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Jun 2
The Learning-Curve Is Logarithmic

Talent sets one’s floor and ceiling of ability, but for anyone doing anything, the learning- or training-curve is logarithmic. The best are the ones who continue training just as diligently after passing the point of diminishing marginal returns. Every proximate training-hour confers less increase in quality/ability, yet the person who persists for the activity itself becomes an expert.

Remaining To-Dos Before Beneath the Glacier Book Launch

[x] About the Author page
[x] Colophon page
[x] Set up Shopify/BookFunnel delivery flow
[x] Launch pre-order via personal site + Shopify
[ ] Set up Pirate Ship integration
[ ] Purchase shipping label printer & packing materials
[x] Add $17.95 price to barcode only for the Ingram paperback file
[x] Glacial Press imprint logo/wordmark—final design
[x] Add imprint logo to back cover and title, copyright, and colophon pages
[x] Finalize all content for paperback
[x] Get final cover files (KDP & Ingram)
[x] Final paperback interior PDFs (KDP & Ingram)
[x] Push final paperback files to KDP & Ingram
[ ] Ebook formatting in Atticus, final .epub file
[ ] Push final .epub files to KDP and BookFunnel
[ ] Order author copies
[ ] Ship/fulfill all pre-orders
[ ] Launch on Amazon and Ingram, with marketing campaign for reviews, etc.

Jun 4
Notes on Green Lantern: Earth One, Vol. 1

The art is incredible throughout, and the story covered so much ground that it felt like I’d just watched a feature-length film—but one better written and more engaging than the vast majority of superhero movies. I read the whole hardcover collection in one sitting.

Dialogue: “Those folks are only qualified to wipe their own asses.”

My Creative Process: Bit by Bit, Burst by Burst

I write in little bits, then big bursts. The connective tissue between the two is incubation. The bits undergo mitosis, and reach a critical mass that I can gestate (draft, edit) and birth (publish).

(This, for instance, is one of many little bits that I’ve written about incubation. Someday, I will refer to the collection of these little bits as I draft an essay on creative incubation in one or two big bursts.)

Screenplays Are Analogous to Comic-Book Scripts

A screenplay is no different than a comic-book script, except that each “panel” will be a motion-picture, a shot, rather than a static image. But screenwriters don’t hardly imagine how the camera will moves (as far as I understand); rather, they imagine the composition of a shot—i.e., a single frame in the mind’s eye—and that is what they record on the pages of a scene, just as a comic-book writer describes the panels within the composition of a spread. The only movement in a screenplay is shot to shot, just as a comic-book goes panel t panel, not frame to frame.

I’m new to the medium of comic-books, yet I can tell that the writer–illustrator interaction and interdependence makes it one of the most fascinating storytelling mediums. Often in film, the writer can be the director and cinematographer too, but in comics, the writer is rarely (if ever?) the illustrator.

All this said, I could imagine a screenwriting course that assigns students the task of writing comic-book scripts to teach them the art of thinking in a series of images woven with dialogue and stage direction.

Jun 6
Here’s a quote from an archival video from a representative of Argonne National Labratory, from the 1960s (featured at the end of this video by Cleo Abram), that could be considered optimistic but I would consider dystopian on account of one verb choice that signals man’s hubris: imprison.

And this, of course, is just the beginning. Not only will atomic power be released but someday we will harness the rise and fall of tides and imprison the rays of the sun. We have, indeed, just begun.

I love both David Foster Wallace and Albert Camus, but I say that Camus is my favorite author because I find his writing more impressive and more impactful per word than DFW. I want to be a writer that errs on the side of necessary-but-insufficient rather than sufficient-but-unnecessary. Nothing that Camus includes in his books is unnecessary, but many argue that the material in his books is insufficient to make his point, to convey a coherent message. DFW sufficiently explains every single part of every single thing, but it is easy to argue that much of those many things are unnecessary to write about, to make the point (even though they are delightful to read).

On the trail, when I get bucked up off my bike seat and lose my footing, I feel the same urgency as I did as a kid playing third base trying to find four teams on a baseball before throwing across the diamond. I float the balls in my feet Off the pedals so I can plant them again on the spikes in the right spot.

[[A Frictionless Forest]]

Minerals compose rocks; rocks are comprised of minerals.

(If you know the difference between rocks and minerals, this is a good pneumonic for the difference between compose and comprise, which I often confuse; and if you know comprise vs. compose, this a good pneumonic for the relationship between rocks and minerals.)

I’m a sucker for extended metaphors, because images make ideas more memorable. And what’s better than a single image associated with a single concept? An entire landscape or world full of images that render an entire worldview or philosophy “visually.” At the pinnacle of extended metaphor is allegory.

The ridge is blue even beneath the setting sun, almost especially in contrast to it, and the ridgeline is softly serrated, not rigid, because any line I see is not rock but bushy branches and leaves. The entire landscape’s texture is bulbous and fluffy, with only the exception of the most distant ridge I can see, due west, at 8:20 p.m. now silhouetted. That ridgeline is cleaner, less blurry, but the hill’s body has been matted out to a flat blue shadow, a cardboard cut-out filling out the background of the set.

(Reflections from my first time on the Blue Ridge Parkway, while stopped at Little Bald Overlook, having just left Blowing Rock on my way to camp at Upper Creek Falls, between here and Ashville.)

