I'm ready for the fall
It's time to put back on my pants and start wearing socks again
My kids are all back in school, the temperatures are dropping, the colors of my world are changing, and it smells like pumpkin spice outside. It must be fall. There’s something about the change in seasons that sparks my imagination. How are you feeling about the fall?
Today’s newsletter is sponsored by the latest issue of Surreal Haiku. It’s called The Joy of Nothing. It’s 38 pages of vibrant color, abstract art, and strange surreal haiku. It’s a haiku comic book and it will transport you to another world.
You can buy it in ebook format or paperback.
Poetry Comics
Pocket Story
The Last
I love extremely short fiction. For this experiment, I took one of what I call pocket stories and turned it into a short comic. I had a blast with this and will make a few more of these in the near future. (Next week in the Make Cool Stuff section I’m featuring a few of my favorite writers of extremely short fiction.)
Make Cool Stuff
I’m fascinated with projects creative people do outside of their standard money-making jobs. I call these creative side quests.
One of my favorite podcasts is Nate DiMeo’s The Memory Palace. He tells obscure but deeply meaningful stories from American history. He is one of the best writers on the planet.
While I think you should listen to his podcast—and you can start anywhere, every episode is incredible—that’s not exactly why I’m bringing up Nate DiMeo.
He usually takes the last three weeks of the summer off and reposts some of his favorite episodes or just goes dormant. But this August he went on a creative side quest. He narrated The Great Gatsby by F. Scott Fitzgerald. He posted his narration in three parts, each one about ninety minutes long.
I had never read The Great Gatsby before. I somehow missed being assigned it in high school and even though I had heard it was a book everyone who wanted to understand the rich in the United States should read, I had never found the time.
There are so many books to read.
But I made time for Nate DiMeo. Because not only is he an incredible writer, but he has the perfect radio voice. Calm, soothing, and able to punctuate the right sentences with the perfect amount of emotion effortlessly.
It was worth the listen.
I hope you’ll make time to hear it—even if you’ve already read the book. You’ve never had Nate DiMeo read it to you, and that’s something worth experiencing.
You can click here for the first part of the book.
Thanks for coming along with me on this journey! Please let me know what you think of the new format.
Be the weird you want to see in the world!
Cheers,
Loved your first issue back, Jason. Especially the pocket story. It was powerful!