here for this reason. And move on.

The story

Mott Fortress was a maintenance worker on the IHC-111, one of three multi-generation ships carrying what remains of humanity on a centuries-long mission to seed life across the cosmos.

She’d never questioned the mission. Why would she? She was born into it. Her job was to keep systems running, follow protocols, and eventually pass the work to her own clone. She understood life as something measured in centuries-old routines.

Then everything went wrong. It started small. She was asked to supervise two junior clones from one of the royal families while their elders attended important meetings. Annoying, but manageable. Then her best friend Beryl called, frantic, claiming she’d witnessed a ghost ship, vast and cloaked, shadowing their fleet, and that she was now trapped in a medical facility.

What followed was an unauthorized rescue mission that spirals out of control. It’s something of a coming-of-age story. Mott spends the book becoming the kind of person who can hold responsibility. Which means failing spectacularly over and over again.

The title comes from the physics (flux referring to some sort of amazing starship drive technology) but also from the condition of living in permanent transition. The seeders exist between origin and destination. They’re not the people who left Earth, and they’ll never be the people who arrive. They’re the ones who keep the lights on.

What does it mean to live a life that exists purely in service of a future you’ll never see?

An excerpt

Here’s a passage from early in the book. Mott has just been stood up by her boyfriend and is counting stars on the observation deck:

My eyes fixed out beyond the transparent pane on the void of space. I was counting the stars—or trying to, anyway. It’s a game that my boyfriend Tam and I have: keep your eyes fixed straight ahead and try to count the total number of stars in your field of vision. The game had started on one of our first dates, when I’d confessed that my sensitivity to picking up other people’s emotions sometimes made it hard for me to know what I was feeling myself, and in those moments I needed to decompress by staring out at space. He seemed touched by me mentioning this, and suggested we head here, to the observation deck, to see how fully we could decompress in each other’s presence. And before long, it became our simple, secret way of enjoying the warmth of each other’s presence against the backdrop of outer space’s far reaches.

It was an impossible game. There are far too many stars and nebula to count, but I loved to try, to just stand and take it all in, make my field of vision as broad as it could be and estimate the tens of thousands. Or rather, try to stretch the sharp clarity at the center of my vision so that it expanded wide enough to take in every distinct star, the shape and size and color and the unconstellated proportions between each and every dot against the rich pure black of space.

What’s next

I have a detailed plan for book two. The story continues, the stakes expand, and some of what got set up here pays off in ways I’m excited about.

But for now: book one is here. You can read it. I hope you will, and I hope you enjoy it.

Starseed Flux is available now on Amazon →

The heavy feeling. There’s something you really want to do or become or create. Something stands between it and you. Stands with one foot on your chest. It feels like a cloud or a pressure weighing you down. In some, it triggers anxiety, a panic felt in the heart or a shortness of breath, and above all an urgency to distract or shift focus to something, anything else.

It’s the weight of your own expectations when the current moment doesn’t have something to show for it. The universe is off-kilter, starting with you.

The heavy feeling is intellect fighting with intellect. Emotions battling emotions, mind fighting mind. Wrestling fitfully with a bummer of a feeling and losing.

Here’s what I’ve learned about getting unstuck: to break through the heavy feeling, you need to understand three things, and I promise each of these is useful on its own, even if you never get to my conclusion.

First, how to tell when you’re genuinely shifting your state versus just avoiding the work. Second, what the heavy feeling actually is. And third, why most of us keep looking for the answer in the wrong place. These three insights stack on each other, but they’re also each worth knowing independently. By the end, you’ll see how they point to something specific about breaking through, but we’ll build to that.

Change your state, don’t avoid it

I see two options when the heavy feeling hits. The first is to do something that changes your state. Go for a run. Hug your dog. Make a lateral move out of the vicious cycle.

This makes the feeling go away. And that sounds like success, right?

But here’s the question worth asking: are you changing your state or avoiding your state?

I had a friend who took a nap whenever he got depressed. He’d get sad, take a nap, wake up feeling fine. All smiles, ready to party. For him, a person whose emotional state was governed by what he was physically doing, that’s all that was needed.

You could also say it wasn’t working. That sometimes it’s good to do the thing that doesn’t go with the grain, like actually talking about what’s happening.

Here’s how to tell the difference: A genuine state change gives you access to something you couldn’t reach before. It creates space for insight or action. Avoidance just kicks the can down the road. You’ll be right back here tomorrow, same feeling, same stuck place.

Your spouse comes in and finds you watching television. “How’s the book coming along?”

“Oh, I’m changing my state.”

The diagnostic question is simple: Does this action create the conditions for me to return to the work differently, or does it just delay the reckoning?

This matters because if you can’t tell the difference, you’ll spin your wheels forever thinking you’re being strategic when you’re actually just running.

And even when you master the art of genuine state changes, even when you can reliably return to your work refreshed, the heavy feeling might still show up. Which tells us something important: it’s not just about your state.

Which means we need to understand what’s actually causing it.

Understanding the gap

Let me tell you what the heavy feeling actually is, because it’s not what most people think.

It’s not writer’s block. It’s not imposter syndrome. It’s not even resistance, though it feels like all of those things.

The heavy feeling is the sensation of standing in a gap, specifically the gap between your expectation and your present experience.

Here’s how it works:

You get inspired. That inspiration crystallizes into an expectation. Maybe it’s writing a novel. Maybe it’s launching a business. Maybe it’s becoming the kind of person who creates consistently. The expectation is luminous. You can see it clearly, almost taste it.

In your mind, achieving The Expectation feels like a hallowed ceremony. Sunlight through an oculus. Magic descending from on high. Or at minimum, a tropical dance party with a balmy breeze and fire in the air.

Then you show up to actually do the work.

And it’s a Tuesday morning. You’re tired. The page is blank. Your coffee is cold. The work feels like Eyes Wide Shut’s Illuminati sex party—everyone else seems to be getting it on while you’re just getting murderously creepy vibes.

The gap between these two experiences, the idealized and the actual, creates the heavy feeling.

This is worth understanding on its own because it means the heavy feeling isn’t a sign you’re failing. It means you’re in the space between who you are and who you’re becoming. Of course it’s heavy, because you’re holding both realities simultaneously.

Every client I work with eventually admits they want to be a bestselling author. But their present reality is: blank page, self-doubt, Tuesday morning. The rift between “bestselling author life” and “struggling to write 500 words life” creates that pressure on your chest.

It’s only natural to want to avoid that feeling. But even if you sit there and open to the feeling, that won’t make it go away.

Knowing this doesn’t automatically free you. Most people understand the gap exists and still can’t move through it. Which brings us to the third thing you need to understand.

The external solution trap

Most people stay trapped because they expect the answer to come from outside them.

Our mental models for inspiration and the muse usually arrive in the form of something external. Lightning striking. The perfect environment. The right mood. Enough time. Better circumstances. Someone believing in us.

We wait for conditions to improve. We wait to feel ready. We wait for the heavy feeling to lift before we begin.

“If I just had more time...” “That person has something I can never have.”

It’s the ass end of the often-studied idea about how we’re all motivated by emotions yet believe we’re rational beings. Emotional triggers trail behind them a ghastly mess of false logic.

This is what makes the heavy feeling so persistent. You’re standing in the gap between expectation and reality, and you’re waiting for external circumstances to shift before you move. But external circumstances changing is another form of expectation, which just widens the gap.

The heavy feeling intensifies because you’re fighting yourself. Mind versus mind. Emotion versus emotion. You battle with it and wait until you’re worn out enough to get the message that proves your fear right.