8:22 p.m. this past Wednesday, Jun 03, summer began, because, on the greenway in our neighborhood, I caught my first firefly of the year. And I caught the first firefly I saw! I only saw one other that whole walk.

My First Excursion to the Blue Ridge (Journaling inside my tent after 9:30 on Saturday night)

My plan was to have very little plan. I knew I wanted to go to Boone via Blowing Rock, then take the Blue Ridge Parkway towards Asheville and stop somewhere I Pisgah National Forest to camp, then maybe do a hike—either short or long, strenuous or casual—before spending some time in Ashville or Morganton. Otherwise, meaning for what I would do in all these places, I had no plan.

Blowing Rock is touristy but very nice. I loved it there and ended up spending the whole afternoon, leading to my skipping Boone. I parked near Downtown and planned to just walk around to get the vibe of Main Street, maybe get a bite, but then I waltzed into this lovely round park (Broyhill Park), which had signs that said “Glen Burney Falls Trail,” which I then followed to a trailhead. I was carrying my book, Nan Shepherd’s The Living Mountain, because I figured I would just read in the park or over a meal, but then I ended up carrying that book, and reading intermittently, through a 3-hour hike that featured two waterfalls, one of which my face and head and neck and hands indulged in.

I met this big group of a family celebrating grandma’s 60th birthday, who looked much younger than 60. She and, I assumed, her sister were hanging back with her sister’s husband and their son or grandson who had cerebral palsy (it seemed, at least some neurological disorder that challenged his speech and motor skills). I walked with them for a bit and talked to the sisters who were interested in my book and that I’d just moved to Charlotte, etc.

I did dunk my face into the stream beneath the first waterfall, but it wasn’t until I was on my way out that I went up into the waterfall and drenched myself; Grandma insisted! I did not hesitate, and put on a little show for the twelve-strong family reunion by running up over the downed logs and slippery rocks to the most thunderous water column, leaned my head in, face down, hands out. I was about to turn around but the timing of Grandma’s shouts made it seem as if, again, I was obeying her order: “Turn around. Let it fall on your face!”

After having dried then drenched myself again, phone and wallet and keys and annotation pen in my pocket, I made my way back up to the fork in the road, continuing on my own way toward the next falls.

The rest of the evening has turned out to be just about perfect, except for a totally frightening surprise as I was just now headed to my final resting place (for the night).

I ate at the Speckled Trout in Blowing Rock and met some retired half-timers at the bar there, then left hoping to catch sunset from an overlook on the Blue Ridge Parkway, which happened just “as planned.” Before leaving the parking lot in Blowing Rock, I had scouted out a spot with dispersed primitive (free!) campsites called Upper Creek Falls, and went straight there, besides stopping to enjoy two overlooks, looking west at the absolute best time of day with few clouds and the perfect amount of blue haze on the hills on one of the longest days of the year. This site is the first turn-off once inside Pisgah National Forest. It’s not all that remote; from my tent, I hear the cars passing on the highway and just mistook the sound of a plan passing overhead for the sound of rolling thunder (once the sound drones on long enough, I knew it wasn’t the sound of lightning).

I find myself a little uncomfortable without my rainfly. I love the idea of no rainfly, so I can fall asleep looking at the barely-light behind the fans of these trees’ canopies, but something about the combination of being alone and without a rainfly (and not that far from the highway, i.e., accessible and visible to people while I sleep, that is if anyone were to come up here) is fear-inducing. There were two cars at this trailhead when I arrived just before 9:00, but they left while I was pitching my tent and brushing my teeth. So, I am alone in this not-so-wild place, and hopefully it stays that way until morning.

Yet this place is wild enough for me to encounter wildlife. If you recall, I was on the Parkway during sunset, so I used the last of the day’s light to pitch my tent and then by the time u had brushed, it was already pitch-dark in the parking lot, where there is no tree-cover.

After the last car left, then fully alone, I started to walk to my tent with my backpack. Tempted to use my flashlight, I thought about how Nan Shepherd wouldn’t need a “torch” and how she would probably walk barefoot even through this poison-ivy-laden wood. She’s probably immune to it—has assimilated the antidote into her blood! But then I decided that was dumb, or at least I decide that I’m not as hard as Nan Shepherd, and a couple strides into the narrow-cut trail through low bushes leading from the lot to the sites, I flipped on my phone’s flashlight and illuminated a snake a foot in front of me. I yelled and jumped back—my mouth move faster than my feet, which noice startled the snake and sent it into attack/defense position, coupled, head raised and neck tightly bent like a stopped hose. By the time the image registered of a brown snake with a monochrome chevron pattern and a diamond-shaped head (not as big a jaw or the coloring of a copperhead, though), I was far away, back at my car again. I nearly stepped on the thing! And imagine if I had succumbed to hubris and gone to the lengths of removing my shoes to feel more grounded and hardened and cool!

I am grateful that I turned on my torch, grateful that I didn’t step on the snake, and grateful that the snake didn’t come chasing after me. We were both scared.

Jun 7
I aspire to be an adventure-sport polymath, master of one: skiing.

