Hack the Planet? Or Take Another Bath?

Hello! I’m a writer, editor, and book coach with a 15+ year career that spans Hollywood, book publishing, and other creatives industries. I work with novelists, screenwriters, and topic experts who want to share their ideas through storytelling. To learn more about my services, check out my website or connect with me on LinkedIn.

This newsletter is where I share my Brain Stuff on writing and culture. Sometimes my personal creative work finds its way here too. I hope you dig it.

Happy Thanksgiving my lovelies!

It’s gotten extremely fucking cold in Berlin, and we had our first snow this past week. On top of it, the flu seems to be ripping through both sides of the Atlantic, and the effect of it all is that I’m more reluctant than ever to leave my house. Though I’m forcing myself to, because I don’t want to go insane.

I completely crapped out on Thanksgiving this year - my usual expat crew isn’t really around, and it’s actually been a bit of a relief to keep my normal schedule and pretend there’s no holiday. Which is easy, because in Germany, there isn’t! I’m busier than expected leading into mid-December, both with paying work and professional development stuff, and as I mentioned in my last email, I’m starting a very exciting writing group next year! I can’t finalize pricing until I confirm some tax compliance stuff with my German accountant, and he’s on vacation. But the landing page is mostly built, so we’ll get there.

Moving along, I’m bringing back monthly roundups, both of the culture I’ve been consuming and other personal odds-and-ends like poems and photos. But they’ll likely be a bit scattershot, because some months I have more to share than others. Case in point, this post is fleshed out with spillover from October.

It can be tricky to do reading lists because I have to read SO much for work that I often don’t read much for pleasure. And I usually can’t write about what I read for work, even if I’d like to, because it comes to me pre-publication. But here are some recents:

White Cat, Black Dog by Kelly Link - A bit of a cheat since I’ve been making my way through this collection for about a year now, but I finally finished it. Kelly Link is one of those writers who sends me into raptures, even though I only read her sporadically. I think she’s a genius (the MacArthur Foundation agrees), she's impossible to describe and exactly my favorite kind of weird, and her writing makes me jealous in a good way, a quality I talked about in my last post. Everyone should be reading Kelly Link, especially if you want to stretch your understanding of what genre is for, or just want to trip out on someone else’s wild imagination. Also, since she writes mostly short stories, you can give her an hour here and there without losing the thread of the thing.

Heretic by Jeanna Kadlec - Jeanna Kadlec runs one of my favorite newsletters and my absolute favorite Discord community, and this is her beautifully written memoir about being raised in, and leaving, the Evangelical Church. There’s a lot of great research in it about the history of Evangelical Christianity in America and the extreme behavioral control the church exerts over its members. But the thing I found most unexpectedly moving is the way Kadlec talks about what you lose - both socially and spiritually - by leaving a fundamentalist upbringing, and how that loss never really goes away, even as you build something else in its place.

What We Can Know by Ian McEwan - This I got to read for work after it came out, and while it took me a bit of time to get into, by the end it knocked me out. It’s one of those books whose second half forces you to reconsider the meaning of what was contained in the first. Hugely ambitious, and successfully so, while refusing to become too self-serious. We love a capital-N-Novelist in top form.

Hackers - One of my best friends here in Berlin is hosting a monthly-ish film club, and in addition to this being a delightful DarkTimes activity, the selections for the first couple of months have been verrry exciting if you’re a certain kind of nerd from the Xennial generation bridge. I hadn’t watched Hackers since high school, when it was required viewing because (trivia alert!) it was shot in my actual high school. The joke about the swimming pool on the roof bled into IRL Stuyvesant lore.

Guys, if you haven’t watched this one since the ‘90s (or ever) I am effing begging you. It is an absolutely perfect object of its time. The outfits! The SFX! The production design! The soundtrack! Matthew Fucking Lillard! Truly genius shit. ‘90s NYC looks incredible. Nothing that happens makes a lick of sense, the dialogue is bonkers, every random actor you saw in that other thing that one time is doing the absolute most, and the kids are just kvelling over their new 28.8bps modem, because it’s 1995. Hack the Planet for realz.

One Battle After Another - Furthering the anarchy theme, I liked this, but I didn’t like it quite as much as everyone else liked it. For me it worked better as a series of sequences, many of which were individually brilliant, than as a whole film. The caveat to all of this is that I’m a PTA fangirl, so I only really measure his films against his other films. For me this one is midrange. Ace performances, though, top to bottom. DiCaprio has really turned into one of our great comic actors and I didn’t see it coming when I was a lovestruck tween, but adult me is very into it.

These were all taken with Ektar 100, because I wanted to see how this film, famous for its saturated colors, performed during a vivid fall weekend. I like it, but the images feel flatter than the Portra ones from Paris, and it definitely doesn’t perform as well in the kind of “dramatic” light I tend to favor - almost everything high contrast came out with the highlights kind of bleached. It definitely (as advertised) works best in very even light, which isn’t what my eye is drawn to. I did get a few shots I like, though.

I told you I might start throwing poems in here and after some debating, I’m doing it because I want to force myself to be less precious. However I’m also taking semi-seriously that this counts as “publication,” so anything I might want to really work with and submit shouldn’t go here. Starting to submit work again is one of my big goals for 2026. In addition to actually making money.

So, a casual poem-thing, which I wrote very quickly off of a workshop prompt.

(Substack’s formatting is abysmal, but ah well.)

Ritual to Crack Ice
     Dip your fingers into the skin of your chest, twine them through the slim fissures in your ribs, and pry the whole thing apart like the shell of a coconut.
     Put a handful of salt in your mouth and spit it over the balcony into the courtyard below.
     Grab a blue pen and draw a circle. Grab a red pen and draw a slash through the circle.
     Tell someone you love them, ideally someone you know but don’t know too well, and insist on it over and over until they believe you. Then believe it yourself. Love comes in many forms, even (especially) in delirium.
     Fill the mouth of your lover with salt and see how long they will hold it there for you.
     Rinse their mouth for them, tenderly.
     Wait for spring.

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