Happy Monday! I’m trying a new release day after releasing the last couple of newsletters on a Friday. Will it make a difference? Hopefully it will make a difference to your week, at least.

See the end of the newsletter for more links of note. And today’s exhaustingly minor publishing news about my upcoming graphic novel: We’ve seen colored pages! They look great! Max Bare is, as ever, a wizard. And like all good wizards, he has a beard.

Daddy, would you like some sausage?

I want to talk about sausage. Specifically, how the sausage is made. That’s right, I’m talking process. (Apologies for the labored metaphor. It’s way easier to find sausage GIFs than process GIFs.)

I love process. I love seeing someone go through a process. I even love process movies, where you watch a very talented person or group of people go through their process, only to have their process fail them in the final act and have to come up with a whole new process. Heist movies are great process movies, of course (shout-out to Sneakers), but even Ferris Bueller is a process movie. His whole schtick works, until it doesn't.

More than anything, though, I love things that show people going through the creative process, especially writing. And if you’re reading this newsletter, you’re either related to me, owe me a favor or are interested in writing, so I thought I’d share a couple of great examples I’ve enjoyed recently of things that lay the creative process bare.

First, a podcast. I’m a big Mike Birbiglia fan (and I’m seeing him open for John Mulaney next month, woo!), and his recent special The Good Life is great. And after listening to him as a guest on three different podcasts recently, I thought I’d check out his own podcast, Working It Out. Specifically, an episode I heard him shout out in the interviews as one of his favorites.

Working It Out is a process podcast, and usually involves Mike talking to stand-ups who are at the top of their games, working through specific jokes and material. But recently Mike hosted Ira Glass of This American Life, who is many things but is not a stand-up at the top of his game. Ira played some old stand-up he’d attempted, and then Mike walked him through how, exactly, he could turn it into an act that’s worth performing.

As a process nut, it’s incredible. Even if you’re not interested in doing stand-up, it’s worth it to hear how Mike takes a core idea - in this case, an anecdote that happened to Ira Glass - and pulls out the parts that can be expanded on, or given a twist, or spin off into their own side tangents. By the end of it, I was convinced I could write my own stand-up special, if I were willing to talk that much about my own life. (I’m not. That’s why I write sci-fi/fantasy. Allegory, baby!)

Next, I has a hankering to revisit my favorite book of all time on writing. No, not Stephen King’s On Writing. I love On Writing, but mostly for the biographical details. Stephen King’s writing advice all basically boils down to “be Stephen King,” and, for better or worse, I am not.

No, this is a far more obscure book called The Writer’s Tale: The Final Chapter. The Writer’s Tale is a truly weird book. It’s essentially a 700-page email correspondence between Russell T. Davies, then (and now once again) the showrunner of Doctor Who, and Benjamin Cook, a reporter for Doctor Who Magazine. Whether you’ll be able to get through it all largely depends on your tolerance for Doctor Who and self-pitying British men. But if you can make it through, it’s a treasure trove.

The Writer’s Tale is the only book I’ve ever read that shows what’s it like to actually write, and actually have ideas for writing. You get to watch RTD in the moment come up with ideas, tease them out, toss them out, file them away, pull them back out again later, and - above all - revise, revise, revise. I’d never understood how to revise my writing before I first read this book more than 15 years ago, and then it unlocked something in me. It truly, truly changed my writing for the better, and I owe it a whole heck of a lot.

If you’re a process junkie (or, if you will, a Sausage King), I can’t recommend it enough.

Links to Cool Things

• A couple of my comics industry friends have started their own Beehiiv newsletters recently, and you should check them out. Ethan Sacks, writer of Star Wars and - with his daughter Naomi - A Haunted Girl, wins the award for best newsletter title (Sacks Appeal). And Jim McCann (Return of the Dapper Men) is a delight, and his newsletter A Gay Old Time is certain to be a delight as well.

• If you were ever curious to hear what it was like working at Wizard Magazine back in the day from the perspective of the undisputed Greatest Hugger in Comics, I can’t recommend my buddy Mel Caylo’s episode of Wizards: The Podcast Guide to Comics enough. It’s really fun that there’s a podcast that’s dedicated to my first job and interviews with all my friends from my first job. Everyone should have one of these.

• In this post-peak TV age, sometimes it’s hard to find something to watch. Sometimes you want something that’s not too fluffy but not too dark, funny but substantial, gorgeously rendered and ably acted. That’s hard! I was pleased to find Murderbot on Apple TV+ fit the bill, and even more pleased it got renewed for a second season. And hey - that’s the first thing I’ve plugged in a newsletter that doesn’t have any of my friends involved in it.

That’s it for now. Thanks for reading, and as always please subscribe and help spread the word!