Welcome to the Tuesday tastemaker

#50: Vampires be vampirin’ This week, as requested by one of my readers, I’m doing a deep dive on Sinners, the recent “vampire” movie (in quotes b/c it’s so much more than that), now streaming on HBOMax. This is a lot like one of the lessons I teach in The Craft, my 10-week writing workshop for creatives and service providers. I’m currently enrolling for the 2026 cohort. Learn more here and here. Quick, Reader! How do you stop a vampire?? Garlic! Holy water! Wooden stake through the heart!...

“I’ve been working on this for two. fucking. years.” 👆that’s Ashlan, a brand strategist and *literal* professional marketer — as in, she has a degree in this shit — on the work she did in The Craft (Spring 2025 cohort). 🐈⬛ SAVE $666 on THE CRAFT RIGHT MEOW(enter THECRAFT666 at checkout!) Writing for your own business and/or doing the work for yourself that you normally do so well for your clients is a real “cobbler’s kids” situation. It’s much easier to do for others than for yourself.It’s a...

Hi Reader. Registration is officially open for the 2026 cohort of The Craft, my 10-week writing workshop for creatives, service providers, and business owners who want their writing to stand out from the sea of AI blandness. This email’s got everything you need to know — but before we get into that, you should know: I decided to offer a $666 discount if you pay in full today, tomorrow, or Sunday. At checkout, enter promo code THECRAFT666 😈(funny, right?) TAKE ME THERE NOW I’ll be emailing you...

#49: Binaries Suck and Are Wrong For those of you who’ve been missing the Sunday Coffee Break, it’s not gone! I’ve decided to switch to a monthly format for those emails, because they tend to be a lot for both of us. Instead of the every-other-week format I was doing before, now you’ll get a two-part email on a Saturday & Sunday, mid-month. Part I (Saturday) will be a piece of writing to look at; Part II (Sunday) will be the craft breakdown. I’ll start those up in November when I’m on the...

#48: Weirdness will not save you (but it might save humanity) Down the road from me is a local bar that used to be an old auction house. They distill their own spirits; the bartenders are goths; and on Thursday nights they host something called “Bless Your Heart Trivia.” The building is a squat, sprawling warehouse. Half the space is crowded with storage shelves and you know, distillery stuff. The other half features a sparkly little stage and some very wobbly picnic tables. The walls are...

#47: Now *that's* an idea with teeth! Happy Tuesday motherfuckers! I’ve got a new word to teach you today: the uncanny valley. It’s got a nice October ring to it, right? Spooky. Mysterious. Intriguing. I never knew what it meant though, until I learned about Selena Gomez’s teeth. Jessica M. Golden, Have you noticed that everyone’s teeth are a little too perfect?, The Washington Post. The uncanny valley hypothesis states that when an object starts to look more human, people’s affinity for it...

#46: You've got something they'll *never* have Hi, Reader. There’s a particular flavor of meme going around these days about how stupid this moment in American history is, how insulting it is to the psyche that the men taking over our country are a bunch of dusty incels in rumpled suits. We were hoping it would look cool, at least — shiny, sleek, impenetrable, efficient, cold. Like a proper evil overlord, says one such meme. Others say things like, “I knew there’d be a backlash to #MeToo, to...

Tastemaker #44 AI copy vs. my copy: head to head Hi Reader. On Sunday I shared a behind-the-scenes peek into my writing process for an event commemorating the one-year anniversary of Hurricane Helene. You can peep that here if you missed it. I got a couple replies asking about my use of Claude in this process. Like: "Seems like Claude could have done this all by itself. What makes you an invaluable part of this process?” That’s a great question, JULIA. 🤨 😘 When you see what I had Claude write...

Tuesday Tastemaker #43Everyone needs to stop doing this The Craft is coming back! Peep the details & join the waitlist here Happy Tuesday motherfuckers! I’m on one today about the em dash (again). Just because some dummies who don’t read enough books noticed that GPT uses the em dash a lot (that’s the long dash with no spaces—like this), writers everywhere have started using the dinky little hyphen to indicate a mid-sentence break-like this. Or sometimes - like that. BUT THAT’S NOT WHAT IT’S...