I just saw a butterfly poop! I’ve never seen a butterfly poop—how exciting! I had seen this one down near the plunge pool of a waterfall that I have been swimming in, and it followed me up the rocky slope where I was laying out to dry. I saw it land on one of my sandals that I had set aside, and I squatted down to watch it. It began rubbing the hind segments of its wings together, only those two pieces, and I wondered what purpose that served. I guess I found out. I also found out exactly where a butterfly’s anus is and what consistency and color their poop is, at least for this species—a tiny iridescently purple butterfly. While it was perched on the cliff’s edge of my sandal, rubbing itself, it pooped over the edge, out the whole at the end of its thorax which I could have guessed was there but had never imagined, and then it peed.

Ashville is way weirder than Austin. It’s no contest. Everyone is “alt” or trying to be (the latter case is, in fact, “anti-trad”). That said, everyone is chill (maybe high—it’s Sunday at noon). My first impression is that the people are weirder and take more pride in their weirdness than Austinites.

In Downtown, there are homeless people on every block. Noteevery block rather than every corner; these people are mobile, active, energized and, it seems, engaged members of the community. “Homeless” is a judgment based on this cohort’s level of cleanliness. It just means that they look like the homeless in New York City, but they don’t act the same at all. I should not assume homeless. I should read exactly what I observed, which is that these people are shower-less, or maybe just soap-skeptics. Probably the more apt word would be “Hippies,” but I’ve only ever seen Hippies in movies. Do I even know who they are and what they’re about? These bath-boycotters dance and busk and walk in pairs holding hands. There is a lot of love, and one attribute they certainly exhibit is freedom.

Walking around town all afternoon, I only once felt a pang of worry, neurotically sensed danger: after leaving Malaprop’s bookstore carrying a heavy brown bag in my hand, I had a moment’s thought that a passerby in a pirate costume would try to rip the bag from my hand and run off with my three new books. That’s the first time I’ve ever—even for a moment before dismissing the thought as ridiculous—worried about being the target of theft for brandishing books because I was brandishing books. If you ask me, that’s pretty weird.

Jun 10
I’m 80% finished with my personal site’s redesign, and these are the remaining to-dos:

1. Load in responsive favicon.
2. Build About page.
3. Build /btg book landing page.
4. Build Aphorisms page.
5. Add functionality for out-of-text-margin media attributes, like a cover photo for a book or a table of contents with href links.
6. Incorporate Shopify buy button on the /btg page to serve as the mechanism for my book’s pre-orders.
7. Do a whole sweep of the code base to remove unused blocks and optimize it, especially to be fully responsive to mobile devices.
8. Tweak the appearance of post-cards to include photos.
9. Create a short code for inserting any post’s card in-line with just parameter of the slug.
10. Set up the whole GitHub flow and Cloudfare pages hosting, etc. to make the site live.

Jun 11
As I grapple with the Buddhist concept of emptiness, it helps me to imagine each moment as a single-celled zygote—before mitosis: pure potentiality. Rather than imagining a human as a solid form in a square box, with some effort I can imagine him/her as formless, vacuous, containing nothing and having the potential to become anyone.

I need hubris enough to go after what I want and humility enough to receive what I need.

The editor’s job is not to insist on better words but to intuit the words the author intends and has yet to apprehend.

Command-line commands for operating my new personal site:

Open site directory: cd ~/Dropbox/mySite

Run test build on local server: npm run build & npm start (URL): http://localhost:8080/

Add, commit, and push updates via Git to Cloudfare Pages: ship "[changelog message]"

Notes

• The npm build command caches new images in /public/img as transforms from /content/assets, and images will break if that command is not run before deployment.
• To exit Claude Code and return to the terminal shell, hit control + C twice.

Jun 15
The launch of my new book, Beneath the Glacier, marks the beginning of Glacial Press: an imprint for talented indie authors. With Glacial Press, I’m inverting the traditional publishing model to offer an alternative for writers who want to retain 100% ownership of their book, forever, and receive support from editors and designers throughout the self-publishing process. The Glacial Press promise: Never sell out. Never settle.

Substack’s Downfall and Betrayal of Long-Form

Here’s a running list of the changes Substack has made within the past couple years at the expense of long-form writing and in favor of short-form slop and corporate gain—the changeling from Hell:

• Defaulted the home page of the website and app to the Notes feed rather than a user’s inbox.
• When you click + Create New, the first option is “Note,” followed by “Article,” with “Post” no longer an option (much less “Essay” or “Story” or “Poem”).
• Removed the option to send only via email and not post to the app/site.
• Introduced short-form videos on the Notes feed and became another “Everything Platform” like Twitter (X).
• Throttles free publications and boosts accounts/publications with recently high conversion rates to paid subs.
• And now they’re going to introduce sponsorships?! At least they’re not selling paid ad space on Notes yet, but incentivizing writers to monetize at every turn is diverting everyone’s attention from the only thing that matters: the quality of one’s prose.

Jun 16
Another genius rhyme in “The Bare Necessities”: “bare necessities” > “bear can rest at ease”.

Give yourself grace.

Notes on Batman: Beyond

I’m now two episodes into Batman: Beyond, watching it for the first time since when I was a kid. For one, the theme absolutely rips, and they nailed the future-punk aesthetic with the animation and soundtrack. It feels like a different Gotham with new versions of the same problems—as the typography in the intro sequence reads: “apathy, greed, corruption, power, hope.” But hope feels out of place and inaccurate there, both for Gotham and for Batman. Hope makes me think of Superman. Superman is hope. Batman is not. Batman is vengeance. Batman is the night(/knight). Batman is not hope but justice.