There’s this teaching, maybe you’ve heard a version of it, about universal compassion and forgiveness. The teacher speaks beautifully about extending grace to all beings, about how everyone deserves understanding. The students nod along, feeling enlightened. Then one guy raises his hand: “Yes, yes, compassion for everyone. But surely not my neighbor, right? He’s a really bad guy.”

We’re all for universal principles until it comes to that one person, that one situation, that one creative block that feels uniquely insurmountable.

The pattern is universal, but we believe our situation is the exception.

We believe everyone else has access to something we don’t. Some secret ingredient. Some advantage. And if we just found that external thing, the gap would close and the heavy feeling would lift.

But external solutions can’t close an internal gap.

So if changing your state doesn’t resolve it, and external rescue won’t come, how do you actually break through?

Breakthrough

The cavalry isn’t coming to save you from the beauty of your dreams.

Here’s what breaks through the heavy feeling: forward momentum. Get your ass out there and practice.

You can’t become a bestselling author unless you author something. The only way you’ll author anything good is if you pour love into the process, which can be joyful and insurmountably difficult.

The multiplier is to have some sunlight in your heart. Drop the expectations for lightning to strike and show up fully for the process. Pour love into your actions until you have nothing else left and nothing else matters.

And here’s the key point: forward momentum isn’t valuable because it closes the gap between your goals and your current reality. It’s valuable because it changes your relationship to the gap. Yes, when you decide to show up and work anyway, you’re going to make some objective progress toward your goal. But that’s just the external stuff. What matters more is what’s happening inside.

When you’re stuck, you’re treating the gap as a problem to solve before you can begin. The gap will forever be the barrier. It will stay with you even when you attain your external goal. Unless you find a way to love yourself and find joy within it, the heavy feeling will always be able to show up and get in the way of your work.

Forward momentum flips this. You move inside the gap. You discover that the gap is a space you can inhabit while moving. The joy isn’t waiting on the other side of the gap. The joy is there in taking action following the initial impulse. The journey itself gives you the fuel to take one step and then another step.

This is why you have to lower the bar—not because your output doesn’t matter, but because lowering the bar is what allows you to start. And only starting creates momentum. And only momentum changes your relationship to the gap and allows you to reconnect with the joy of the process.

The heavy feeling doesn’t disappear. But it stops being a barrier. It evolves from “I can’t move” into “I’m in the space between who I am and who I’m becoming. There’s no wind, but my sails are open all the same, and I am rowing in the direction of my choosing.”

The breakthrough is cumulative. It’s one step and then another. It’s discovering that you’re not kept from joy and love no matter where you happen to be.

I write about this stuff because externalizing it is helpful for me to do. It thingifies it. It’s also fun to make light of what is in fact a really beefy thing to master.

But understanding the heavy feeling and actually moving through it are different things. That’s where coaching comes in.

I work with writers who are done waiting for perfect conditions and ready to build forward momentum. We work together for a month, a few months, or ongoingly, until the gap becomes a space you can inhabit instead of a barrier that stops you.

If that’s where you are, reach out.

The Understory

The Understory is a place to share works-in-progress. If you have something you’re working on, feel free to post it as a comment or in the chat. You can just click to leave a comment and paste it there. Say a bit about it if you’d like.

Here’s mine for this week. Just some jots. Scenes and images:

under a clothesline
a woman scoots a terracotta pot without flowers

dripping wet sun
siena smoke and exhaust
sunset over ochre

mosquito of a speeding scooter
thick mule of a passing bus

pre-memory outburst
she tripped, spraypainted
kicked gravel

/

for as long as he can and
for as long as he can

walk over the earth
where his grave might have been
to press forward a sort of plow

just a means of opening earth at the seams
of a footstep

soles on brown cypress needles
rustle of a bed

avoiding ants
one bears a cotton tuft
large white sail
peace flag

/

she’s a
white mare at midnight
thigh high in tall grass by the farmhouse
where something happened
a secret had happened
or it didn’t happen
a secret carried away
a story told later

dryflies about
an orchestra rehearses
withered bow drags across
flat strings this hot day
your skin a sponge being squeezed

If you have something you’d like to contribute, feel free to do so! Just click comment and drop it there — or post it via chat. Fame and glory await you.

Every night brings dreams, and every morning there’s an ever-vanishing window of time during which those dreams can make the leap of faith, Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade style, from the cloud of supraconscious direct experience into present focused attention, and potentially then into long-term storage.

That’s the quality I want in my writing. Right there in the first draft, ink still wet. To show you what I mean, I need to first show you the three ways attention shows up in writing, and why two of them kill what’s alive on the page.

The point is how you focus

You can write different ways. You can write absentmindedly, for starters. When the writing is not in any way about the language or subtext or the present moment, this is the kind of writing output that AI will grow to become competitive against. Absentminded means relying on tropes and the aggregate of things you’ve said before—how it’s said versus how the moment lives right now.

First mode: Autopilot

This type of written content tends to have a kind of flow, but it’s the sort of flow that’s like how you could drive all the way to work without really being aware of any specific thing you’re doing while you drive. A thousand chained perceptions, a thousand sequenced actions, a ton of steel hurtling down the road at 70 miles per hour, but what’s playing in your mind is the theme song to Green Acres.

Absentminded writing is mediocre writing. If anything, absentminded writing is about simply getting from A to B. There’s less presence in it. It carries few surprises.

The thing is, we’ve all written this way. You can feel it when you reread something. There’s nobody there.

So if autopilot doesn’t work, what about the opposite? What about being deliberately, consciously present? This is where most people reach for mindfulness. And this is where things get interesting, because mindfulness, at least how it’s usually practiced, might be worse than autopilot.

Second mode: Self-monitoring

As I’ve seen it performed, mindfulness seems to just involve people running some kind of internal process in tandem with their actions that monitors what they’re doing. I’m not convinced that mindfulness is all it’s cracked up to be.

A mindful person might just be one who is metacognitively observing. Because they’re spending extra resources on self-observation, somehow the mindful person gives off the impression that they’re an alien trying to pass as human. They’re mindful in that it’s taking more effort for them to do things that could otherwise flow.

Mindfulness and social awkwardness share some ground.

Here’s why this matters for writing: when you’re monitoring yourself write, you split your attention. Part of you is writing, part of you is watching yourself write, maybe even narrating it: “Okay, I’m being really present now, I’m noticing my breath, I’m choosing my words carefully...” Meanwhile, nothing alive is happening on the page.

This applies beyond writing, by the way. You see this pattern in the person at the party who’s so busy being “present” they’re actually absent, the musician who’s monitoring their technique instead of playing, the lover who’s performing presence instead of being present. The distinction matters.

So not autopilot, not mindfulness. What then? What I’m talking about is a kind of focus that doesn’t split your attention but concentrates it. Instead of dividing your attention to watch yourself, you funnel everything into a single point. All of you, right there in the moment.

Third mode: Concentrated presence

So it’s focus, then?

What I mean is awareness. Or maybe “open focus”—but that sounds like a rehab center or an app the innies in Severance would be triggered by.

Write in such a way that you bring to bear your whole being into the moment. Or at least the pointy end of it. The end that can hold a pencil and press keys, primate-like, as it resonates within a corporeal form that sits wholly occupied—we must be grateful—by chiefly metabolic processes. Possessor of the alimentary canal, governor of many mitochondrial processes, wizard of ATP and calcium channel something-somethings. To say nothing of the constant neural storms, the winds of thought and voltages of cognition, the missed connections of ever more reaching toward comprehension of what is in fact an ephemeral passing.

