October Events and Such

• Friday, October 3, Sturtevants, Ketchum, Idaho, 5 p.m.

• Saturday, October 4, Legends Never Die ultramarathon, Ketchum, Idaho

• Monday, October 6, Fleet Feet Meridian, Boise, ID, 6 p.m.

• Tuesday, October 7, Oldspeak, Boise, ID, 7 p.m.

• Sunday, October 19, Dudley’s, Bend, OR, Time TBD

• Sunday, October 26, CNF Pod Live at Gratitude Brewing, featuring Jason Brown, author of Character Witness, 1 p.m.

The Riff

Remember when things were inconvenient? Remember the days when you bookmarked a website and checked it every day for updates?

Then it all went to shit.

No need to walk down that trail anymore.

What I have found tremendously fun is hanging out on my own website and tending to it like a garden. Going into my anti-social media feed and posting a thing. Posting fresh pics, not on Instagram, but in a blog post. Physically writing out a blog post. Then I might click on one of the links in my newsstand widget along the right rail and see what certain folks are up to.

It feels like 2006.

Then we got lazy.

So what I’d love to see is people guest blogging on each other’s websites again, but what I really want to see more of is IRL. As Seth Werkheiser says (and I’m paraphrasing), feed your website first, then social media, if you must. Social media, even newsletters, are, as Seth says, “the delivery truck.”

Listen: Social media is getting taken over by AI bots and we can’t even trust what’s real any longer. What we can trust is gathering in community, doing the inconvenient thing of leaving our homes, to pluck at the strings of our social anxiety, and attend events (unless we hate the venue operator) and buy the books (unless we hate the author), etc.

Maybe you’ll join me for CNF Pod Live #4 on Sunday, October 26, 1 p.m. at Gratitude Brewing.

This newsletter starts here and goes up to 11!

Issue 5 of Pitch Club with Justin Heckert

Wow. What a banger! Great Pitch Club that took some guts on Justin’s part, sharing a pitch that didn’t land.

My good pal Leah Sottile said of Pitch Club, “Honestly, Brendan O’Meara is providing a full master class on being a successful freelancer for free, and we should all be paying him for it. Pitch Club is brilliant.”

The Books

1. Enshittification: Why Everything Suddenly Got Worse and What to Do About It by Cory Doctorow. All social media slouches toward the same ends. There’s no greater voice in figuring out how to rage against the algorithm than Doctorow.

2. We Survived the Night by Julian Brave Noisecat

3. The Waterbearers: A Memoir of Mothers and Daughters by Sasha Bonet. this book is kinda blowing my fucking mind.

4. Character Witness: A Memoir by Jason Brown

The Other Stuff

5. Did the Back of the Book podcast.

6. Did my own podcast.

7. Imagine a world.

8. How to read better, and also libraries as serendipity vendors. I love that. (h/t to Austin Kleon’s newsletter for this rec.)

9. A pretty cool interview with Jeff Tweedy about songwriting, work ethic, creativity. I guess he has a new, triple album out? Dang.

10. Well, shoot, Zadie Smith had something to say about essays.

11. Went through some old bookmarks and found a cool story to Charles Bukowski’s rules for writing.

Coda

I hope you dug this issue of RAtA. Kept it tight this month. To support what it is I do, you can buy copies of The Front Runner, subscribe to Pitch Club, and/or leave kind reviews for the podcast on Apple Podcast and/or leave kind reviews for The Front Runner on Amazon and Goodreads. My understanding is the book is well received, and well reviewed, though I still refuse to look. Can always use more.

If you have a few bucks burning a hole in your pocket, you may check out Patreon.com/cnfpod.

Otherwise, rage on ragin’ on,

b.r.o.