The Weekly Digest is a weekly (no shit?) update that captures highlights from the week that was. At the end of each week, I share a collection of thoughts, recommendations, and links. Like everything else I write, it's awesome, but it may be too long for email so make sure you click through.
Substack Summer Update
Substack Summer is back for a second year, and as a special bonus this year I will be mixing in reviews of stories from Bad Clown Books’ short story collection Masculine. My goal is to add a review of each short story in the collection to the Weekly Digest for the rest of the Summer. This week’s is down below!
First Substack Summer review was Holiest of Cities by Tom Schecter.
Second one should be up in a couple days: Midwestern Death Trip by Meaghan Garvey.
If you are an author with a completed work you’d like reviewed, you can find out how I manage Review Requests here. If you’ve already sent me an ARC of your work (or if I bought it myself), you are already on “the List.”
🎵Some Mad Hope
On Matt Nathanson
I was struggling to come up with a lede this week, and then I started listening to old Matt Nathanson songs. You probably know Matt Nathanson from the big hit “Come on Get Higher” that was in every coffeeshop, bookshop and third public place circa 2008. By the time he released Some Mad Hope in 2007, I’d probably seen him live 5-6 times. One of my good friends from college was a singer/songwriter and turned me on to the poetry of Nathanson’s work. The man can turn a phrase.1
What always got me about his music and his songs was a sort of melancholy wistfulness. The underlying theme being something like ‘love will always break your heart, but that’s also kind of the point.’ Exactly the kind of thing a hopeless romantic early-20s kid needed to hear (or maybe not, who knows?). Regardless, the man had a knack for describing the kinds of women I found myself falling for during my self-destructive era2.
At some point after one of his shows, my friend and I were chatting with Matt and my friend laid out some of my recent romantic failings, which included taking a girl to one of his shows and getting dumped immediately after.
“Dude, I’m so sorry… I failed you,” he replied. He then gave me a piece of advice. It’s about the only piece of advice that’s ever stuck with me:
“Stay clear of loose women.”
Look, it’s not his fault I didn’t listen.
📚Book Bits
Bonus Review: “Las Cenizas” by LaTesha Harris from Masculine (Bad Clown Books, 2026).
“Las Cenizas” means ashes or cinders according to Google translate because I went to the only high school in America that didn’t offer Spanish, and the supplementing I did with Sharika music videos didn’t help.
Clocking in at 20 pages, “Las Cenizas” is one of the longer stories in the collection and still felt too short. By the end, it felt there was more story to be told, this feeling was probably exacerbated by the rapid conclusion. It’s an interesting choice in a story full of them.
Without spoiling too much, the story is about a missing foreign exchange student, but the story is told entirely from a white male narrator’s perspective, a nuance I didn’t appreciate until I read Harris’ blurb after the story. That closeness to the narrator instills sympathy. And for a story about power, privilege, and race, it’s a compelling choice to center the white character.
The story leans heavily on visual language, directing you more to character’s body language as a way of showing emotion. Generally speaking, I don’t like this technique but as I came to understand the framing of the narrator more, I understood why he would talk about his scowling or blushing instead of his emotions (another “masculine” trait).
I liked this story, but I think it was longer than the page count. I would like to read a version that had more room to flesh out the parental relationship(s), the romantic(?) relationship, maybe mess with chronology for more suspense, explain more about the mysterious Marcel (the only character that isn’t racially identified, if I remember correctly)…
Also, LaTesha - I see what you did with the snow globe nickname. Nice touch.
A Long Game: Notes on Writing Fiction by Elizabeth McCracken (Finished)
Most recent audiobook “read.” McCracken has a funny, self-deprecating style that I adored listening to, but there’s nothing really groundbreaking here in terms of content, craft, or tactics. Maybe I’ve just heard too many pep-talks on writing fiction.
The Good Enough Life by Avram Alpert
I actually may DNF this one, not because it is bad but because it is preaching to the choir. Like, I really don’t need convincing that our capitalist, hustle-bro culture is ruining everything or that we should have a 4-day workweek, or that pursuit of infinite wealth is morally vacant. Which is really too bad, because the book lays out excellent foundation support for all this. Just no one that needs to read it ever will.
Recent Book Haul:
Leverage by Amran Gowani
Let this be a lesson to you authors out there: go on Substack Live. You might just make a good impression and end up selling a book or two. I picked up Leverage after seeing Amran shoot the shit with Alex Muka and Andrew Boryga.
Angel Down by Daniel Krauss
I was told to read Whalefall (I think by Craig Clevenger), but Angel Down was on sale. The decision tree in my brain has been consumed by kudzu.
Inside the Box by David Epstein
I’ve been hearing lots of great things about this one and have been watching David’s interview with Big Think on the side. Coinciding this with my recent writing exercise(s), I’m interested if thoughtful constraints can help me build a more stable writing routine.”