The passing itself serving as one coordinate on the being that is brought to bear with its pointy end in the moment of giving shape to inner experience through the wizardry of language and symbolic forms.

How fully can you muster your focus right into the moment? Funnel it all so that the pointy end of consciousness takes the shape of the words on the page as you write them.

People talk about having focus, but more should be said about really mustering focus, bringing to bear even the negative capability of your being into what you’re doing.

Think about how you experience dreams before they fade. Your focus is on the feeling, the experience. You’re wholly receptive. This is what I mean by bringing the dream-state into writing. You’re totally vulnerable to the experience of the dream. That total immersion without self-presentation is the quality we’re after.

Where writing differs (and where it’s alike)

Focused writing is not conversation, but it becomes more like conversation in ways that are too easy to disregard.

In conversation, so much passes—body language, microgesture, the gutterally real potential of two or more human forms in bodily proximity in the shared effort to communicate. Whereas in writing, unfortunately, this same reading of the other gets ignored. In the moment of doodling letters, there would seem to be no other.

But the other is there on the other side of the transcribed experience. And the other is there in the transcription.

This other is the shadow or mirror of the writer’s attentiveness to the moment of creation. And that’s not you, not directly. You’re not exactly writing to yourself, but you are there in the writing of it. And although this sounds like some trivial nuance to say, a rounding error in the calculus of scribbling with a pencil, I think it’s vital.

Vital in the sense that attention is a light that shines from the living self into the thing it’s doing, which in this case is writing.

So we have three modes now: absent (autopilot), divided (mindful), and concentrated (open focus). The last one is where things get interesting, where writing becomes performance in the best sense.

What this looks like in practice

Presence happens and gets recorded because writing, like other art forms and opportunities to experience flow, provides both some stability—an easy opportunity to perform something automatically which nevertheless requires consistent engagement—and also unlimited potential. Anything at all could happen. There’s some anxiety in this, some potential to strike fear in the heart of the poor writer—the “will I write nothing good,” the performance aspect of it.

A performance is always unexpected and alive. The moment brings with it any possible outcome.

So this is the “open focus” of it, if you will. Openness describes the potential for it to be a vessel of something that flows, something you could do and have the doing done automatically. The focus of it is the performance. The dancing jazz. The sand thrown on the windshield in a storm. The phrase that turns unexpectedly. The alchemical change that happens within the writer.

To substitute mere mindfulness, if mindfulness is just some sort of self-monitoring, would mean a loss. What substance can meta-awareness have compared with actually being there, a force in the moment. Being in the hot seat, and choosing to put yourself there, because that’s where the unexpected happens. That’s where phrases get turned. Because you’re actually on the spot, admitting you can’t know, and speeding toward knowing.

Why morning is the window

What does bringing full focus and attention to writing look like? The inner awareness is directed into the moment, at what’s precisely been written as it’s being written, with an eye both for what just happened and what’s to come.

For me, it’s where the phrase becomes visceral and alive, and where language is as much shapes, geometric patterns and forms, connective strata, as it is something that is spelled out, rhythmic and gutteral.

This is where writing becomes capable of carrying within it the quality of attention that created it. The presence of the writer is there and able to be felt in the writing. The writer feels it. The reader feels it too.

When you’re truly present in the writing moment, you’re focused. You’re not performing mindfulness. You’re not just monitoring yourself non-judgmentally from some safe observational distance. You’re right there in the thick of it, vulnerable to and able to be affected by whatever wants to emerge.

This is why the morning matters. In that window between dreaming and fully waking, you haven’t started monitoring yourself yet. You’re too drowsy for self-consciousness. You’re not yet clicked-in enough to be on autopilot. You’re in that rare state where all of you can show up in the writing without division. And you only get a few minutes of it before your day’s machinery kicks in and you start living from memory instead of truth. That’s the vanishing window.

I love helping writers go deeper with their writing projects. If you’d like to work with me as your writing coach, reach out here.

The Understory

The Understory is a place to share works-in-progress. I’ll start off each week, and anyone who likes is welcome to contribute something of their own. Just post it as a comment or in the chat.

Here’s a draft I remember writing after learning all the cool words we have for the parts of a shoe. There’s really a complete vocabulary for describing the whole geography of a shoe or boot or moccasin. Really, think about it. There’s cheek, heel, eye, sole, tongue, lace and on and on. And it makes me nostalgic for a world that was more embodied. To have such a complete mapping for the parts of something as common as a shoe means that we really spent time with those objects because we needed a way to describe and engage with them. Nowadays, we’re spending less time engaging with the tactile world, and all of our new words are just sort of meme-based or else stem from something tech related.

Some people take their job as them

So there’s this meme called a dickbutt
and it is what it sounds like
it’s a dicklike tube that has a butt
or is a butt coming out of a dick
with one
or just is one with both
as part of what it is

anyway it’s out there on the internet
and some people are like that
with their jobs
they take their job seriously
or more to the point
they take it to be them
as in
they are them
is their job is them
they are who their job says is them
“you sir are a plumber”

the baby is born as neither a boy nor a girl it’s
a plumber, a senior engineer,
it’s a dickbutt
of a someday life partner, it

is maybe
they are maybe
who they are

/

consider how
it is normal now to receive “notification sounds”
which is a whole class of
application-driven annoyance

“honey silence your notifications”
whereas formerly we in the village
would refer descriptively to the regions of a shoe

and say the tongue or heel or cheek or eye,
referring to something on a piece of foot leather
related to the insole or arch

whereas all our names newly coined lately
i would say
tend to be, fair to predict,

will be application-related
product and device specific
as even “your device”

is about as meaningful
as attributing your eternal and changing sense of self
to a profile on a corporate application

and corporations
to be honest
are or have eaten the world

are people
which is to say a man can’t go to a beach
anywhere but greenland

and with a shovel
dig down a few feet

without eventually turning up
a stone that has been handled by
jim in accounting

jim being a kind of stone
that works in accounting
and which you could bet your life
somewhere on it--
or him, I mean, on jim

which some of these are still small or subtle
(you have to have the eye for this)
but they’re growing

corporate logos
like the mark of the beast
you’ll find it applied somewhere on its device
on jim

just like the button in the middle
is the home button
but where it takes you
isn’t exactly anywhere

so call it a
white whale of a button
whales being after all
a name for
large bitcoin holders

and money something to work for
which if it’s not also working for you
suffers inflation
which we know ends in
what you’d call
correction

Feel free to share your work-in-progress draft here in the comments (just post it as a comment) or the chat:

This week I’m continuing with another “five things” post. Take it as a little anti-algorithm move. Rather than a high-powered recommendation engine or whatever, here are five recommendations from one human to another.

The Crying of Lot 49 - Thomas Pynchon

Thomas Pynchon’s 1966 novella follows Oedipa Maas as she learns she’s been named executor of her ex-lover’s vast estate and finds herself drawn to unearth a centuries-old conflict between two mail distribution companies, Thurn und Taxis and the Trystero. My favorite scene involves her putting on so many layers of clothes she comes to resemble a beach ball.

One thing I love about Pynchon’s work is how his characters’ obvious artificiality (their cartoon names, their allegorical flatness) makes you aware you’re reading a constructed fiction, which, fellow Pynchon fan Paul Thomas Anderson really nails. Some of the best moments in his movies are when his characters seem just on the edge of breaking. In those moments, something weird and hilarious shines through.

