Friday Favorites 30

Fri, 11 Sep 2026 00:00:00 +0000

Happy Friday,

Cue the music, brew that pot. The humidity dropped in Minnesota, so I ordered a new winter coat and can’t wait for colder weather.

Here are 10 interesting things worth sharing this week:

“I’m a machine for turning Talking Heads bootlegs and hammocks into pungent tech criticism.” Love this Longreads Questionnaire with Cory Doctorow, the tech blogger and fiction writer who I didn’t know had a thing for David Byrne, too!
I loved learning about the book clusters R.F. Kuang draws on for each of her books — Victorian lit for “Babel” with its maximal prose, Dante/Milton/Ovid for “Katabasis.”
I wrote about Cory Doctorow’s and R.F. Kuang’s advice to not pay too much attention to how you feel about your writing when you’re writing. First it has to exist, then you can make it good.
Love these illustrations Gustave Doré made for Dante’s Divine Comedy. I’ve taken a break from reading Inferno, but they complement the mood!
Love this video about how Terry Gross reads a book.
“Reading is prismatic, and a great writer shows us how to read far beyond their own works.” Enjoying this series from The Guardian asking writers about influential books they’ve read, especially this one with Madeline Thien about running up and down mountains listening to Middlemarch, the plurality of reading, and The Iliad.
“It’s clear the problem isn’t the writing, but the starting. In those cases, it’s helpful to think about why starting is difficult and then apply a solution.” Writing is easy once I’m actually writing, but the procrastination and hand-wringing before starting is my biggest obstacle. So I like this idea of using writing catalysts to get in the writing flow with less activation energy.
Taking notes on how to take good travel notes.
I’m still reading out of season with Dan Simmons’ “The Terror,” but pretty soon that will invert to reading thick, hot summer books.
The psychology behind why you rewatch the same movies (the same probably also applies to books).

See you on down the dusty trail,

Separate your writing from how you feel about your writing

Thu, 10 Sep 2026 00:00:00 +0000

I’ve written about how Cory Doctorow consciously separates how he feels about his writing from the writing itself:

“My writing epiphany was there was no relation to the way I felt about the words I was writing and their objective quality. … You can’t tell what’s good and what’s bad while you’re writing it. … Once you start thinking about what you’re writing, you lose the ability to stop writing it.”

Rfkuang on Isak's Blog

Friday Favorites 30

Separate your writing from how you feel about your writing