Summer Resources, Referrals, Reading

I'm going on leave until the fall!

May 20, 2024

Check out my first post here to read more about the namesake of this newsletter and make a copy of the input/output tracking sheet if you so desire.

I’m off on family leave followed by book leave

I will likely pop back in with very irregular newsletters if the spirit moves me (as it did with what is now my most-read newsletter on the craft of the “I’m Just Ken” Oscars performance), but I wanted to do one formal round-up of news, resources, referrals for various things, and some of my recent reading/recs before things get sweaty.

BIGGEST NEWS—I’m co-authoring a craft book on how to write comedy with Elissa Bassist!

Inside Jokes: A Comedy and Creativity Guide for All Writers will be out from Grand Central in January 2026:

We’ll be sending out newsletters from each of our Substacks talking about the process of collaborating with each other (I’ll write about her; she’ll write about me) sometime soon. Subscribe to Elissa’s very good newsletter, Tragedy + Time, here, and enjoy her recent viral banger, “Writer Math,” here.

I put together a referral sheet for the most common queries I get over email

Check it out here, and if you reach out to anyone on the list please be respectful: we all talk. You can find contact info for humor, satire, and fiction editing; gift book consults; class suggestions, and more (did I use semi-colons right there? I never know).

Note: please do not ask me to add you/your services to this list, I am done working on it for now! Respect the leave!

Nonfiction Reading List:

I’ve found reading in the last six months to be very challenging—for the first time in my life, I’ve actually fallen asleep many nights without reading a single word. But recently, I’ve had success with a varied and random selection of nonfiction:

“Adult Children of Emotionally Immature Parents” by Lindsay C. Gibson. Shout-out to my in-laws, I also find books like this excellent for helping flesh out the actions and motivations of fictional characters—an important one in my novel got a lot sharper when I applied knowledge from this book.
“Being Mortal: Illness, Medicine, and What Matters in the End” by Atul Gawande. Very unclear what made me read this book at this stage in my life beyond being a long-time Gawande-head (the chapter about flesh-eating bacteria in his book “Complications” is something I think about several times a week and the reason I will never again zipline or get a pedicure), but I found it incredibly moving and thought-provoking. Having a 4.7 on Goodreads, the platform where the worst haters alive congregate, is pretty unheard of.
“Slow Productivity: The Lost Art of Accomplishment Without Burnout” by Cal Newport. My favorite business boy is definitely recycling some of his own thinking from “Deep Work,” but I still liked the framing in his new one. My second comedic novel is about burnout heightened to extremes, so I’m always reading about the topic from different angles. I did appreciate Cal’s (yeah, I use his first name) very trollish suggestion to have a public document at work of your task priorities so other people can see how low their new task will be. He says they’ll probably just do it themselves. Only a tenured man would have the gall to pitch this strategy, thank you Cal!!!

Fiction I am attempting to read soon with flap copy:

“Big Swiss” by Jen Beagin. I...have to read this. People keep mentioning it to me. I know it’s in line with my taste and style. I have a hard copy and a Kindle copy that confront me daily. I must perservere.
- “Greta lives with her friend Sabine in an ancient Dutch farmhouse in Hudson, New York. The house is unrenovated, uninsulated, and full of bees. Greta spends her days transcribing therapy sessions for a sex coach who calls himself Om. She becomes infatuated with his newest client, a repressed married woman she affectionately refers to as Big Swiss.
  
  One day, Greta recognizes Big Swiss’s voice in town and they quickly become enmeshed. While Big Swiss is unaware Greta has eavesdropped on her most intimate exchanges, Greta has never been more herself with anyone. Her attraction to Big Swiss overrides her guilt, and she’ll do anything to sustain the relationship…”
“The Husbands” by Holly Gramazio. Sounds so up my alley!!
- “When Lauren returns home to her flat in London late one night, she is greeted at the door by her husband, Michael. There’s only one problem—she’s not married. She’s never seen this man before in her life. But according to her friends, her much-improved decor, and the photos on her phone, they’ve been together for years.
  
  As Lauren tries to puzzle out how she could be married to someone she can’t remember meeting, Michael goes to the attic to change a lightbulb and abruptly disappears. In his place, a new man emerges, and a new, slightly altered life re-forms around her. Realizing that her attic is creating an infinite supply of husbands, Lauren confronts the question: If swapping lives is as easy as changing a lightbulb, how do you know you’ve taken the right path? When do you stop trying to do better and start actually living?”
“The Ministry of Time" by Kaliane Bradley. The cover is enticing me and the description is pretty bonkers, love it when a writer goes nuts with the quotations marks.
- “In the near future, a civil servant is offered the salary of her dreams and is, shortly afterward, told what project she’ll be working on. A recently established government ministry is gathering “expats” from across history to establish whether time travel is feasible—for the body, but also for the fabric of space-time.
  
  She is tasked with working as a “bridge”: living with, assisting, and monitoring the expat known as “1847” or Commander Graham Gore. As far as history is concerned, Commander Gore died on Sir John Franklin’s doomed 1845 expedition to the Arctic, so he’s a little disoriented to be living with an unmarried woman who regularly shows her calves, surrounded by outlandish concepts such as “washing machines,” “Spotify,” and “the collapse of the British Empire.” But with an appetite for discovery, a seven-a-day cigarette habit, and the support of a charming and chaotic cast of fellow expats, he soon adjusts.
  
  Over the next year, what the bridge initially thought would be, at best, a horrifically uncomfortable roommate dynamic, evolves into something much deeper. By the time the true shape of the Ministry’s project comes to light, the bridge has fallen haphazardly, fervently in love, with consequences she never could have imagined. Forced to confront the choices that brought them together, the bridge must finally reckon with how—and whether she believes—what she does next can change the future.”

Random Pleasures/Recommendations:

Childhood throwbacks. Place a pack of traditional M&M’s casually onto the counter at the bodega or pharmacy as if it just occurred to you to eat them and is not the main reason you went to the store in the first place. Also, treat yourself to the share size…but don’t share.

Putting up art even if you haven’t gotten it framed/made it look nice yet. I taped an illustration of a horseshoe crab onto my wall with Scotch tape the other day and looking at it naked is so much better than chastising myself for forgetting to frame it every other day.

Learn about a random new topic and make it your personality for a few weeks. I recently experimented with becoming a color analysis aficionado…I’m fairly certain I’m a light summer based off YouTube videos and blog posts and no actual information from a real person. I will not truly implement this knowledge into my life because as soon as I read that black is off-limits for light summers I disavowed the whole system, but I did buy one (1) linen shirt in a light purple rather than the dark blue I would have normally chosen. I know the kids are doing this process with filters on TikTok but I am too spiritually elderly to go there.

Input/Output

Discussion about this post