This quality of characters hovering at the boundary of their fictional world runs throughout Pynchon’s work. Characters like Pierce Inverarity, Mike Fallopian, and Randolph Driblette populate a world where the symbol of a muted post horn appears everywhere—in bar bathrooms, among an engineer’s doodles, as part of children’s sidewalk games, amidst Chinese ideograms in shop windows.

It’s also just really well written. It’s Pynchon’s most approachable book.

Miss Lonelyhearts - Nathanael West

West’s 1933 novella follows a male newspaper advice columnist who becomes unable to ignore the misery of his correspondents.

Why is this book great? Good, pared-down language.

In describing his protagonist, West writes:

Although his cheap clothes had too much style, he still looked like the son of a Baptist minister. A beard would become him, would accent his Old-Testament look. But even without a beard no one could fail to recognize the New England puritan. His forehead was high and narrow. His nose was long and fleshless. His bony chin was shaped and cleft like a hoof.

Great turns of phrase:

after a third drink, just as he was settling into the warm mud of alcoholic gloom.

West writes about the blackly comic energy and caustic ebullience, the strange buoyancy of suffering in early 1930s Manhattan.

This sort of prose inspired my book The God Pot.

Cheers to West.

Collected Poems - Lew Welch

Gary Snyder was my gateway drug for Lew Welch. I will never forget Snyder giving a reading he opened by announcing: “Poetry is not an intellectual exercise.” My heart swelled to fill the room.

Welch was apparently the man who we can credit with the phrase “RAID KILLS BUGS DEAD” while working as an advertising copywriter before one of his nervous breakdowns. He had also driven a cab and worked as a dockworker on the San Francisco waterfront.

Here’s Welch’s “Ring of Bone”:

I saw myself

a ring of bone

in the clear stream

of all of it

and vowed

always to be open to it

that all of it

might flow through

and then heard “ring of bone” where

ring is what a

bell does

God bless Lew Welch. The body is a sacred space that is also a process, a noun that is also a verb, self continuous with “the clear stream of all of it.”

Here’s another great one from Lew:

He Thanks His Woodpile

The wood of the madrone burns with a flame at once

lavender and mossy green, a color you can sometimes see in a sari.

Oak burns with a peppery smell.

For a really hot fire, use bark.

You can crack your stove with bark.

All winter long I make wood stews:

Poem to stove to woodpile to stove to

typewriter. woodpile stove.

and can’t stop peeking at it!

can’t stop opening up the door!

can’t stop giggling at it

“Shack Simple”

crazy as Han Shan as

Wittgenstein in his German hut, as

all the others ever were and are

Ancient Order of the Fire Gigglers

who walked away from it, finally,

kicked the habit, finally, of Self, of

man-hooked Man

(which is not, at last, estrangement )

Train Dreams - Denis Johnson

For stretches of time, usually after rereading one of his books, Denis Johnson again becomes my favorite writer. I think Train Dreams is my favorite Johnson.

The language is so good, and the audiobook is narrated masterfully by Will Patton—Patton’s reading perfectly matches the tone, texture, and depth. People whose only exposure to Johnson is Jesus’ Son are missing out.

There’s a great passage when in the course of the story’s telling, the main character is with a team of loggers and one of them suffers an injury. In his delirium before dying, Arn Peeples:

shouted mad words—‘right reverend rising rockies!’ he’d shouted; ‘forerunner grub holdup feller! Caution! Caution!’—and called out to the spirits from his past, and said he’d been paid a visit by his sister and his sister’s husband, though both, as Billy said he knew for certain, had been many years dead.

This occurs after Arn is struck by a falling branch from a larch tree (a “widowmaker”), which initially seems like a minor injury but leads to dizzy spells, fever, and ultimately his death.

And this description: “his right shoulder locked up as dead as a vault door,” and later he feels “a palsy which was rocking the entire avenue like a rowboat” and “the heat itched in his hair.”

There’s a superb description of a forest fire, and when Grainier’s Bible burns, “here had come a fire stronger than God.” After the fire, “The ground about was healing. Fireweed and jack pine stood up about thigh high. A mustard-tinted fog of pine pollen drifted through the valley”.

Or where where the main character experiences his first kiss with Gladys:

The first kiss plummeted him down a hole and popped him out into a world he thought he could get along in—as if he’d been pulling hard the wrong way and was now turned around headed downstream.

This happens during their picnic in the meadow when Grainier shows Gladys the land he’s acquired. After she says “You got my mouth flat against my teeth” and tells him to “Do it again. But easy does it.”

From Johnson I take away the trust of the moment and an example of how poetry can grow into a story, how the discipline and eye of the poet can be brought into other modes. People who read just to know what’s going to happen will be missing an entire universe of experience.

Johnson was born in Munich in 1949, grew up in various countries due to his father’s diplomatic career. He was intermittently a teacher and journalist, always a writer who often alluded to a troubled period when he was addicted to heroin and alcohol. From 1979 to 1981, he taught creative writing at the state prison in Florence, Arizona. This experience, particularly his work with two death-row inmates, impelled Johnson to finish Angels, a novel he had started years before.

Aesop Without Morals - Lloyd W. Daly

Lloyd W. Daly presents the Fables in a new light as adult literature, as an expression of Greek creative genius. To me this expresses something about prose poetry. Fables are brilliant but they can be ruined by the moralizing.

The opposite is true, too. You can have a completely flat little scene and then a completely disproportionately contrasting moral. The tension between the two is worth living for.

Daly separates out the morals into a long appendix at the back—579 morals all in a row. This book for me is a discovery of a different way of experiencing that tension between scene and commentary, what’s it like shaped another way.

Here’s 228, The Geese and the Cranes:

Some geese and some cranes were feeding in the same meadow. When hunters appeared, the cranes, who were light and agile, got away safely, but the geese, who were heavy-bodied, waited too long and were caught.

There’s a moral to the story. It’s on page 293 of the Appendix:

So it is with man. When there is fighting between parties in a city, the poor, being unencumbered, easily move from city to city, but the rich stay behind because of their great possessions and lose their lives.

I like sharing these lists. If any of these sound interesting or if you’ve read them, feel free to share your thoughts. Always curious what others are reading or if these remind you of other books worth checking out.

I have a couple of openings next month for writing clients. If you’d like to work with me as a writing coach, reach out here.

The Understory

The Understory is a place to share works-in-progress. If you have something you’re working on, feel free to post it as a comment or in the chat. You can just click to leave a comment and paste it there.

For this week’s Understory submission I pulled another notebook at random and came across a piece partially collected of overheard sound fragments.

Echo’s Edge

out in the courtyard
the crisp evening air
brings fragments of sound,
after dinner commotion from verandas
from far inside stone rooms
with wide open shutters

I’m under the night sky
attempting some sort of painting

cypress trees
their treelines cresting
silhouettes

the moon in a
long line
                                  of white

                                  some sort of glare tonight

moonlight shows the dawn
from the world’s other face

ROUND FALSETTO

permission to breathe
“han   som”

“you wan com back han som”

/

pain ting under no light at all
hold it close up

broadbrush pain ting
in a throwaway
journal

“hemingway?”

turn around to get water
confront the riotous commotion
another successful dinner on planet earth

alltherooms
faced the same 


 /
 
“no no no
 really is part of
 the fam”

paint the moon
in lumbertoned blackpants

paint the moon
using only the irritation from
bugbites
skinwhelps
light upstairs goes off

lights like
disparate eggs

satisfied because you’re here or
satisfied because your dream home
is a laid back place
for sitting hens?

