The Newsletter Thus Far (2022-Present)
Three Years of Miscellaneous Wonders
Dear Friends,
It’s that time of year where the sun sets at four-something PM, and when I take my fat-soluble weekly Vitamin D capsules to try to cure some gloom castle that has been built inside my brain. A belated Halloween spirit comes each evening, and I watch all the horror flicks I meant to watch in October. So far, my favorites of the season have been Late Night with the Devil, Oddity, Double Blind, and Rita. They feature a lot of my narrative soft spots: girl gangs, magical realism, escape plots, demon possessions, clandestine rich people cults, psychometry, twins, familial revenge, animate mannequins, psychedelic sleep disorders, and final girls.
But I’m not necessarily here today to gush about all the movies I’ve been watching after dusk. As we move from the solstice—the darkest night of the year—toward a longer stretch of light… another year ends and another year is about to begin. It also marks approximately three years of this newsletter existing. While I do have a dozen drafts of maybe-one-day posts for Miscellaneous Wonders, I’ve been thinking about the past as much as I’ve been thinking about the present (and future) of this Substack.
While this is still a tiny newsletter, I’ve gained a good deal of new subscribers in the past year (thank you!). I’d like to extend my gratitude toward the people who have been here since the beginning as well as those who joined up this year. If you like what I post, please consider liking this post, commenting, or even forwarding to a friend. One of the odd bits about taking on an endeavor like this is how you rarely know what people think.
To celebrate the (almost) three-year anniversary, I’ve compiled an index of every newsletter I’ve posted thus far under a variety of categories. Some newsletters work under multiple sections, so I’ve included them multiple times below. If you’re a newer subscriber, I hope you’ll peruse during the quiet, darker days of the winter holidays and find one that might be worth revisiting. I, of course, have a personal bias, but I’d say quite a few of them are evergreen and worth another glance.
In any case, thanks for being here, and may the new year be filled with light for you.
XOXO
J
For the Writer’s Mind & Soul
Creative Writer Goals & Five-Year Plans (A Worksheet)
An Eisenhower Matrix for Creative/Scholarly Research
What being a writer vs. being an author means to me
The Elimination of Impostor Syndrome
Where Does Curiosity Come From?
Embracing fan culture over prestige culture
The Craft of Writing
The Four Dyads of Building Fictional Worlds: Part I
The Four Dyads of Building Fictional Worlds: Part II
The Trunk and the Drawer: On Trunking Stories
How to Write a Commercial Novel: A thought experiment on form and formula
The Business of Publishing & Authorship
Post-Publication Awards for Poetry, Fiction, & Genre Books
Submitting to Literary Magazines & Genre Fiction Markets: A How-To Guide
How much rejection goes into publishing a story collection?
A Few Thoughts on the 'Author Website'
The Trunk and the Drawer: On Trunking Stories
Some thoughts on SPD / Small Press Distribution closing
The Erotics of Collaboration / The Mysteries of Viral Phenomena: Amal El-Mohtar and Max Gladstone’s This Is How You Lose the Time War
How to Write a Commercial Novel: A thought experiment on form and formula
How To Get a Literary Agent with This One Simple Trick
Academic Life (MFA and PhD and Teaching)
An Eisenhower Matrix for Creative/Scholarly Research
The Loneliness of the Middle Distance Scholar
The Doctor is In[-Progress], or, the Erotic Power of Knowledge
40 Thoughts on the Creative Writing MFA / Should I Get an MFA?
Some fragmentary thoughts on AI, LLMs, and ChatGPT
Reading Lists
Spring, memory, and the reading lists of a first-year PhD student
Seasonal Syllabi #1: Hauntology & a Haunted Reading List
Creative Writing Prompts & Close Readings
Karen Russell's "The Bog Girl"
The Erotics of Collaboration / The Mysteries of Viral Phenomena: Amal El-Mohtar and Max Gladstone’s This Is How You Lose the Time War
Personal Essays & Personal Feels
On hope, longing, novelty, & transformative failure
How a past life as a photographer taught me how to protect my creative heart
What being a writer vs. being an author means to me
Writing Practice as the Stages of Grief
The Loneliness of the Middle Distance Scholar
Some ramblings on book bans, the history of the NEA, and protest art
Alternate Universes, Alternate Selves: On Multiverses
Miscellany
Some ramblings on book bans, the history of the NEA, and protest art
Helloo. A word of praise for you. I find life is generally too busy for online newsletters, just more information to clutter up my mind when I ride the bus … Slowly I’ve unsubscribed to almost everything I used to be subscribed to, but not this one. I can’t remember how I stumbled across it now, but your writing and what you chose to write about is consistently interesting. So kudos. I never leave comments online, but thought I would break the habit