Weekly Digest 046 - Fathers' Day Edition

The Weekly Digest is a weekly (no shit?) update that captures highlights from the week that was. At the end of each week, I share a collection of thoughts, recommendations, and links. Like everything else I write, it's awesome, but it may be too long for email so make sure you click through.

Substack Summer Update

Substack Summer is back for a second year, and as a special bonus this year I will be mixing in reviews of stories from Bad Clown Books’ short story collection Masculine. My goal is to add a review of each short story in the collection to the Weekly Digest for the rest of the Summer. The first one is down below!

If you are an author with completed work you’d like reviewed, you can find out how I manage that via the Review Requests page. If you’ve already sent me an ARC of your work (or if I bought it myself), you are already on “the List.”

On Fatherhood

If you’ve hung around the Vinny Reads newsletter for some time, you’ve probably noticed that “fathers & sons” is a recurring theme in what I write, both fiction and non. This Sunday is Fathers’ Day, which means I’ve been fielding questions all week about what my plans are, or what I want for, or to do on “my day.”

The answer to that question is invariably some variation on “less responsibility.”

While responsibility may be intangible; it comes with plenty of tangible baggage. Any responsibility I opt to shirk will fall on Mrs. Reads. I don’t know about you, but knowing my partner is struggling just offstage with all the work I’ve dumped on her makes it hard to enjoy my moment at centerstage. There has never been more to do, or more desire to shrug off that work. Of course, shrugging would take a real Randian sociopath.

Anyway, I’m content with whatever the day brings. I’m not going to spend it golfing1 or anything. I’ll nap if Kiddo wants to nap and generally go about the day with him as I would any Sunday but with the knowledge that I have permission to pull the ripcord early if he starts going nuclear on me.

That and some Miller High Lifes are all I need.

For some additional perspectives on Fatherhood, I enjoyed this article from Huckberry immensely:

I also had a blast listening to Andrew Boryga, Alex Muka, and Amran Gowani talking about the challenges of pursuing creative passions while raising young kids.

Happy Dad’s Day to all you gents out there doing the work to break the cycle, leading by example, redefining masculinity, and generally being good dudes raising good dudes and dudettes.

Bonus Review: “The Stainless Steel Hubcap Principle” by The Junk Man's Son (J.M. Son) from Masculine (Bad Clown Books, 2026).

• I wish I could say that picking Junk Man’s Son’s story for the Fathers’ Day edition was intentional, but really, it’s just the first story in the collection.

• The story is brief, the junk man and his son searching for scrap metal, but it is dense like the boy’s imagination of a sugar cube of neutron stars. J.M. Son does a fantastic job of creating a claustrophobic environment throughout that you can feel slowly squeezing the youth and innocence out of the boy.

• Fathers take care of sons then sons take care of fathers, and it’s a helluva thing when that switchover comes too soon. I dug this story for the brief slice of life it is; J.M. says so much about the lives of these two characters using so little language. It’s an impressive short.

Hell’s Half Acre by will christopher baer (Phineas Poe trilogy, #3 - Finished)

• There is a sequence about three-quarters of the way through this book that twisted my brain in pretzels. Poe is an unreliable narrator at his best but caught in a convoluted plot where every character is literally and figuratively playing multiple roles, and the lines between reality and script are blurred, and copious amounts of substances and head trauma have occurred… Baer does an incredible job of portraying Poe’s disorientation and the slipping in and out of reality.

• I loved this book. I love how Poe comes through his dark night of the soul and emerges, finally, as a true “good guy” (albeit still flawed). I’m torn on the ending, though, which I will not spoil. I may do a full review so that I can spoil the book and talk more in depth, but you should definitely check out Hell’s Half Acre if you’ve read Kiss Me, Judas.

Consider This by Chuck Palahniuk (Finished)

• Finished this over the weekend and came away impressed. Some craft books are more self-help than actual craft. Palahniuk designs this almost like a series of lectures or a syllabus for a writing workshop. The repeated mantra of “If you were my student…” helps guide you toward potential exercises, restrictions, or paths to take with your work.

• This might be my favorite craft book so far.

• My Heart Is a Chainsaw by Stephen Graham Jones

• The Black Dahlia, Blood’s a Rover, American Tabloid, and The Cold Six Thousand by James Ellroy

  • Went a little crazy with my Thriftbooks credits

• The Science of Storytelling by Will Storr

• The Good Lord Bird by James McBride

• Nicked by M.T. Anderson

• How to Tell a Story by Meg Bowles, Catherine Burns, Jenifer Hixson, Sarah Austin Jenness and Kate Tellers

I kept the majority of my screen time to reading, Substack Lives, and (of course) doomscrolling. I’m trying to be more judicious with my Internet tabs; resigning myself to the fact that I can’t read everything from every one of my subscriptions. The little Co-Pilot widget is actually pretty good for speeding up my reading of listicle-type articles, e.g. “13 foods to lower your blood pressure.” Gimme the list first so I can see if I’m already eating them, ya know? I’ve been leveraging AI summaries for just about every article with a number in the headline.

I also listened to more podcasts this week than I usually do, including John Julius Reel’s Book Rants on YouTube, specifically this one on Shelby Foote.

And this author interview with Uncle Craig Clevenger:

🚨FEVERCHAIN is coming to paperback! This is not a drill!

Check the link for details or watch the Live announcement which includes a cover reveal! When pre-orders become available, I will share a link to that as well. And yes, I’ve already reserved a space in Substack Summer for this one.

FiC Goes to Readercon!

A cohort of Substackers will descend upon the greater Boston area in early July for Readercon. They will have a table/booth set up and have graciously offered to present free promo materials for Substackers. Tiny Worlds and Drek Death and Doom will also be there, hawking their wares. Props to Inzani D'Arpeggio for organizing all this, and if you can spare a few bucks to help her stay in the hotel instead of braving Boston area traffic2, please do so.

On Timing

I picked up A Long Game: Notes on Writing Fiction by Elizabeth McCracken, as both my audiobook and craft book follow-up to Consider This, so I’ve been wallowing in the morass of writing advice. I also listened to Muka talk about how he wakes at 3-4am to write, and frankly I didn’t know those numbers came in anything but “pm” variety.

The upside of all the craft reading is it is making me a better reader, hopefully internalizing enough of it to be put to use at that unscheduled later date when I will write. When I won’t be so twee about it. When, as Haly, the Moonlight Bard ✒️ put it, I’ll “just put on a timer for 30 minutes and fucking write!” Really that’s the only craft advice there is: make time for writing. Not “find time,” Vinny, but make it.

Instead, I’ve given myself a Herculean amount of reading to do over the next 3 months, because much like cleaning the dishwasher filter or detailing my car, just about anything seems less onerous that overcoming the blank page.

This is already one of the longer Digests, so I probably shouldn’t belabor this conclusion. I don’t usually say “thank you for reading,” because it feels hokey and false, but I am truly grateful when people read and react to what I’m putting out there. Work is on-going to refocus both the newsletter and the Weekly Digests more around literature and less of Vinny’s Weekly Catalog of Complaints. I’ve been losing subscribers lately and while the actual count doesn’t bother me, the sense that I may have failed to live up to the intended purpose of the newsletter does.

Substack Summer couldn’t have come at a better time and brought with it storms that are keeping me (mostly) indoors. It’s given me a chance to recalibrate how all this falls in the larger schema of my life and served as a kick in the ass to not phone it in.

So, thanks to those of you who are sticking with me, thanks to those of you who are new, and to those of you who haven’t subscribed yet: fuck you, I hope you step on a LEGO.

LEGO Prevention Button

🍻+🤙,

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