/

choosing a color
ran dom
 unitary
 solitone

“off all aler mo
 mo ale pop”
 conec
 con stelat

trace ink
like Nera or
 some other black horse
guide
 
“but I just like
Jerry getting goosed” 

If you have something you’d like to contribute, feel free to do so! Just click comment and drop it there — or post it via chat. Fame and glory awaits you.

This week I’m sharing Bearing Witness, the inaugural contribution to The Understory, a new feature that runs at the tail end of each weekly article where we share our works-in-progress, our creative compost, the fertile mess beneath our polished pieces.

Broadly speaking, this is for writers, but I’m wholly inviting other forms of creative output as well.

Don’t expect crowds here. Don’t expect to be wowed. This is more potting shed than amphitheater.

I’ll be populating The Understory with whatever’s currently decomposing/germinating on my desk. Consider this an open invitation — when something of yours feels ready to be seen in its unready state, you’re welcome to share it too.

If you don’t see anyone else sharing, don’t take that as a reason to hold back.

Why share works-in-progress?

I received an excellent bit of advice when I became managing editor at Puerto del Sol: “We don’t look for perfect work. We look for work that transcends its flaws.”

Every submission we received represented someone making themselves vulnerable and submitting themselves to the process. They took time from their life to create something and then took the terrifying step of sending it out into the world, onto the desks of a hopefully well-intentioned editorial team. So we did something basically unheard of in literary journals: we wrote personal notes for each rejection. Real responses from one human to another about why this particular piece wasn’t quite right for us at this moment.

This practice is even harder to imagine happening now, now that the world is So Very Optimized. But that’s exactly why The Understory matters.

The value of witnessing process

This isn’t a critique circle. If anything, it’s about sharing what’s most alive in a piece while understanding it’s still becoming.

A work-in-progress might be a seed waiting to connect to something else. It might be something that comes from hour three of a sustained practice where transformation starts to happen but hasn’t crystallized yet. It might be that messy middle where the real work lives.

For readers, witnessing works-in-progress is good practice too. Learning to see what’s alive in unfinished work, to witness potential rather than judge completion, is its own creative discipline. When we engage with work that’s still breathing and changing, we participate in the creative process rather than just consuming its products.

The best writing happens in collaboration with uncertainty. Here in The Understory, we’re honoring the creation phase. We’re choosing to value process, sustained attention, and the joy of humility.

An experiment in creative community

For now, The Understory lives in the comments (or chat, as you like). If this space starts to thrive, I might move it behind the paywall to keep it feeling like a trusted circle where we can share the vulnerable stuff. But let’s see what grows first.

This week’s understory finding: Bearing Witness.

It’s a piece pulled at random from an old notebook of mine. I made a few minor edits.

Bearing Witness

“Man is condemned to be free; because once thrown into the world, he is responsible for everything he does.”
- Jean-Paul Sartre, Existentialism Is a Humanism, 1946


I wish I wasn’t here

 the way things sit in the desert
    after being constructed there
                                asking for air


          methaddicted pornfiends
                    existentialist poets,
                                   same thing

those photos of faces after a war
it doesn’t work to see them as people

"No one bears witness for the witness."*

let’s speak to the desert on the beach
we can do a painting of each other

we can do painting each other

we can do each other here on the beach
I wish I was here.

we can speak with everything and connect
all ideas all sensations all dialogue

desert bodies in congress are landscapes in congress
their disconjunctions rejoindered and cruising

and now we are the road
the second occurrence of I wish I wasn’t here is passing

saguaros, as lines, are the radii of perfect spheres
I am dedicated to thinking about how I would feel if you were here.

I am glad you are
     always around
                      as in

I want a perfect memory
                                of you

across the border

I am digging into the dusty castles
giving them specific homes in emotions

“The full experience of an emotion is the funeral pyre of the emotion.”*
Your funeral pyre become the first creature who listens transparently.

If I were dying in the desert, that creature would speak to me.

The dog lets you pet it
I like conversation that discovers that choice.

The mountaineer says
to take a dog
for your emergency rations;

it’s edible
and you won’t eat it
until you have to




* Paul Celan, Aschenglorie, from Atemwende, 1967
 ** Stanislav Grof, from The Way of the Psychonaut

If you have a piece or work-in-progress you’d like to share, feel free to include it as a comment or link (or as a photograph using chat).

I’ll see you back here next week with another TMMW article and in The Understory with another piece or fragment or semi-polished ruin to share.

For a phase in my life I lived off grid.

For a phase I worked in software engineering—an entry level job in my late thirties.

That cultivated a bit of humility.

Not that I’m above doing hard work. It’s just the fact of what it feels like to attain a certain level of comfort in one domain. It feels nice. And then to switch to another entirely. To put on the paper hat, so to speak, and flip burgers.

Flipping burgers is honest work. But what’s most humbling about a career change like that is how you’re expected to really embody the role.

Switching roles is good medicine, though, and I recommend it. It’s great for peeling back the layers of the onion of self.

Any stretch of time spent in a role gets you to respond as if that projection of you is who you are.

Every day, Master Zuigan would call out to himself:

“Master!”

“Yes?”

“Are you awake?”

“Yes, yes!”

“From now on, don’t be deceived by others.”

“No, no, I won’t!”

He would have this dialogue with himself daily.

Anything can be fine for a stretch of time. But too long in any given role can be problematic. I have found it necessary in my life to make hard pivots into other pursuits and then to go deep with them.

Each phase strips something away. The corporate phase especially, even as a grubby work-from-home engineer. When you’re a part of a corporation, the company culture gets you to show up clean-shaven in every possible way. The more time you spend in that meme the more you stew in the dogma promoting being streamlined, optimized, and made presentable for the algorithm. You become aerodynamic in the worst possible sense.

More people lose themselves in the corporate world than in any monastery, cult, or remote commune. At least those places acknowledge they’re asking for your whole identity. The corporate world pretends it only wants your 9-to-5, then somehow ends up with your dreams, your language, your very way of seeing.

Before you know it, you’re a hairless corporate being, smooth as a Ken doll, optimized for a healthy retirement in the great machine.

This next phase for me is about writing from joy, fascination, creativity—the love of it. Enthusiasm and humility, and not the corporate kind that’s really just fear dressed up nice. Real humility that comes from facing the blank page and knowing you might fail spectacularly and that’s perfectly fine.

Not a concern of the mind managing risk and reputation, but the mind as a vessel used by the will. Just as language becomes a vessel used by the person with a desire to make a feeling tangible.

Time to get woolly and strange and forested. Tend the wild plants that grow on the paths.

You want some sort of permanent home, some stable identity, but nothing works that way. We’re standing in the rain our whole lives, eroding. And the rain wins in the end.

Master Zuigan has the wisdom—keep checking in, keep asking if you’re awake.

“Are you still you under there?”

“I’m looking for me. Give me a minute.”

“Don’t let them polish you too smooth.”

“Too late. But hair grows back.”

Write, and rediscover your voice

I think everyone should pivot from time to time.

Pruning the weeds away helps you discover what wants to grow. A writing practice gives you a temporary home in the wilderness.

I love working with people making life pivots who want to adopt writing as a practice. Reach out to me.

I’m a big fan of the amazing musician Smokey Hormel. I remember first encountering his name reading the liner notes for Viggo Mortensen’s Don’t Tell Me What To Do, and I wasn’t so sure that the name wasn’t someone’s pseudonym. When later I came across his name on a Beck album, it stuck with me, and I needed to know more about the guy with the name that sounded like sausage.

As a matter of fact, he is the great-grandson of the Spam inventor. In his early years he studied acting with Sanford Meisner at the Neighborhood Playhouse in New York. Acting couldn’t pay the bills, so, when living in LA, he took a job washing dishes at a diner.

