Breathwork for Church
OK, ‘breathwork’ is this thing about controlled breathing, right?
Taking deeper / longer / more measured breaths in specific ways is supposed to have all these real, actual health benefits: physical and mental and emotional. Like, it can supposedly calm you, improve your sleep, improve focus, juice your attention span, etc., all depending on how you’re breathing. Maybe it’s a bit woo-woo, sure. But on the other hand: we all understand that taking a deep breath is calming. It seems plausible.
I know the few times I tried an ‘activating’ breathwork thing, it felt AMAZING. As good as a strong cup of coffee.
SO what I’ve always wondered, and think about once per week: does anybody write songs that build in breathwork? Singing is by its nature a kind of structured breathing, but in a loose way. When you sing, you generally decide when to take new breaths in, but the song itself determines when you breathe out. And it seems like with a little more planning, you could map this into a real breathwork exercise. Instead of just ‘in’ and ‘out’ and ‘hold’ in breathwork, we could have words and melody.
And furthermore: I go to church on Sundays, and every week we sing songs together that are meant (in part) to affect our mental and emotional state. That’s not the POINT of worship music per se, but it’s part of it, right? We sing Amazing Grace to remind ourselves that we once were lost but now are found. We sing It Is Well With My Soul to practice equanimity both when peace like a river attendeth my way AND when sorrows like sea billows roll.
SO my question is: who is writing new-age-breathworky songs for Christian worship, and where can I try them out?
So I started an OnlyFangs
I have a real job, but my side projects have occasionally gotten out of hand. One of those is Dracula Daily, the email newsletter where I email you the entire book Dracula, in ‘real time’, on the days when the events happen to the characters. The whole book runs over about six months. And then I do it again the next year.
My side project life now has a rhythm, and one of the big sections in that rhythm is Dracula Season. In 2026 this will be our fifth time through, and we’re about to embark on Dracula Season.
A crazy thing about this is: most people don’t unsubscribe after reading it! There are still hundreds of thousands of people sign up, and this year more people than ever read Dracula together. This kind of blows my mind!
The newsletter runs on Substack. Even if your newsletter is free, the platform really wants you to consider a paid subscription tier, and whether you like it or not they offer your readers a way to ‘pledge’ a subscription. So last year I caved to that pressure, and launched the official supporter tier.
I called it Dracula Weekly, because for those supporters only I write a weekly recap post. I cover what happened in the reading (in case you missed one or feel behind), and point to some of the good memes/jokes/artwork/etc that people have created, and then some general notes and pointers to other things I think are neat. That’s not much of an ‘exclusive’ reward here. Also I might mail you some merch.
I called it Dracula Weekly officially, but secretly I call it my OnlyFangs.
Sending the same emails out year after year to hundreds of thousands of people is exciting - but having these actual supporters is surprisingly motivating! It’s not the money, but the signal that people actually care. Because I get it: you sign up for something, you may or may not read it, and you might just never get around to unsubscribing. Maybe you delete it when it comes in, maybe you just throw it in your junk or to-read-later pile. I also don’t allow comments on Dracula (because I don’t know how I would community-manage this many people), and so it’s hard to know if people are engaged… or just haven’t gotten around to unsubscribing.
So knowing that there are real supporters out there who have made this choice, that actually want Dracula Daily to keep going, makes all the difference. Like I said, surprisingly motivating!
(Yes, there ARE also tens of thousands of new subscribers each year. I’m excited about them too!)
Anyway, this year as a thank-you I’ve made some Dracula Daily-themed band-aids, which I will send out to supporters. I think this is a good joke! We’ll see.
Anyways: Dracula Season starts on May 3! You can sign up to read along with us - it’s free! Or of course, you can also subscribe to my OnlyFangs.
Ride the Retro Metro
Today I’m excited to share a new site I made with Jessica Goldstein, author of forthcoming novel Retro.
Retro is a delightful read: an out-of-work actress joins up to be a Time Travel Agent for Retro, the world’s only time travel agency. I got to read an early copy of this and thought it was so much fun.
I worked with Jessica to build a site for Retro the company, following the description in the text (and adding some details here and there). My favorite bit: you can get your Pastport, the official ID that lets you ride the Retro Metro.
Sadly we couldn’t play it completely straight; the publishers and agents all want to eventually, you know, link to the book so you can buy it. But this was very fun, and I think Jess is going to sell a million copies of this thing.
Reading Honeywood
One of my favorite books I’ve read in the last few years is The Honeywood File, by H.B. Cresswell. It’s funny, it’s true-to-life, and it’s cathartic.
[ Spoiler alert: I’m going to launch it as a newsletter a la Dracula Daily - I’ll email you the parts of Honeywood ‘as they happen’ to the characters. You can Join Honeywood Daily here to read it! ]
Honeywood is a series of found letters and telegrams between an architect, his client, and the characters involved in designing and building a house. Things do not go according to plan.
