I get to do the easy part: giving people advice on how to be more creative.

“Just do it this way,” I’ll tell them. “Think of it like a metaphor. Look at it through this lens.”

🎣

“Give a person a fish, and they’ll eat for a day. Teach a person to fish, and they’ll eat for a lifetime.”

What’s missing from this pithy two-sentence parable is this:

🐟 Occasionally the fish are elusive, or worse, gone (someone got there before you). You spend all your time and energy out on the water but get nothing in return except frustration.

🐠 Sometimes you are too tired or depressed to fish. You’re not in the right headspace. Even the thought of lifting the rod is too much to bear. You just can’t bring yourself to get out there.

🐡 At other times, you are afraid to fish. You’ve completely lost your nerve. The water looks dangerous and foreboding. Wouldn’t it be safer to go hungry today than to tempt fate?

🍣 And every once in a while, you really get into it. You create elaborate plans and traps and nets. You game the system. You catch so many fish, you become overwhelmed. And most of them end up rotting on the deck…

Parables are neat and clean, but living is messy and human.

or how to read George R. R. Martin’s staggering, cumbersome epic without getting traumatized by the torture, rape, incest, and murder, thwarted by the medieval language, lost in his vast, invented world of strangely named cities and surrounding geography, muddled by the epic history and mythology, confused by the excessive cast of characters, or bored by the details of custom and culture.

CAUTION: There are some minor spoilers below, but they are worth it if I can get you to visit these books. Besides, you’ll forget about them as soon as you get into it.

HOW TO READ GAME OF…

I had an idea and now it is gone.

Fuck it.

If I spent every moment lamenting lost thoughts I’d be a professional mourner, a dream widower.

If you love something, let it go. Set it free. Let it die. Or whatever.

Honestly, I don’t run an idea zoo here. I can’t keep everything locked up in my head.

If it’s going to go it’s going to go. Good riddance. There’s a lot more where that came from.

Right? Right? [Nervous laughter]

Every morning there is a magical moment between when I hit snooze and when I fall back to…

I love world-building and science fiction. I get excited by the different sets of rules, as arbitrary or as meticulous as the author allows. For me, the more consistent the better, with a ‘lived in’ feel. I like being dropped deep into a detailed world without exposition, then figuring my way into or out of it.

Some examples of worldbuilding/sci-fi I enjoy getting lost in:

• 🎬 Dune (1965–1985)
• 🎬 2001: A Space Odyssey (1968)
• 🎬 Alien (1979)
• 🎬 Blade Runner (1982–2017)
• 📓 Hyperion Cantos (1989–1997)
• 📓 Prophet (2012–2017)
• 📓 Southern Reach Trilogy (2014)

What are some of your favourite worlds…

Let’s take a break from all the catastrophizing, doom-scrolling, and troll-fretting to celebrate some kid jokes!

I know it’s a little bit early, but this one came to me as I was doodling a little ghost and realized it was shaped like a bandage. And one thing my momma taught me was to never shy away from a good play on words (or a bad one for that matter):

1. What do you call a Band-aide® on Hallowe’en?

While I wrote that one myself (#humblebrag), here are a few more recent ghost riddles from Good [Haunted] Housekeeping (answers below):

2…