The owner was obsessed with Western swing music and asked Hormel to join his band. The owner was well-connected in the punk rock world, and bands like X, The Blasters, and Circle Jerks would come there. The Blasters eventually recruited Hormel, and he made enough money with the band that he decided to ditch his acting aspirations. Playing music fulfilled many of the same dreams he had in mind as an actor.

The beauty of being a session musician

Smokey didn’t pursue the solo career. He’s a collaborator. Listening to albums he was a part of, like Beck’s Odelay and Mutations, Johnny Cash’s When the Man Comes Around, Tom Waits’ Mule Variations, among dozens of others, you can tell that for him it’s all about the music.

A session musician is sort of a hired gun, so maybe it’s an unfair moniker for him. Or maybe he just elevates the title. He’s a guy for whom his love of music is everything.

Recommendation 1

Smokey and Miho’s The Two EPs

I lent the album he made with Miho Hatori, those two EPs where they paid tribute to Brazilian guitarist Baden Powell, to a roommate once. She was going through a breakup. It was a mutual breakup. Nobody’s the villain, nobody’s the victim. In my memory, the guy she was breaking up with was the son of a really successful car salesman, and they spent the afternoon driving around listening to the album. New car, just driving, windows down.

She told me later they didn’t have a single frame of reference for bossa nova or Smokey & Miho’s atmospheric vocals and guitar work, but they happened to listen to it during that exact experience. And she said listening to the album led them through the post-breakup emotional processing, basically. The album held the space they couldn’t hold themselves. They let go and all was good.

Recommendation 2

Next up is Guido Argentini.

I came across Private Rooms at a book fair in Düsseldorf. Of all places. I had this massive backpack strapped to me, heavy already, and I carried a big shopping bag full in front of me. I’m an American and I like to purchase things sometimes. In the bag, even, was a log I’d found in the woods—I wanted to carve it when I got home. Something about that specific piece of wood I just had to have. It felt like I’d come across it in the woods and it would be special to carve that specific one.

The book is massive, filled with photographs taken over ten years in closed rooms, ancient villas, modern apartments, hotels from the most elegant to the most squalid with cheap plastic chairs and worn-out wallpaper. He’s a phenomenal photographer, and the images just blast whole scenes at you—it’s high and low all together. It’s very much an unabashed voyeuristic fantasy, but there’s something else there too. It doesn’t pretend it’s not what it is.

Recommendation 3

Then there’s A Pattern Language.

A part of me loves to nerd out on buildings: anything from feng shui to ancient construction methods to home design. Pattern Language belongs to its own category. Christopher Alexander and his colleagues wrote 253 patterns for how they believe humans actually want to live. This book should be standard reading for everyone because it’s an example for how valuable it is to bring language to things that don’t yet have a mental model around them. The book does everything from describing why it feels better to have no cars in sight to why some neighborhoods support pedestrian meandering and others don’t to why it feels eerie to have windows others could peer into from on high.

“A street without windows is blind and frightening.” Alexander gets specific—build windows with window seats looking onto the street, place them where people keep passing by, keep first-floor ones high enough for privacy. It’s the opposite of those dead suburban streets where all the garage doors face forward like the rear end of dump trucks.

People need to refresh themselves by looking at a world different than the one they’re in.

Rooms without a view are prisons for the people who have to stay in them.

Pattern 192: “Windows Overlooking Life”

There’s this Buddhist monk story Alexander tells about a house overlooking the ocean, where the monk designed a slit in his courtyard wall so that only at one exact spot, for an instant, you could see the ocean. Then you were past it.

Encourage local shopping centers to grow in the form of short pedestrian streets, at right angles to major roads and opening off these roads—with parking behind the shops, so that the cars can pull directly off the road, and yet not harm the shopping street.

Pattern 32: “Shopping Street”

Recommendation 4

Speaking of seeing things, let’s move on to the father of BluBlockers, Joe Sugarman.

Studying copywriting, you have to read Joe Sugarman. The guy who sold 20 million pairs of sunglasses. The man for whom copywriting seems totally made for. Good for people like that. I have a side like that but I’m thankfully no Joe Sugarman.

I got his book Success Forces because I was curious about his B-sides. It’s sort of a memoir in which he processes his challenges and a boilerplate “I’m successful, here’s how I made it.” I see in it the woolly end of a sales and marketing bro’s personal life. The guy who failed with Batman Credit Cards and kept boxes of them in his basement for decades, still handing them out at conferences as a joke.

Sugarman’s whole thing was the “slippery slide” technique—get readers to seamlessly move from headline to purchase. Every element in the headline exists to make you read the first sentence. The first sentence exists to make you read the second. Before you know it, you’ve bought sunglasses. He’d point out the negative aspects of products first, which made people trust him. Enough to pay the price of a pair of sunglasses, anyway.

Recommendation 5

Finally, Mayakovsky.

Check out his satirical play The Bedbug from 1929 when you’re in the mood to get his take on Soviet philistinism and bureaucracy. He wrote it as one increasingly disillusioned with the course the Soviet Union was taking under Stalin.

Usually So

Any man is born entitled to love,

but what with jobs,

incomes,

and other such things,

the heart’s core grows harder

from day to day.

The heart wears a body;

the body—a shirt.

Even that’s not enough!

Someone—

the idiot!—

manufactured stiff cuffs

and clamped starch on the chest.

Aging, people suddenly have second thoughts.

Women rub in powder and rouge.

Men do cartwheels according to Muller’s system.

But it’s too late.

The skin proliferates in wrinkles.

Love flowers,

and flowers

and then withers and shrinks.

The collection spans his entire career, from the earliest pre-revolutionary lyrics to a poem found in a notebook after his suicide.

Why these five recommendations?

I do these “five things” recommendations because it’s anti-algorithm. It’s more interesting to discover new and unexpected things than to live under the filter of “People Who Are Like You Also Ordered . . .”

I never did carve that log I was carrying in Düsseldorf. I carried it all over Europe that summer and brought it back to the US. I kept it for years in my studio until one day I put it out to pasture—literally. I returned it to its native environment, albeit on a different continent.

Sometimes the wanting is better than the having, and sometimes the story of the vision is enough.

There are three types of clients who find me:

• The first loves to write and wants to build a real practice around it.

• The second can talk for hours about their ideas but then they freeze up when faced with the blank page.

• The third thinks they don’t have time to write. They need someone to ask them questions until all the things in their head become clear enough to articulate.

People come in with a theory about what’s blocking them. But then we start working, and something else emerges. Collaboration generates something we couldn’t have seen alone.

Reclaiming the coach

The “phoning it in” style

Years ago, I did the whole Tony Robbins thing. I reached out and got myself a Tony Robbins coach.

It was the right move in theory, but the experience was underwhelming. The person, I’m sure, just showed up to the call, read what I put on the form, spouted some Tony Robbins boilerplate, and went on. I felt like I was part of a quota.

I spent a few months in the Mediterranean where internet was spotty, and I found myself in the situation where I was loving life and attaining the growth goals I set out to achieve and I really didn’t have anything to discuss with my coach. So I didn’t keep up with our regular call schedule. Disappointingly, that was the period of time my coach was most active. She just wanted to make sure I kept having calls with her. The only thing she seemed passionate about was getting paid.

Finding the right person to collaborate with can be hard, because a lot of coaches are in that line of work because it’s easier to tell people what to do than to do it themselves.

