For the Weekend Warriors, Weirdos & Whackjobs - Issue #129
A brief interruption to your doomscrolling
Reporting to you from a sunny morning, peppermint tea in hand. You may have noticed vibes were a little low last week, but we’re back in the flow and getting some much-needed naps in.
Once all the naps are had, we’ll be back to your regularly scheduled programming.
Until then, we only had one article out this week. In all inboxes, there was The Ghosts of New Tech. I wrote about a strange experience I had while walking through a conservation area and how it led me to think more deeply about how modern technology fills in the blanks for us. After a photo editing app generated a figure in one of my images, I started looking into how AI-assisted lighting and scene completion actually work, and why those results can be so eerie.
What Kennedy Recommends
Book | On Writing: A Memoir of the Craft by Stephen King
April was an astronomical month in writing for me, something like 90,000 words, combined, in a number of projects. Some days, it comes easily, some days, it would be easier to run a cross-country marathon through hell.
Ending the day with this book always made it more tolerable.
There are a lot of books about writing that feel like they were written by people who have spent too much time thinking about writing and not enough time actually doing it. On Writing by Stephen King isn’t one of them.
What makes the book work is that King treats writing less like an inspired and impassioned art form and more like something you have to show up for consistently, badly, stubbornly, and often while doubting yourself. There’s very little romanticism in it. He talks about rejection, addiction, routine, editing, vocabulary, and the deeply unglamorous reality of getting words onto a page when you’d rather be doing almost anything else.
It’s one of the few books on craft that feels genuinely useful, whether you write fiction, investigative pieces, newsletters, scripts, or anything else that requires sitting alone with your own thoughts long enough to shape them into something coherent.
Available wherever you buy books.
Meet here again next week?
Can’t wait.
Until then, be well.
Love,
Your Bullshit Hunting Crew