Jack Cheng's Blog, page 3

#430: How Bridges are Built

I slept till 10am yesterday, for the first time in weeks. Rufus’s coos and smiles (which just started this month) are serious confidence boosters, and help us get through the fussier hours. I gave my editor and agent an update on the new manuscript (125 pages and counting of what’s effectively one long brainstorming session), and the week before I read at Brain Candy, a monthly event at Green Brain Comics that brings together a musician, poet, prose writer, and visual artist. Super relaxed, and ...

#429: Some Postpartum Favorites (Baby Not Required)

I didn’t learn it this way, and friends I’ve talked to say they didn’t either. When as schoolkids we were taught the three R’s of Reduce/Reuse/Recycle, we were not taught that they’re an order of operations. A flow chart. You first look to reduce, to not need the thing at all. Only when forgoing is out of the question do you look to borrow, barter, repurpose, or buy secondhand. And only once that’s exhausted do you pick up something new-but-recyclable.

Very much in this spirit is Sarah Lazarovic’...

#428: Fluxx

A new friend says the first months being a new parent are like that episode of Battlestar Galactica where the Cylons attack every 33 minutes. I liken it also to the card game Fluxx, where the rules shift with every hand. Compared to all the projects and hobbies I’ve written about here, I’ve never had to learn anything that’s changed so quickly as I was learning it. What worked today to calm him, burp him, get him to sleep and shit and smile will suddenly stop working two days from now. Every pro...

#427: Best Daze

Here’s one thing about being a new father for which I was not prepared: the inundation of parenting advice we’d be getting from family, friends, neighbors, nurses, lactation consultants, doulas, pediatricians – advice both solicited and not, often conflicting, sometimes with a premonition of a TikTok trend.

The best so far has tended toward the general: Enjoy this time, and trust your instincts. But even with the latter, it’s often hard to tell the difference between instinct and incepted thought...

#426: The Paradox of Craft

This has come up multiple times in conversation lately: the Paradox of Craft. You learn, in part, to become a better writer by learning to become a more critical reader. You pick up patterns of plot and theme, story and character. You take a scene apart to figure out how it works. You build the muscle that helps you be more critical of your own writing.

The upshot is obvious, but there’s an unwanted side effect: It becomes harder to quiet that critic brain earlier on, when you need it to be quiet...

#425: Is Today the Day?

R.’s friends, whose due date was a day after ours, had their baby three weeks early. Another friend, B., with a similar due date, announced his son’s birth literally a few hours ago. A question Julia and I have started asking every morning is: Is today the day?

So far it hasn’t been! So we carry on with our plans, however tenuous. I was warned about the post-residency slump but have seemingly scheduled my way past it; talked to my agent and editor this week, separately, and pitched a bunch of boo...

#424: Concentrated Intensity

I’m typing this in the air back home from Los Angeles, where I was teaching at Antioch MFA’s summer residency. In the closing circle yesterday someone’s mention of learning from the program’s “hundred teachers” (i.e. both faculty and students) rang bright and true. In the seminar and workshops I led we reflected not just on our work but our ingrained beliefs about “good” writing; I sat in on as many talks and readings and graduating student presentations as my introvert battery would allow; had ...

#423: Die Hard, Calmwashing, and Cosplaying the Future

I finished Deb Chachra’s eye-opening book, How Infrastructure Works, and it coincided neatly with our current streak of evening Bruce Willis movies. If infrastructural systems are Odes to Boring, where “nothing happens, and nothing continues to happen, as a result of sufficient attention, specialized care, and unceasing oversight,” then the Die Hard films are all about things happening. The bad guys are constantly out to thwart, for financial gain, the infrastructural systems of a particular set...

#422: Cardboard Software

A huge thank you for all the support so far for Bebop. This week I’ve been happily answering feedback emails and posts on Threads and Mastodon, and David Pierce interviewed me for the The Verge’s Installer newsletter (*waves to new readers*). Click through to see my phone’s Home and Lock screens, plus a few media recommendations.

My friends over at Good Enough, makers of new-kid-on-the-blogging-platform-block Pika, also gave the app a nice shout-out on their studio newsletter – thanks guys!

While ...

#421: New iOS App, A Book Award, and Summer Teaching Plans

Three short but exciting bits of news this week. The first is that I built an iOS app! It’s called Bebop and lets you quickly capture notes as text files, saved and synced to iCloud or Dropbox. It’s meant as a companion to desktop apps like Obsidian and NVAlt, a way to get thoughts and ideas into existing .txt or .md archives for later review. I also wrote about the design/development process, in case you’re curious.

Second: The Many Masks of Andy Zhou won a 2024 Young People’s Literature Award f...