The “better than you” style

Plenty of other coaches fall into the “I’ve figured it out and you haven’t” bunch. They give off the idealized version of a person who has achieved something that YOU WISH YOU HAD TOO, DON’T YOU? And sure, the struggles of actual life get hidden behind the performance of having it all together. But so does the actual joy of creation.

This kind of positioning is a real turnoff for me, and because it’s so loud in the marketplace, it’s all most people think is available. And they’re not wrong for deciding to soldier through it all alone rather than work with some douchebag who believes they need to pretend their life is perfect.

I’m sure plenty of people who could really use support just give up on coaching instead.

The messy middle

TMMW is the place where I write about the woolly, unkempt middle of creative work—that space between “I have an idea” and “it’s actually done”—because that’s where I spend most of my days, both in my own writing and with clients.

Most of my time, I’m either writing creatively (recently wrapped collaborative project Revolt in Steel Meadow and now revising The God Pot) or ghostwriting for CEOs and people who trust me to find their voice in the chaos of their ideas. But here, I write about what happens based on the coaching conversations, the collaborative sessions, the moments when someone realizes they’ve been squashing down their real work for decades.

I’m a writer first. The coaching emerged because I can’t help but collaborate—it’s like I’m constitutionally unable to hear someone’s stuck story without wanting to sit down and untangle it with them.

My clients are smart and talented, but they’ve also either been taught that their real voice isn’t good enough, or they don’t want to spend years honing their writing skills and would rather work with someone with extensive experience wrestling with blank pages and waging war against the voice that says “this is garbage” after every paragraph. My war wounds, it turns out, make me a good coach.

Not because I’ve figured it out. I absolutely haven’t. I don’t want to. I want to create anyway and keep going when the situation is gnarly and hopeless and gallumphigatious. I coach because the best stuff happens in collaboration—when your little idea meets someone else’s off-beat curiosity and eventually something neither of you expected appears on the page. Whether that page holds a novel, a poem, or just a letter about what you really want.

That exchange, which is like a mutual teaching, is what I’m really talking about when I say coaching.

And coaching isn’t right for everyone, which is why I also ghostwrite.

Getting your ideas onto the page

Unless we externalize and shape our thoughts through some creative modality, we’re missing a huge opportunity. Writing thoughts down helps clarify them.

“My writing practice had languished for so long it wasn’t even a practice anymore,” one writer shared with me. Yet within days of structured writing time, “the floodgates of creativity opened.” The block dissolved, and it revealed what had been waiting underneath all along.

However, breakthroughs don’t always happen immediately. We think our ideas are clear until we try to express them. Trying to achieve clarity through writing can make things seem like an even greater mess. But miracles happen simply by trusting the process and collaborating.

“The writing exercises brought ideas and memories out of me that had been hidden or buried for years,” another writer told me. “When answering a question about goals, three pages later I found myself forgiving myself for something I’d done in the past.”

The process of making thoughts concrete, whether through writing or conversation, is both constructive and creative. You literally can start with something half-formed and ephemeral, and if you have trust in the process and the willingness to see things shaped, it will absolutely become something great and durable.

This requires humility, and the openness to see your ideas take form and sometimes surprise you with what they actually are.

How I collaborate

The work takes different shapes depending on what you need.

Done For You: Ghostwriting

You have the ideas, the expertise, the vision, and I create the finished work. Through conversations, bullet points, and your existing writing samples, I write in your voice and structure your thoughts into polished pieces.

From a few questions and loose outlines, you get a piece written in your voice.

Co-Written: True Collaboration

We build together. We’re both in the document, both shaping the work, both discovering what wants to emerge. Your expertise meets mine, your questions reshape my understanding. This is for when the process itself matters as much as the outcome.

Done With You: Coaching & Guidance

I guide while you create your own work, and I hold space for your discoveries. This is for the writer who wants someone to ask the right questions and keep them consistent. You bring your vision and rough drafts, I bring perspective and the ability to help you find what you’re actually trying to say. The work is yours, but you’re not doing it alone.

An invitation to collaborate

You bring your vision, your challenges, your questions, your rough drafts. I bring perspective, a love of the turned phrase, and the ability to hold space for what wants to emerge. That’s the coaching I believe in.

Reach out to me and let’s work together.

Origin story

I was getting some sun in Playa del Carmen when the idea of writing a book called Pants in a Tree arrived fully formed, and I chuckled. That's it. That's how books sometimes begin. With an absurd image that makes you laugh alone in a beach chair.

I'd given myself an insane challenge: write twenty book-length projects in a single year.

“Twenty books is a lot,” I said to myself. “I bet if I can write twenty books in a year, that’d really be something.”

The first step in this challenge was to give myself some notion as to what the titles of these twenty books would be. The fact that "Pants in the Tree" emerged as the third title tells you something about where my head was at.

The weekend sprint

When I got home from Mexico, I sat at my drafting table and doodled out a sketch of the book. I decided on a specific number of chapters, and mapped out what would happen in each one—giving myself obstacles and fodder, little problems for my pantsless genius to encounter. The beauty of this approach was that I knew the shape and many of the moving parts, and I still had plenty of wiggle room to discover why these moving parts were positioned as they were.

What followed was something like a fever dream weekend. I drafted the entire book, following my sketch but letting each sentence surprise me. Take this moment from Chapter 4:

The genius woke in the late-morning heat clinging to the branch of a desert pine.

The only friend he could hope for was the gravity supplied to him by the distance between his body and the earth below.

'Help me down this tree, Gravity.'

I wrote that not knowing where it would go, then subverted my own expectation by having him address gravity as a friend. The whole book emerged this way—writing toward surprise.

The art of not knowing

The process was about "turning a phrase"—writing without knowing where it would land, then following that landing to the next unexpected place. When my genius looks down at the broken sprinkler and says, "There's no need to water the lawn anyway. Go put yourself into a shed somewhere," I, the author, wasn't in on any secret. If there was to be a joke, it wasn't going to be an insider's joke. If the reader was going to wonder what was going on, I wanted to be right there with them in that experience. The sprinkler had become a character, a disappointment, a thing that should excuse itself from the scene. The genius was also sort of talking to himself, wasn't he?

The whole "turning a phrase" approach opened up passages like this one, where observation becomes philosophy:

Perhaps all is as the way I do things. He watched his hands take slow, sloppy steps forward in the cool grass. There may be a wheelbarrowness to things, yes -- that may be part of what everything depends on.

Those statements express a kind of narrative overreach that typify the genius. And maybe myself as well.

The genius crawling on all fours, looking for his pants, suddenly contemplating the essential "wheelbarrowness" of existence emerged from following the logic of the moment.

Enter McIlvoy

After that weekend sprint, I had a draft, but Kevin McIlvoy helped me understand what I actually had. Working with a writing coach helped me find depths I didn't know how to honor.

The tendency in situations like that would be to either push the book toward being simply goofy or attempt to make it profound. Mc helped me go deeper, to thoroughly inhabit the thematic possibilities I'd unconsciously embedded.

He pushed me to flesh out the shock of death that lurked beneath the comedy. The genius had lost his wife, his friend, his grip on conventional reality. Mc encouraged stylistic experimentation and got me to push the work like taffy in different directions. The recurring theme of pants in trees was enough of a spine; everything else could spiral out from there.

The permission of play

A work that doesn't take itself too seriously gives you total permission to go wild. Some of my favorite moments came from this freedom, like when the genius sits contemplating his empty lap:

A lap existed as a part of the perfect balance of things. One's lap, when one stood, was given to someone else who sat down.

This idea was no good because the exchange would only balance if there was an even number of laps.

