Goodbye 2025

If you are reading this, you have officially made it through the entirety of 2025. Good going, you. You are a badass. Until we talk again, I remain, Your pal, Jamie

(a wee giftie for your stocking)

Cowboy Santa When Santa brings presents on each Christmas night He likes to surprise the last stop in his flight He asks that last person what they want the best And one year his route Ended out In the West Now out on the prairie, fixing his shed Was a

I only trust what can be haunted

First of all, I highly recommend this article from the New York Times about a local typewriter shop I visited (a couple of times) just this last summer. Go ahead and click the link below to read it now. But please come back when you’re done. I want to

“I wanted this to be easy”

Oh what a tangled web we weave, when first we practice to [write a newsletter post] - William Shakespeare[ish] When you get a new (required field) Productions post, it has usually been created using a simple 9-step process: 1. idea! 2. outline 3. drafts 4. final review by Mari

Where is my werewolf?

When I was kid, we had a werewolf problem in our backyard. Okay, I had a werewolf problem. Then I moved and the problem went away. Or did it? I had a whole other topic planned for this week, then I looked at a calendar and realized: it’s October.

The Big Machine Theory

I made a decision — and a promise — to only talk here about things I had directly experienced. And now I’m going to break that rule. Kind of? I’ve been thinking a lot about the current state of creative endeavor, and what I call The Big Machine Theory. We’

How Microsoft turned me into a horror fan

You’ve probably already figured out I'm a horror fan. I mean, I wrote a 1,000-word essay around my Alien head canon. And described my Predator growth theory in the Lightning Round. And heck, it’s right there in this newsletter's banner: “Occasionally monsters.” To

What I Learned (again) at Jazz Camp

So I said I’d post, what, every other week? Ha! The only excuse I have is that I was busy — at Jazz Camp! It was an amazing experience. I learned many new things. And I relearned some important stuff that I kind of forgot and had to relearn because

Life as an iceberg

I’ve been thinking about icebergs this week. It’s not a climate warming kind of thing, although boy howdy, we’ve had to set up an umbrella to protect a prize hosta in our backyard from the very un-Seattle heat. You know how the What’s Going On section

BDSM for your phone

Your phone is not the boss of you. Your apps are not free-range chickens, allowed to constantly peck at you. It’s time to make them earn your attention. Soon after I concluded my “constantly iPad” experiment, I started a new one: taming my iPhone. I wanted a quietly helpful

It’s time for the Lightning Round!

Get ready for a roundup of items that are too short to be a main essay, but meatier than your typical Fun Fact. It’s a jambalaya of thoughts, quotes, news, and yes, even poems – it’s the Lightning Round! I have to warn you, there’s going to be

Update to “Fortnightly"

About the link appropriately titled “Doom" Folks, I noticed that for some reason the Fun Facts link to a New York Times article on the history and ubiquity of the video game “Doom” showed up blank on the email. So here’s a link that should work: Management regrets

Fortnightly

Many thanks to everyone who responded to the poll at the end of Better living through compliments. I truly appreciate you taking time from your day to help me with this crazy little newsletter. And the results of that poll were hilariously inconclusive. The votes were evenly split between 4

Read to each other

When Mari had her knee replaced, it came with a lot of benefits: * She was able to walk pain-free. * We became closer as a couple. * Our sleep habits improved. * We started reading a lot more books. All this from a new knee? Well not directly. What happened was, as part

Better living through compliments

First, look at this. This is Troy Hawke, the alter ego of a standup comedian from England who created the fictional “Greeter’s Guild.” He’s one of my heroes. He stands in public places and greets people, like this: If you are an introvert like myself, you may be

Can Your Heart Stand the Shocking Facts?

(The shocking facts about this newsletter and its “value statement”?) When I started reading about running a newsletter, I kept encountering the term “value statement.” Simply put, it’s “why?” Why should someone read this newsletter? What’s in it for them? Here’s some sample value statements from newsletters

Mermaids & Airplanes & Ideas & Done.

💡Ahoy! I’m still somewhere on the Atlantic, so here’s a repeat view of one of my fav issues of the newsletter. A friend of mine once asked me what it was like to be a writer, and I said, “A constant state of grief and disappointment.” That was

Commit to the bit

💡Part V (and the finale) of The Edinburgh Cycle: five unlikely and useful things about creativity I learned from performing at the Edinburgh Festival Fringe It was well after midnight. The lounge-singing puppet Danny O’Hare and I stood alone on a makeshift stage in a vaulted stone cellar in

Embrace the Good Bad idea

💡Part IV of The Edinburgh Cycle: five unlikely and useful things about creativity I learned from performing at the Edinburgh Festival Fringe The Edinburgh Festival Fringe. The world’s largest arts festival. Where such talents as Stephen Fry, Emma Thompson, Craig Ferguson, and Robin Williams (?!) started their careers. A quarter

Find (and nurture) your shoulder devils

💡Part III of The Edinburgh Cycle: five unlikely and useful things about creativity I learned from performing at the Edinburgh Festival Fringe Making anything is frightening. If you make something, it’s going to be looked at. And people might say mean things about the thing you made. And about

Gather your restrictions

💡Part II of The Edinburgh Cycle: five unlikely and useful things about creativity and project management I learned from performing at the Edinburgh Festival Fringe So last week I talked about how I use (manipulate?) the Dunning-Kruger effect to motivate myself at the beginning of a project, and to then

Finessing Dunning Kruger

Part I of The Edinburgh Cycle: five unlikely and useful things about creativity and project management I learned from performing at the Edinburgh Festival Fringe So I decided to produce a cabaret show. Which I had never done before. And I decided to sing lounge music in it. Which I

Refer this newsletter, get a goodie

💡SPECIAL BULLETIN I am happy to be writing this newsletter for such an interesting group of people such as yourself. I would like to be writing for an even larger number of interesting people. And I figure interesting people like you know interesting people like you who aren't

The Edinburgh Cycle

When you look at your own life, oh my gosh, so much stuff has happened. Almost every day, you experience something that you carry with you forever. Sometimes it's a boon, sometimes it's a limp. And these incidents often occur in clusters, bunched together by time