the MIXTAPE

The Mixtape: Vol. #60 How do you procrastinate, Reader? Do you sit down at your desk and then pick at your cuticles for 20 minutes? Do you glance at your phone—just for a second, to do something you definitely need to do—but accidentally end up solving the last three weeks of Connections? Do you text stupid GIFs to your sister that only she will find funny? (... do you take ten minutes to scroll back through three months of daily back-and-forth to find this specific exchange, record a...

Coffee Break: issue #55 **Today’s missive is less of a missive and more of a writing prompt. I encourage you to reply to this email once you’ve done it.** Happy Saturday, Reader. A few weeks ago I sent you a B-sides sample of a piece I wrote about my time in the service industry. It’s here if you want to re-read. In all that time, I must have engaged in hundreds of thousands of IRL interactions — with my coworkers, with my bosses, with every single person at every single table or barstool. Of...

Coffee Break: issue #54 Happy Friday, Reader! OR IS IT… 👀 Lemme tell you something — and feel free to picture me as a crotchety old punk, shaking my fist at the heavens… AI slop is not a new problem. The value of human creativity — especially writing, especially in a business context — has *always* been undervalued, dismissed, underestimated, and exploited to within an inch of its life. This has been true in the online business world for as long as there’s been an online business world,...

Coffee Break: issue #53 Happy Friday, Reader. I took most of last week off, which I haven't done for at least a year, and it was GREAT. I hemmed some jeans, turned a corner of my bedroom into a witchy altar situation, floated in the pool and listened to a Tana French book, went to a funeral (welp). Coming back this week, though... brain fog. 😶🌫️ I know what I want to write about—AI slop; the idea that "slop" has existed for as long as I've been a professional writer; human creativity...

Coffee Break issue #52* Oh hi Reader, At the time of this writing, AI has been on the scene for about four years. For a while, I grumbled about it. I don’t like when things are forced upon me. And I would rather do… whatever I want…than expend so much of my precious brainpower trying to understand and adapt to something I didn’t even ask for and don’t even want. But I’m also insatiably curious about literally everything—this is what makes me a good writer/editor—and I learned a long time ago...

Coffee Break issue #51 Hi Reader. My junior year in high school, the honors English department was mired in an unprecedented, sweeping plagiarism scandal. 😱 We’d recently turned in our final papers on John Steinbeck’s The Grapes of Wrath, which was one of our summer reading assignments that year. This book was a slog — an epic, Oregon Trail situation tracking the Joad family’s westward migration from the Oklahoma dust bowl during the Great Depression. Heavy stuff for a bunch of 16-year-olds...

Issue #48: Yep, Watching TV Counts as “Reading”—But Only if You Watch It That Way Read a Lot Series part 4/4 Four weeks ago, I kicked off this series with a famous Stephen King quote, from his book On Writing: If you want to be a writer, you must do two things above all others: read a lot and write a lot… there’s no shortcut. I work with a lot of writers who don’t really think of themselves as “writers.” At first blush, this might sound like head trash—impostor syndrome; a confidence issue,...

Issue #47: Don’t Believe The Hype Read a Lot Series part 3/4 This week I promised to write about how watching TV counts as “reading a lot,” even though Stephen King says it rots your brain, buuuut we’re gonna talk about Timothée Chalamet instead. The internets have been abuzz lately because uh-oh, Hollywood pretty boy said bad bad thing about opera and ballet! I realized I couldn’t talk about this without knowing what he actually said—and in what context—so I went clicking through a labyrinth...

Issue #46: The Easiest & Most Fun Way to Get Better at Writing Read a Lot series, part 2 of 4 There’s a famous piece of writing advice from Stephen King’s On Writing (still one of the best craft-centered writing books, by the way): If you want to be a writer, you must do two things above all others: read a lot and write a lot… there’s no shortcut. I think we all know that the first half of that missive is much easier than the second—yay! I get to read a lot! vs. oh noooo, I have to write (a...

Issue #45: Old books that still hold up and are not Wuthering Heights Read a Lot series, part 1 of 4 <bursts through your screen like the Kool-Aid man> HELLO, READER! I’m back with your regularly scheduled Coffee Breaks, and I’m kicking things off with a March mini-series that will mostly focus on reading—what I’m reading, what you should read (and why), how reading can make you a better writer, and in today’s case, the “classics” and “required reading” you get to skip. I’m skipping any...