June Laughs and Recs

Hello and welcome to my monthly roundup post for June!

I spent a good chunk of the month traveling and am now back home and entering the try-to-do-as-much-writing-as-I-can-before-I-need-to-start-prepping-for-my-fall-teaching-semester portion of the summer. But also, I am trying to slow down and enjoy summer. I realize these may be opposing goals, but fingers crossed!

-JV

• TV: The second season of Four Seasons on Netflix made me laugh a lot (especially the Christmas witch episode, which brought me to a rare state of laughing so hard I teared up a bit). I am probably squarely in their target audience as a married person of a certain age, but I liked the relatable characters, relationships, and humor on the show.

• Cartoon: This word game cartoon by Ali Solomon.

• Newsletter post: This piece from Asher Perlman about AI art. All cartoons probably need some sort of ghost, right? On a semi-related note, I appreciated the discussion about AI art with Pixar’s Chief Creative Officer on Mike Birbiglia’s podcast. I think that a lot of the stuff touched on in these things is true of the problems with AI writing, too.

• Snack nuts: Mauna Loa honey-roasted macadamia nuts. I used to have trouble finding these outside of Hawaii, but I’ve recently seen them at Target and World Market. They are one of my favorite snack nuts, so I have been grabbing some when I see them.

• Greek salad. I was in Greece this month, which reminded me of how much I like the traditional Greek salad. Lettuce is maybe my least favorite part of salads, so I am all about non-lettuce salads. I often make a basic version similar to this with whatever I have on hand, but I also like this spin on it.

• Writing wins post: I really like the idea of creating a writing wins list that Heather Eng discussed in this guest post on Andrea Bartz’s Substack. I already started my list in my phone’s notes app.

• Pitching tip: I also found this post about pitching the editor and not the publication helpful. Sometimes it’s not clear which editor at a publication would be the best fit for a pitch, so this kind of research makes sense.

• Pitch calls:

  • AARP is looking for travel pieces

  • You’ve got one more day to get your humor piece submitted to this pitch call for Chortle.

That’s it for this month!

Thanks for reading Humor Me, a newsletter featuring funny stuff and writing tips. In case you’re new here, I’m a humor writer and freelancer whose work has appeared in New Yorker Shouts, McSweeney’s, Real Simple, and more. Find out more about me at julievick.com.

Any typos in this newsletter are a result of the text being written by a human and not AI.

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