This is the kind of philosophical investigation the genius was best at—serious thought about absolutely unserious questions, which somehow circles back to being profound. One effect of these ponderings is that they prod at the phenomenon of cognition and compare it in an unfavorable light against the more resonant logic of dreams.

The easiest hard thing

Of all the pieces I wrote that year, "Pants in the Tree" was the easiest and most enjoyable. I don't think "easy" means "simple"—it means I found the right channel for the work to flow through. The absurd premise gave me permission to explore grief, aging, isolation, and existential confusion without the weight of those themes crushing the work.

The book operates on dream logic, where a genius can wake up in a tree wearing only underwear, socks and boots, have a philosophical conversation with gravity, and then insult a broken sprinkler.

Takeaways for writers

The lesson I often make from Pants isn't "write fast" or "be absurd." I use it as an example of how to write a short book based on a sketch. It's a useful example because you can still easily see the signs of the sketch—the arbitrariness of these different elements that each chapter includes.

I gave myself obstacles—pants perpetually ending up in trees—and that constraint energized the creation of the project. I wrote without knowing where phrases would land, and that uncertainty brought discovery. I worked with a coach who pushed me to go deeper into strangeness.

Pants in the Tree began with a poolside laugh and became an exploration of loss and identity. Get your copy here

If you'd like to work with me as your writing coach, reach out to me and let me know what you'd like to work on together.

Have you ever had a dream in which you've been browsing the internet? I mean really browsing—scrolling through feeds, clicking links, searching for something you can't quite name.

Not the old anxiety dreams of showing up to school in your underpants to take a test. More like sending someone the wrong emoji. A nightmare of cold fear consisting of 'Let me Google that real quick' instead of someone chasing you with a knife.

I don't think I've ever dreamt of being on a computer at all. Strange, since I spend so much time on one. If our waking experience serves as context for dreams, what happens with this time we spend on computers? Is it just gathered and junk-collected, discarded? If these waking hours of clicking items and pecking on keys aren't worthy of dreams, why are we insisting on the need to do it in an ever more streamlined way?

Keep a dream journal

I started writing down what I can recall of my dreams each morning. It's one of those on-again, off-again habits. Low effort, high return—best if you do it consistently, which I intend to persist at. Dream journaling is easily paired with a phase of freewriting in the morning.

The act of describing dreams before they evaporate is itself a kind of freewriting, because it blathers through that fertile liminal space where the unconscious still has its arm around your shoulder. Rendering things into form in such a state builds a bridge with the woolly and uncivilized parts of the psyche.

Jung believed that dreams are direct messages from the unconscious, that they serve a compensatory function that helps integrate unconscious contents. He saw them as windows into the deeper aspects of the self. I find it catastrophically arrogant how common it is for people to disparage dreams as if they're nothing more than random firings of neurons or emotional offgassing from the day's productive work. Sleep is a part of life. Choosing to decide ourselves ignorant to it simply because it's mysterious is a real bum move.

Dreams offer meaningful communications from parts of ourselves we've lost touch with. Jung said it in these words: "the dream is a spontaneous self-portrayal, in symbolic form, of the actual situation in the unconscious."

So what does it mean that most of our waking life has become, in a sense, irrelevant to this ancient system of psychic digestion? Why don't I ever dream about working on a laptop?

As a plant produces its flower, so the psyche creates its symbols. Every dream is evidence of this process.

- Carl Jung

But what symbols grow from the LED-lit soil of clicking and scrolling?

People say that blue light from screens reduces the amount of time spent in REM sleep—the very stage where our most vivid dreams occur. But I don't think this is something rose-colored glasses can solve. We may be literally engineering ourselves out of the dream world.

Think about what we're trading away. Jung brought the insight that dreams sometimes use symbols as myths to express their themes, and that they access archetypal content from the collective unconscious. These are the deep waters where personal transformation happens, where the psyche works through its knots and discovers new patterns. Some dreams are apt to be remembered for a lifetime. They can bring spiritual significance and transform how we view ourselves and the world.

But you can't build the compost of archetypes if you're doomscrolling. The psyche needs raw, embodied experience to work with. Not "digital content."

Neither here nor there

If digital activities can't even make it into our dreams, how worth doing are they? Digital life is neither here nor there. It's some strange limbo between experience and non-experience.

I think we're creating a kind of experiential malnutrition. Not starvation exactly, but the kind that comes from eating only processed food. The body might survive, the mind might be productive, but something essential withers in the background while we're too busy and fatigued to notice.

Jung brought the realization that you develop psychologically by bringing unconscious contents into the light of consciousness, that this process enriches our personality and makes us more self-aware. So, again, I ask the question: what if we're spending our days in ways that generate no unconscious content worth surfacing?

It's not that technology is inherently empty of meaning. Or is it? Is digital experience merely memetic?

The dream deficit

We all know that increased screen time is linked to poorer sleep and lower dream recall. In this way, "screen time" is an apt term—we're placing a sieve in between us and our experience, and what gets filtered through is basically just dopamine, neural activation, and an economic exchange.

Each subsequent generation will dream less, remember less of what they do dream, and have less raw material for the psyche to work with in the first place.

I think this matters more than we realize. Dreams can serve as an early warning system for our physical and mental health, with the unconscious being capable of detecting subtle abnormalities long before symptoms appear. They're how we process trauma, consolidate memory, and tap into creative insights. Many of civilization's great creations and discoveries have been inspired by dreams—from Mary Shelley's Frankenstein born from a nightmare of a 'hideous phantasm' stirring to life, to Kekulé's benzene ring revealed by a serpent swallowing its tail. Niels Bohr saw electrons orbiting the nucleus like planets around the sun, giving us the structure of the atom. Einstein's theory of relativity emerged from a dream about cows and electric fences, while the mathematician Ramanujan received thousands of mathematical proofs through his dreams.

What revelations are we missing? What healing isn't happening? What creative breakthroughs remain forever ungerminated because we've replaced the rich soil of lived experience with the substrate of screen time?

Have you ever attended a Zoom meeting in a dream? I haven't. But for that at least, I'm grateful.

Reclaiming the night

If an experience isn't worthy of being transformed into dream material, is it worthy of our waking hours? If the psyche—that ancient, wise part of ourselves that's been processing human experience since we first became human—finds nothing to work with in our daily digital consumption, what does that tell us?

A morning writing practice helps. When you freewrite first thing, you're catching yourself in that liminal space where the dream world hasn't quite been dried up by the aridity of waking life and its beeps and burps. Keeping a dream journal—which for me is as simple as writing a few sentences in a notebook—gives the unconscious a voice before the conscious mind fully boots up with its to-do lists and notifications. For me, it's important that I have a durable bridge into the dark forest of the psyche.

But we need more than just dream recall. We need experiences worth dreaming about. Real encounters, genuine struggles, embodied adventures. The kind of raw material the psyche has been working with for millennia—love and loss, fear and courage, beauty and ugliness, human connection, adventures in new lands, all of it unmediated and immediate.

Marie-Louise von Franz described important dreams as "like a visitation from another world, which in truth it is, the other world being the subterranean one of the unconscious." These visitations are getting rarer, not because the unconscious has less to say, but because we're giving it less to work with and less time to work.

Let's give the psyche something to chew on besides the thin gruel of optimized content. Dreams are messengers, so if the messenger is radio silent, that's the message. An absence of rich dreams tells us that the human soul needs something more substantial than what American prosperity dogma wants to feed it.

After all, what's the point of optimizing every waking moment if we're starving the very part of ourselves that makes meaning from it all?