The Anatomy of Story by John Truby
What to get for the man who has everything? Another craft book…
📺Screen Time 🖥️
This guy has been building a single fantasy map since the 1960s. Absolutely wild.
I also binged the first season of Mr. Inbetween. It’s only 6, thirty-minute episodes and each one is just packed with tension and usually some great dark humor. I’m now more than halfway through Season 2 already. The lead guy also has the creepiest smile this side of Willem Dafoe.
💡Substack Spotlight:
9️⃣Nine Story Hotel & Television Sky 📺
New works are being added to the haunted collage that is the Nine Story Hotel, starting with Amanda G.’s “The Knife in Her Pocket.” And this past weekend Edith Bow posted Enter the Dollhouse / Sultana to the Television Sky stack. It was Edith’s post that helped inspire some of my own writing this week (more on that below).
📚FiC Goes to Readercon!
A cohort of Substackers will descend upon the greater Boston area in early July for Readercon. They will have a table/booth set up and have graciously offered to present free promo materials for Substackers. Tiny Worlds and Drek Death and Doom will also be there, hawking their wares. Props to Inzani D'Arpeggio for organizing all this.
📖Busy Writers’ Book Club
I have done an atrocious job of co-hosting this with Haly, the Moonlight Bard ✒️, because I am becoming a luddite and Discord overwhelms me. BUT! The Club is wrapping up Q2’s reading of The Science of Storytelling by Will Storr and voting is closing soon (tomorrow?) for Q3’s craft book. If you’re interested in a book-per-quarter club with a focus on writing craft, you can check it out at the Blanket Fort Discord.
🖋️Writing
Or God Help Me if Rain Ever Stops Being Romantic
I wrote a thing! You can read it here. It’s called “I am beyond fake,” for two reasons: 1. I was listening to “Doll Parts” by Hole while creating this as a writing exercise for myself and 2. I used up all my cleverness and creativity in the 30 previous minutes and saved the title for last.
I am beyond fake.
I challenged myself to write for 30 minutes. I put a song on repeat for the 30 minutes, “Doll Parts” by Hole. This is the result.
If you’re thinking “weird, I didn’t get that e-mail,” that’s because you didn’t. I’m going to make it my policy that any writing exercises or unpolished stuff I post on here will not clog up your inboxes.
Anyways, I had just read Edith Bow and Emil Ottoman’s piece for the Nine Story Hotel, and there was a embed of “Doll Parts” by Hole. I thought, “oh I love that song. I haven’t listened to it in a while. Hey! I have an idea!”
It’s not an exercise I’d heard about anywhere, just something that gave me an arbitrary deadline to hit and a pseudo-constraint in music choice. If you don’t have music ADHD3, I would recommend giving it a try. Just make sure you pick the right song. I will not be held responsible if someone tries this “Cotton-Eye Joe.”
It was raining here and I was feeling that “rainy vibe4,” and I don’t think I realized but I’m pretty sure it’s always raining in my fiction. I hope rain never stops being aesthetic and romantic with that perfect bittersweet atmosphere. It probably will though, when it starts raining 300 days a year on account of the planet dying. Regardless, next time I will work on crafting a better opening sentence than “It’s raining.”5
⛱️Fleeting Thoughts
Thinking about summer and my younger days and old music, and I remember that I’ve never had a “summer romance.” The only meet-cute I can remember was at a jukebox in a ski lodge in New Hampshire when I was maybe 9. I guess the thing I came to realize about grand romantic gestures is that you’re more interested in the story than the girl. If you start living your life in a rom-com script, it’s like being out in the sun; you’ll feel warm for a little while but eventually you’ll get burnt.
But I don’t know, maybe a really bad sunburn hardens your skin against lesser ones? At the very least it’s a good reminder to wear sunscreen and not get melanoma. Everyone is bound to get burnt at least once, maybe it’s better to make it a good one?
But what do I know about romance? My pick-up line to my wife was “Hey. What’s up?”
🍻+🤙,
— V
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He is also famous for his stage banter. There is a live recording somewhere of a young Vinny Reads yelling “We love you, Matt!” to which he replied, “Thank you… sir.”
“She brought weekend boys home in her curls.”
”She said, watch your back. I’m nobody’s girlfriend.”
”Cause I can still smell summer on your skin, And I can still remember giving in.”
And on and on and on.
I cannot stand this manifestation. If you listen to 30 seconds of a song and then skip forward when other people are listening: I hate you.
Leaving “rainy vibe” in a finished draft should be a war crime. No wonder subs keep stalling to this newsletter.
Often when I do writing exercises my first sentence is shit. I tend to leave it in because it is the thing that gets me moving. I have another one where the entire first paragraph is me marveling about my stupidity at not knowing a shot is 1.5oz, not 2oz, and that’s probably why the screen looks blurry.
Thanks for checking out LEVERAGE, Vinny! I hope the novel delivers. It's a wild one, if nothing else.
thanks for reviewing my story !!!!