Reader, hear me out: this book is advertised as ‘comedic.’ But is this book funny? I wasn’t sure at first. It’s a bit painful at the beginning! It’s the story of a multi-polar working relationship; a story about people trying to do their jobs, despite everyone around them. It’s so true to life.
But midway through the book I had been convinced: this is laugh-out-loud, guffaw-worthy funny. A masterpiece of subtle cringe. A work of art.
I think the most sympathetic character is the architect. The book captures exactly what it’s like to work with a client, and have contractors or developers take your work and execute it. There are miscommunications, shifting alliances, optimism and pessimism, distrust and hope. The things that go wrong are not outlandish. Sometimes they’re barely even comedic. They’re just things that happen: the client visits the building site, sees the brickwork going up and says ‘I wanted reddish pink bricks not pinkish red bricks, you must fix this immediately.’ Reading the first pages of this book FELT LIKE WORK. It felt like reading my own email inbox!
But after the initial shock I started to enjoy it… in the precisely the same way I enjoy watching videos of train crashes. This is going so wrong! It’s so bad! And every step of this is predictable!
One of my favorite parts is that there’s another character, actually - the ‘editor’ who ‘found’ the Honeywood File and is presenting it to us, with his commentary. In between all of these painfully, uncannily realistic letters, the editor is writing commentary on how each party handles the situation. “This letter should have been more straightforward” or “We can see now how the architect is worried this will compromise his future work” and sometimes he’s just cheerleading a well-written rebuff: “Bravo! A bag of nuts to Sir Leslie Brash.”
I’ve been a working professional in the design field for 20+ years, and I’ve had this sense that miscommunication and passive-aggressiveness and cover-your-ass wishy-washiness is somehow a product of EMAIL culture. Right? Email’s the problem. If we didn’t have email, we could simply meet and solve problems together, or send a single letter that meant-what-it-said-and-said-what-it-meant and at LEAST we wouldn’t screw up our projects so badly. (Here I mean ‘we’ as in ‘all of western civilization.’)
But this piece of fiction is from 1929, and it’s all letters and telegrams, not an email in sight! And everything you hate about your email job, each weaselly bit of corporate speak, ‘per my last email’ and ‘the contract states’ and ‘this is out of scope’ just… already exists. We must have been doing it this way all along! Maybe the pyramids didn’t have this kind of BS when they were built. But I’m starting to think that they did.
And me personally? I’m not exempt! The whole book is like holding up a mirror to my career’s worth of email. I’ve written every single one of these letters.
- I’ve been the designer, of course, trying convince a client to not make a disastrous late-breaking change (while still knowing I also need to keep that client happy enough to pay their invoice). I’ve given half-baked instructions to a developer, causing them heartache.
- I’ve been the client, standing on the sidewalk outside the job site of my own house and asking: is that right? Are you sure? And wondering if (and how) I’m getting screwed by the trades.
- And I’ve been the tradesperson executing a project and dealing with contradictory instructions from all parties, while still trying to do a job I’m proud of, to good standards, while working within a budget and timeline that I didn’t set.
SO: ultimately the journey of Honeywood is both entertaining and cathartic - the things that can be so challenging about working with others are right here in this book, and we can see how these characters navigate it. It’s beloved by designers and creatives, and I think anybody with an email job that does ‘knowledge work’ will love it too.
I’ve been thinking about this book for a few years now, and I think it’s perfect for something to read all together: all the communications have a date, and we can follow it in real time, just like we do with Dracula in Dracula Daily. Plus it’s a great, underrated and overlooked book.
We can read it together on Substack in the same way: in real time, as it happens to the characters. We’ll start on April 1 (no joke).
I’m so excited to share it. Let’s read Honeywood together!
If you think this sounds interesting, sign up for the email list - we start on April 1 (really).
Tiny Truck Tracker
Look, ALL I want for christmas is a tiny electric pickup truck. Not a giant Ford F-747; a TINY truck that runs on electrons. There are lots of startups promising to launch this category. But launching a new car startup is practically impossible; will any of these companies actually succeed?
So last year I started Tiny Truck Tracker, which keeps tabs on which (if any) of these startups will get across the finish line. I’ve put down deposits on more than one of these little guys!
Tiny Truck Tracker gives an overview of the contenders in this space, a kind of scorecard for all the tiny truck stats, some news and updates when available, and an overall ‘how likely I think this is to actually happen.’
(Yes, one of these, the Pickman, isn’t even really an electric pickup - it’s a ‘low speed vehicle’, effectively a chinese-made golf cart dressed up like a pickup for Halloween.)
The race graphic at the top features a few of the dead startups (RIP CANOO). I think it’s worth remembering that most of these attempts have already failed! I’m not cheerleading for any startup’s demise - really the opposite - but it’s exciting to remember what a difficult category this is to enter.
