It has been a long time since I sent out an issue of this newsletter. I want to sincerely apologize to you, my subscribers, for this serious lapse in judgment. But it’s not like I don’t have my reasons. Do you even understand the past few months I’ve had?
I had to make a shitload of tiny embroidered things. I did not have time for this, but I did it anyway.
I had to deal with an evil miniature.
I had to compare myself to every single one of my peers on social media. Do you know how many peers I have? It’s a lot! As of this writing I’d say I’m only about one third of the way through.
I had to spend hours of time researching AirBNB laws in Los Angeles because my landlord converted a storage space beneath my bedroom into an (illegal?) studio apartment and is renting it out to random people and it is disrupting me when I am trying to compare myself to my peers.
I had to do a job. It wrote once more for The Mark Twain Prize, this time for recipient Dave Chappelle. I have many thoughts about the experience and those thoughts have been quite time consuming! Maybe I will write about it here one day? Or maybe not!
I had to promote my half hour special premiere, which I think turned out nicely.
I had to write my book, again. You know what they never tell you about writing books? It’s that when you write one book, it actually means you’re going to write eight books. It’s not like you can just finish a draft, run spellcheck once, punch up a few of the lines and then call it a day. They actually make you revise it. They may even tell you to delete 95% of it, twice, and it may send you into such a free fall of despair that you consider a Run Lola Run scenario in which you place a very large bet on the roulette table, in the hopes that you can win enough money to pay back the book advance and just not write a book anymore. But then you talk to someone who is writing an entire book without a previously arranged book deal, and you feel you have encountered some kind of heavenly being, a person who is somehow able to go through this hell without knowing if they will ever get paid for it or even have it see the light of day, and you are reminded of how you began your own career, committing thousands of hours to writing for which you never got paid and had no idea if anyone would ever care that you were doing it. And then you start googling “ways to re-cultivate faith in one’s self” and “how to get back the delusional self-confidence I had in my 20’s” and then you start downloading productivity apps instead of writing your book. Eventually though you figure out how to force yourself to do it and you turn it in. And then you sit quietly waiting to be told you have to write it all over again.
I had to end homelessness. Well, for a few people at least. If you’d also like to end homelessness, my campaign to raise money for just that purpose is ending in three days. Donate here.
And finally, as if I’ve had nothing else going on, I had to come to grips with the existence of a baby Yoda!
I promise, now that all of that is done, I will return to more regular issues of this newsletter. I have so many things to tell you!