Also, now that I say that, note that it is called the Justice League, which reinforces that Batman is actually at the heart of what “Earth’s mightiest heroes” stand for (not Superman).

Upon a closer rewatch of the title sequence on subsequent episodes, the final two words featured after hope are honor and justice. The final word displayed (the most emphatic) in the title sequence is justice. I need not fear; the creators of this show understand Batman.

Jun 17
There may not be “someone up above,” but there is something all around and within, even if that thing is nothing: emptiness, pure potentiality.

Jun 18
I’m conflicted on the design of Chick-fil-A’s branding. For one, the whole cow-as-mascot gimmick is funny, memorable, and effective: “EAT MOR CHICKEN.” But that feels like an afterthought, more like a marketing campaign that happened to work rather than an integrated part of the brand, given how the logo is still a stylized, red chicken (rather than a cow). The name has always been odd to me too. I just looked it up to confirm that it is just a play on “chicken fillet,” and supposedly the founder wanted to add the capital ‘A’ to denote the top-tier quality of their food and service. I guess my confusion is that the only thing I’ve ever been impressed by with Chick-fil-A’s marketing is the cow campaign/mascot; it’s so effective that “EAT MOR CHICKIN” rings in my mind, and I can picture billboards I’ve seen on 1-70 and 435 and I-95 featuring a cow with a paintbrush. It’s on the same level of simplicity and elegance and vitality as “Got milk?” But no other element of the Chick-fil-A brand is on that level.

Sleep cannot be coerced. It is one of the only daily activities that will always require surrender and openness; more and more, our other activities of the day can be accomplished by grasping.

One of the most practical lessons I’ve learned in life is that you can only want what someone has if you are willing to give up what they had to get it. Meaning, you can’t take the good without the bad. And when you think through that for a second or more, envy begins to dissolve. (I think I originally read this from Mark Manson.)

I love reading David Foster Wallace and wish I could write like him, but do I also want to be addicted to television, chain-smoke and dip tobacco, and die by suicide at the age of 46? Immanuel Kant is a genius and one of the reasons human ethics and normative behavior has evolved to this point, but would I like to only ever travel within a twenty-mile radius of where I was born? All my childhood, we drove 20 miles from our house to private school, every weekday. If I were like Kant, I would’t have ever even visited downtown Kansas City. Nietzsche suffered serious illness for most of his life and the woman he loved rejected his marriage proposals several times. Camus died in a car crash at 46. John Muir had a good life in many ways but never appreciated or opened himself up to other races of people.

Lately, I’ve been reading Robert Macfarlane and comparing myself to him, catching myself wishing that I had done more mountaineering and backcountry skiing already, feeling as if I am behind in life. But to be Robert Macfarlane, I would have to—first of all—be English. I would have to have studied Greek and French and the classics at “university,” and I would be an entirely different person with different values and desires entirely. I admire him and want to emulate him in many ways, but that’s exactly it; I will find my own way.

Jun 20
America’s omnipresent-music epidemic may have begun with the radio-host’s imperative of “no dead air.” Given how integral radio was to daily life for half a century in America, no dead air habituated Americans to noise, as opposed to silence.

Jun 22
Hangry is a choice. If you’re warm, take your jacket off; if you’re cold, put it on. If you’re hungry, eat something before you get angry.

(This, of course, assumes the recipient of this comment has easy access to bountiful food, which is exclusively the case for people who purport to be “hangry.”)

On the Painful Redundancy of “At that Moment in Time”

This weekend, in a short conversation with a friend’s father, I heard him use the phrase “at that moment in time” twice, which caught my ear as painfully redundant. It’s something I’ve hardly ever said, it was odd to hear it as a filler-word or verbal tick. Unfortunately, my editor brain overrode my conversation focus as I analyzed the multiple layers of redundancy within those five words.

First, “then” would do exactly the same job as “at that moment in time” in almost all if not every single case. Then, there’s the issue of “moment in time,” which is the painful part, since there is no other place for a moment to be other than in time (save for the metaphorical, lyrical case of having experienced a moment “outside time,” which is figurative language because it is hyperbolic).

To convey a similar meaning, a careful speaker’s choices are:

• “then”
• “at that moment”
• “in that moment”
• “at the time”
• or “at that time”

which all have bespoke qualities and subtle differences in meaning. The careful speaker never fuses them all together by uttering “at that moment in time.”

Jun 23
I am a point on a plane, which I only just learned and finally know.

NYC is a climate not suited to my sub-species of Nature-loving Midwestern kid, like a palm supplanted to the tundra.

New York has the highest concentration of culture and capital in the world, which is why, at least on some level, it attracts everyone—like a black hole with Manhattan as the singularity at the center of the Tri-State Area’s event-horizon.

[[Material for “Community of KC” V2]]

On the Feel of a Book’s Pages

Everyone always talks about books in terms of pages, but the composition of a page changes book to book, making the same number of words look and feel and fill pages differently. Words are the only reliable book-measuring unit.

My book Beneath the Glacier is 40,000 words, which is fewer than most nonfiction books and less than half the length of any Steven King novel. At that length, I had many degrees of freedom when it came to typesetting. I wanted a spacious text column, which means ample margins (especially in the gutter) and ample leading (white space between lines and paragraphs). Those decisions highlight each word and have the effect of the whole thing being compressed. It’s as if I have asked the reader to read with a magnifying glass and provided it for them, suggesting that there is something worth your attention on every line. I also didn’t want my short book to feel thin in the hands, so I opted for an unconventional and small trim size of 5" x 7", which you could imagine being used for an essay collection rather than a novel, which may be a 5" x 8" or 6" x 9" paperback. Compared to a lengthy volume like King’s The Stand, I printed my paperback at a smaller and more intimate trim size with larger body type and line-leading (12/15 pt.) and at fewer words per page.

That last part is important and intentional; I printed more pages than I needed to per copy to achieve fewer words per page, because I think that will help people fly through the book by giving them a persistent sense of progression. Book typesetting will need to respond to the phone-addicted and media-inundated reader to accommodate not so much her attention span as her biomechanics habits of tapping and swiping and scrolling. The only such movement when reading a book is the page-turn, which is sacred and a direct result of the book’s interior design.

The modern brain is habituated to high refresh rates: flicking between three short-form videos within ten seconds, all loading immediately and auto-playing at 30+ frames per second. In a book, the “frame” is the two-page spread: one static image for the eye to systematically explore like a Hieronymus Bosch hung on the gallery wall. Many paperbacks are printed to minimize cost and may pack 11/14 pt. text into a 6" x 9" trim (or a ~12" x 9" spread), but that design asks the reader to sit with a single frame for 4–6 minutes at a time. I’ve done that sort of math in my head as I read, as I’m sure you have: “It took me three minutes just to read and annotate that one page! If that’s my average, it will take me 15 hours to read this 300-page book!”

Beneath the Glacier’s paperback edition prints at around 200 words per page, which shaves 2–3 minutes off the reader’s refresh rate. So, instead of asking my reader to make the leap from 30 frames per second to 6 minutes per spread, I’m only asking him to make the leap to 4 mps. That’s a notable difference that triggers the page-turn more frequently, which gives any human mind the feeling of progress and momentum, inertia, and that feeling is especially important and valued by the modern American mind who is sitting down to read my book and trying desperately to evade the many distractions at hand clamoring for her attention.

I’m not saying that “the lower your words per page, the better.” Of course not—at the extreme, you’d end up with 2,000-page tomb that reads like a children’s book. Your reader is not only an adult but also a genius. She can pay attention. And she will have an easier time remaining focused if you hit the sweet spot of words per page, given your book’s total word count, which determined primarily by your desired page count, given your chosen trim size. See how everything fuses together? All these design decisions are what create the context for the book’s content, and neither can be overlooked if you want to offer an enjoyable and valuable experience for your reader that he cherishes forever.

Two more examples of the Siren archetype in media: Salina Kyle, Catwoman (counterpart to Bruce Wayne), and Melanie Walker, Ten of the Royal Flush Gang (Terry McGinnis’s love interest in Batman Beyond).

I just watched the Beyond episode “Dead Man’s Hand” and remembered it from childhood as soon as Melanie was introduced as Ten, remember the crush I had on her as a seven-year-old, and it holds up. It’s a platonically good episode of television—the enemy design of the Royal Flush Gang, the story with romance B-plot directly linking up with the crime-threat, the “set design,” of the museum especially, the fight choreography and animation, and the conflict and final resolution between Bruce and Terry. So good!

[[Notes on Batman: Beyond]]

Jun 24
Notes on Obsession

• Cringing, tensing, covering my eyes, goosebumps multiple times
• Audio design, Nikki’s screams
• Laughing while horrified, then only horrified once things got violent
• Platonic story structure that was surprising yet inevitable (dying in the same spot and by the same means as the cat)
• Haven’t watched a horror movie in a while, and that one got me
• Even though it was obsession on a mythic scale, it’s scary in the same way Joker was scary: I could imagine it actually happening. The wishing itself was magic realism, but the depiction of the effect (obsession) seemed on many levels a realistic portrayal of a certain type of psychosis that is feminine in nature (connection, closeness, etc.)
• Jotting down these notes in my car, I can tell my heart is still pounding, and I’m glancing around to make sure no crazed woman is going to headbutt through my window. I just locked the doors.
• Critique: The wording of the wish itself should have used “obsessed” rather than “love,” because loving someone deeply would not lead to actions like Nikki’s, only maybe our perverted idea of co-dependent love, which is not the cosmic, divine, mythic love, God’s love.

Jun 25
I would love to incorporate these three day-themes into my weekly schedule:

• Sacred Sunday: Minimize screen time, maximize presence and creativity and conversation and peace and relaxation
• Admin Monday: Get all urgent and necessary correspondence out of the way, and set clear goals and intentions for the week’s work ahead
• Wild Wednesday: Do something outdoors, go somewhere new, be aimless for a while, let the schedule lapse yet remain focused and lean into creative impulses

Jun 26
I told myself that, with this latest proof copy of Beneath the Glacier, I would only audit the design (margins, text boxes, images, running heads, etc.) and not the text itself. But, alas, I have already re-punctuated—once again—both the first and final paragraphs of the book. I’m allowing these edits, because they are not part of another full editing pass, don’t change the content (only the meter), and I am confident that they are improvements. For instance, I combined to sentences in the final paragraph by swapping one period for a comma and another for a colon, because the sentences were too monotonous in length. The rhythm was dead.

Notes on X-Men: First Class

I’m not sure how many times I’ve seen this movie—more than three—but I haven’t seen it in years and just rewatched it. Wow, they accomplish a lot, and it never gets boring. The cinematography is something I never appreciated as a kid. There’s a two shot early on with Eric and the banker where both of their faces are reflected in the gold bar between them when the camera is over their shoulder (more like at their hip, looking up and across the table)—the biggest stand-out shot of the film.

Then, there’s the fact that this is somehow both the mutants/X-Men’s origin story as well as Magneto’s and Prof. X. But one other important fact that I never noticed as a kid is that this film is principally Magneto’s origin story. On the simplest level, we open on him being separated from his parents as a kid and bending the gate, and the movie closes with him rescuing Emma Frost in his full anti-hero costume calling himself Magneto.

The primary conflict in the film (besides the threat of global nuclear war) is whether Eric will give in to his anger and pain and desire for vengeance (or, rather, since we already know he is Magneto, how the bad will corrupt the good in him). The climax of the film, therefore, isn’t so much when he kills Shaw but more so when he takes up Shaw’s mission in his own way to create a society of mutants opposed to humans, which just so happens to involve accidentally paralyzing Charles for being blinded by his rage.

I think my only critique is that somewhere in the edit, they lost the romance between Xavier and Moira the CIA agent. I can see it in the deleted scenes on the Blue-Ray, but there’s nothing romantic or suggestive between them (besides Xavier’s brief, drunk flirting) until the very end when she holds him on the beach and then kisses him at the Academy. It would have been simple and clever to show just a moment between them when Xavier sees her looking at him, he reads her mind, and he mouths back, “Right now?” or something or jokes about how that would be inappropriate. We don’t know that Moira is attracted to Xavier until the penultimate scene.

Cutting those scenes had a residual effect which is that I think Moira’s name is only uttered once in the whole film, by Eric when he is trying to convince Charles of the humans’ malice and highlights his arrogance by saying, “You think they’re all like Moira.” When I heard that line, I had no idea who he was talking about and had to retroactively fill that info into my memory.

Jun 28
Notes on Across the Spider-Verse

I just finished a double-feature of Into and Across the Spider-Verse, and at the moment all I have to say is: Why the hell does Across end on “To be continued.” I feel like they could have resolved the entire film’s story within the runtime of the (beautifully animated) end-credits. I hate to say it, but it ranks my perception of the film. It’s longer than Into but doesn’t tell a complete story. Of course, it was edited (and likely written) to be “Gwen’s story,” but it’s not going to feel that way when we are rooting for Miles the whole time; he is the protagonist. The film ends with the hero literally tide up and (maybe) about to escape. It’s supremely unsatisfying, and I truly think that the “Miles sorry” could have been resolved with five more minutes of run-time (or five minutes cut from elsewhere).

I hadn’t watched Into since it came out in theaters, and this was my first time watching across. Into holds up as a masterpiece—innovative animation/art style, clever uses of fourth-wall brakes and voiceover narration, mixed perspectives, believable and compelling origin story, multiverse without to much complexity. And Across gets way too carried away with the “Spider-People.”

Looking back on it now, right after the fact, I can’t believe how much of the run-time is spent in the Spider HQ. The entire purpose of that whole sequence, other than the quite cool chase scene, was exposition. Miguel even prompts the AI to “Do the explaining thing” or something, which completely took me out of the film. I mean, damn, why get lazy when everything else, from the animation and world-building to the dialogue, is such high-quality? I just scrubbed through to make sure I’m overreacting. (I’m not.) Miles enters the Spider HQ AT 1:18 and does not “go home” until 1:48. That’s a whole ass half hour of mostly exposition that won’t even be paid off until Beyond (because it mostly had to do with raising suspicious about Miguel and whether has has an ulterior motive).

One last calculation: According to my Halloween Moment rule, the climax should start 83.4% of the way through a movie. “TO BE CONTINUED” flashes onto the screen at 2:13:30, so the climax should start around 1:51. As expected, exactly at that time-stamp is the climactic scene for the Gwen story. She has just returned to her home dimension (banished there from HQ) for the first time since being recruited at the start of the film. Gwen confronts her dad, and they make up, and she avoides the cannon event by making a speech and learns the lesson that she is free. Now, this is a great scene, and I love Spider-Gwen’s character, but she and Miles are competing for the role of protagonist throughout. Credit to the writers: both of them change. Miles realizes his strength and power and lets go of a lot of his self-doubt, basically that he can handle going it on his own. And Gwen learns that she doesn’t have to be alone, that her decisions and perceived lack of choice have led her to “not have made any friends after Peter died” (which is repeated at least three times in the film). Miles learns that he doesn’t need other Spider-friends, because he has his family. Gwen learns that her father wants her to be with and support and protect the ones she loves. Again, those are both compelling character arcs and are well-scoped to a film but not to share the same film, which also happens to have a whole external-conflict plot full of several other characters who are trying to save the entire multiverse, etc.

Jon Bellion on God: The Real Father Figure

My God, this is the most beautiful YouTube description I’ve ever seen, given the context. A few minutes ago, I was delighted to find a new Jon Bellion video on my feed: “GUILLOTINE (Live from Forest Hills)”. I saw Rex Orange County at Forest Hills once. I know that venue, and I was jealous seeing the people who got to witness this concert. It turns out that Jon published this entire concert, with individual clips for each track, produced/sponsored by Vevo—another delight. I’m currently listening to the whole concert as I write this.

After a seven-year hiatus since Glory Sound Prep, Jon released Father Figure. Even as a fan of his, I didn’t even know he had a new album. (That’s what a seven-year hiatus will do to a person’s online presence.) It came out in June '25—a year ago now. The video I just watched was published on YouTube four days ago, after his Forest Hills concert video, which I imagine marked the end of his Father Figure tour.

Anyway, I love this description, which is the same for all of the videos from this live concert video and its constituent tracks.

DEDICATED TO MY WIFE AND CHILDREN

Credits: Directed by Guy Ettlin & James Roberts

Band Sput Searight: Drums Negah Santos: Percussion Bobby Wooten III: Bass Jon Asperil: Guitar 1 Jonny Koh: Guitar 2 + Music Direction Clyde Lawrence: Keys 1 + Music Direction George Benavides: Keys 2 Jordan Cohen: Sax + Keys 3 + Music Direction Michael Golub: Trumpet Tomoko Akaboshi: Violin 1 Sara Caswell: Violin 2 Marta Bagratuni: Cello Chern Hwei Fung: Viola Chris Ott: Trombone

Crew Damien Gravois: Live Switching Director Jaron Berman: Camera Engineer Bryan Long: PTZ Engineer Chris Falkowski: Steadicam Operator Walter Tate: Steadicam Assistant Jay Golder: Mini Cam / Engineer Guy Ettlin: Handheld Cam Matthew Hoffacker: Handheld Cam Jon Baden: AEG Production Rep Nate Smith: Production Manager Stephanie Navarro: Production Coordinator Dave Walker: Stage Manager Jackie Higgins: AEG Account Rep Rob Delpozo: Security Steve McCale: FOH John Arbuckle: JB Vocal Mix Simon Mathews: Sound Engineer Andy Highmore: Playback Jason Bennett: Monitor Nick Schroth: Lead Carpenter / Props Mike Wozniak: Backline 1 Anthony Fay: Backline 2 Keith Kruszeski: Backline 3 Justin Cave: Lead Rigger Tyler Kelly: 2nd Rigger Nick Foresta: LED Lead Benjamin Marcus: LED Tech Ralph Cherrez: LED Tech Jose Romero: LED Tech Humberto Rubio Murillo: LED Crew Roger Gruchalski: Media Server Tech James “JR” Harris: LX Crew Chief Carl Dorbad: LX Ground Control Tech Bryce Mattoe: LX Climber Michael Pagan: LX FOH Tech James Thom: Dimmer Tech Jayne Walsh: Lighting Tech Dylan Gray: A4 / Patch Amy Michelson: Teleprompter Bobby Grey: Lighting Designer/Director Sooner Routhier: The Playground Alison Cloak: The Playground Paige Newman: The Playground Michael “Hank” Hankowsky: F9 Video Server Programmer

Edited by Jose Campos Post Production Visual Effects Valters Markavs

Produced by The Diner

Music Mixed by Jonny Koh Colorist Dmytro Ogirenko

Management - Make Wake Artists Louis Coppola Matt Maschi Chris Kappy Cabell Moskal Kyle Jonas

Promoter - AEG Adam Weiser Rich Schaefer Dan Cleff Don Sullivan Darby VanDeVeen Michael Wadina

Booking - UTA JT Taylor Joe Wohlfeld Mike Hayes Scott Mantell

Surely, the credits are from Vevo and are included as best practice for copyright, but I also imagine Jon insisting on giving everyone credit and insisting that his name not be the only one attached to this work of art. The part of the description that Jon surely contributed himself is the most beautiful: “DEDICATED TO MY WIFE AND CHILDREN.” Again, that line is the first line in the description for this entire series of videos, in all caps each time. Jon has found himself, his purpose, his life’s work; and light and love radiant from him more than ever before.

In contrast, this is the first line of the YouTube description on the “Stupid Deep” music video, which has over 7 million views (vs. this Forest Hills concert’s 200k):

Listen to ‘Stupid Deep’ from Jon Bellion’s album, Glory Sound Prep: https://jonbellion.lnk.to/GlorySoundP…

all of which is a CTA, no personal message, no credits to the people who contributed to the song or video.

Now, this could be the subject of an entire essay, but I now that I am exploring this Jon Bellion album, I can’t help but chastise Taylor Swift for her song “Father Figure,” in which she brags about having a bigger dick than the men in her life. Here, I won’t say anything more than presenting this juxtaposition. Here is the chorus from Taylor’s “Father Figure” and then one verse from Bellion’s “FATHER FIGURE.”

What Taylor thinks it means to be a man:

I’ll be your father figure /

I drink that brown liquor /

I can make deals with the devil because my dick’s bigger /

This love is pure profit /

Just step into my office /

I dry your tears with my sleeve

What Jon sees as man’s misappropriations of masculinity:

All these horses but where your carriage at? /

All these crosses but where your marriage at? /

For the lettuce /

You took a flame thrower to the cabbage patch /

In my REM sleep I see demons /

And they tell me, "Congratulations, standing ovation /

You built a coffin!" And that shit looks just like a /

Big Ferrari!

Jun 29
My top-three values are (1) autonomy, being both self-directed and self-sufficient; (2) stillness, developing a habit of openness and focus rather than one of contraction and distraction; and (3) connection, living in harmony with others and with Nature.

Away from Annotating

Ever since editing became my job, I have found it harder to read for leisure. My default mode is editing-mode, which means reading with a pen and commenting in the margins on things like subtext and paragraph transitions and internal rhyme and clever inversions of S–V–O sentence-structure. When I read this way, both engaging with the content and studying the craft, I probably average 3+ minutes per page. At that rate, it takes me ~15 hours to read a 300-page book. And I never skim; if I finish a book, I have read every word on my way from cover to cover. That’s how I love to read. That’s how books stick with me and how they come to morph my mind. I don’t want to change that, but as a writer, editor, and self-publisher, I need to be reading more books, turning more pages. To that end, I have an idea.

This is a case where a framework may actually help change my behavior. I’ve tried various things in the past to get myself to read more, but this approach actually seems aligned with my creativity and not some trick I’m playing on myself. Here are the two parts of the framework: books I study and books I read. I only finished about ten books in 2025, and that felt like way too few, yet all of those books have stuck with me, and I engaged with them on a deep level, and they helped me improve dramatically as a writer in that time. Rather than chastise myself, as I was doing, maybe ten to twelve books per year is my upper limit for the number of books I can study, meaning where I apply my scrupulous editor’s eye to every sentence and every page and learn from the content while dissecting the author’s craft. Here’s the rub: I finish books maybe five- to ten-times as fast when I don’t annotate. (Yet I still comprehend the content and can still comment on and learn from the craft-quality, just at the book-level rather than the sentence-level.)

So, my plan is to allow myself to read without a pen more often, even for the majority of the books I read, which sounds crazy. Still, I need deadlines and a plan and some structure.

My idea, which I will try out starting July 1, is to study one book and read at least one other book per month. This imposes the type of structure and deadlines and goals that aid habit-building while allowing ample space for more leisurely reading. This whole strategy is a response to the fact that I am not always in the mood to study-read, especially if I’m coming off of a bunch of editing or writing. It’s not even a type of energy I have every day. But I want to be reading every day. Even at my 3-minute pace, I could study-read a 300-page book every month if I only just averaged 30 minutes of reading per day. That’s doable. What I really want is to read 1–2 hours per day, so this whole strategy is built so that when I don’t have the study-read energy, I will still pick up a book rather than refresh YouTube, and I will slowly build an association between reading and leisure/pleasure (not only the pleasure that comes from learning but also from the reading itself), and that will be magical.

There’s one last critical piece of the puzzle, which is that for every book I read, whether I study it or not, I will write a “Book Notes” page for it (and publish on my site), which will double as a review of the book’s quality and my interpretation and integration of its content. The only difference between the study-read book notes and the leisure-read book notes is that the former will have more direct quotes and commentary on the writer’s style and skill. For the leisure books, I will still comment on the structure and style and the quality but just not at the same depth and detail.

So, the desired outcome is this: Read one study-book per month, chosen from a careful list authors I admire and want to emulate (e.g., Annie Dillard, Robert Macfarlane, Terry Tempest Williams, David Foster Wallace) who are writing in genres/forms that I want to focus on: essays, narrative nonfiction, short fiction (both short stories and novellas), and prose-poetry. Then, each month, I would also read at least one other book of any length and genre for leisure, without my pen (picking it up whenever I have the urge). I will select these as books that interest me (rather than authors I explicitly want to emulate). My leisure-reads will be how I achieve breadth, whereas the study-reads lend depth.

Lastly, I’ll explain why this excites me so and why I find it liberating. I love David Foster Wallace, but I don’t own Infinite Jest or any of his short story collections, only his essay collections. That’s because I write essays, and I want to study his essays. If I allowed myself to read DFW without annotating, maybe I would read Infinite Jest, and maybe it would change my life, but idea of spending 50+ hours reading Infinite Jest at my study-pace is the reason I have never picked it up. The leisure books are also low-commitment. I don’t have to finish them. I should be picking books up, putting some down, finishing the ones that I enjoy, then picking up another, whereas the study-books are carefully chosen to be read diligently and deliberately from start to finish, for the sake of becoming better at my craft (as the priority, with the book’s content being secondary). I’ve never read Moby Dick (for crying out loud!) because I imagine myself stopping immediately after the first sentence to remark in the margin about why that first line—“Call me Ishmael”—works so well.

If I do this successfully, by this time next year, I will have read at least 24 books, likely many more, and I will have 24+ posts logged in my “Book Notes” on my site, which is a worthy form of writing I have done a lot of but never in a polished enough to publish. That will change starting next month, with my study-book being Barry Lopez’s essay collection Embrace Fearlessly the Burning World.