Notes on a Saturday Morning

Good morning, friends. 

Since early December, I've been working steadily on The Return of Dr. Necropolis and its sequel Gun Girl Gracie, and now that both are done in draft, I'm at loose ends. I still woke up at 5:30 am this morning out of sheer habit, but with nothing to work on, I've just been sitting here.

It's so weird not to have anything to work on, but I feel like I really NEED to take some time away and attempt to get some perspective on my own work. We'll see how that goes.

In the meantime, here are some thinky-thoughts, just to scratch the itch.

1. Noah Kahan released his new album, The Great Divide, yesterday, and I listened to it twice. I then read a couple of reviews this morning, the first of which was infuriating. The reviewer at the Hollywood Reporter straight-up misunderstood the album, resulting in a track-by-track deconstruction that makes absolutely NO sense.

It's frustrating. How in the world do you become a writer for the freaking Hollywood Reporter without having the simple media literacy required to understand a pop album?

In fairness, I also misunderstood the album on first listen. There's a lot there.

Okay, so the new Noah Kahan album is ANGRY. Damn. Unless I’ve misunderstood it, it’s mostly about his dysfunctional relationship with one of his older brothers. I suppose I wrote a whole book about my own dysfunctional relationship with my parents, but still. Damn.

— Danno E. Cabeza (@dannoecabeza.bsky.social) April 24, 2026 at 6:23 AM

 

However, I also listened to it twice.

Second listen, & what I initially took to be anger with his dad or older brother is actually guilt directed inward, written from his family’s imagined POV. Which doesn’t make the middle of the album easier to listen to. It just makes it more sad than angry.

— Danno E. Cabeza (@dannoecabeza.bsky.social) April 24, 2026 at 11:13 AM

I like the album a lot, for whatever that's worth. I will say, though, that listening to Kahan castigate himself on behalf of his loved-ones' imaginary complaints gets tough through the middle section. That's not a complaint, per se, because it's an amazing artistic choice, and it's well-executed, but it was still my lived experience of the thing. A lot of the songs are fun here, but through the middle, that's less true. 

This isn't to say that they're bad, merely that they're challenging.

Anyway, NPR has a much better, more thoroughly considered review.

2. The Giants tradeded a bunch of Day 3 picks to get back into the Third Round, and this highlights a trend I've seen elsewhere lately, i.e. that college NIL deals have eaten into the value of late-round picks. 

I think we might see this a bit more. Top-tier talent will always be top-tier, but NIL compensation competes favorably with League minimums for what would be mid-tier talent in the pros. This probably heralds a long-term change in the way NFL teams value and pay talent generally, but that might take some time to work itself out.

3. I don't understand what's going on with the stock markets. Global supply chains are facing existential risk, and yet the S&P 500 is above 7000. I suppose I'm not mad personally that my net worth hasn't been hit by this lunacy, but then, *I* seem to win no matter what happens, so let's maybe don't count my personal state as some kind of social barometer.

I can't help wondering if the markets are currently being made/run by the same kinds of people who write 3000 word reviews of pop-folk albums they didn't understand. And because that stuff appears in print, people tend to believe it...?

Weird.

4. I realized shortly after I started playing with cover concepts that Gun Girl Gracie is a much, much better title than The Return of Dr. Necropolis. The cover concepts are better, too.

People are gonna read this one just
because the cover catches their eye.

I'm a little concerned that the second book is just way better all the way around, but that it's not going to get read because people aren't going to give the first one a chance and/or they're not gonna understand it. Again, media literacy is not great out there, and that's before we consider my faults as a writer.

From a craft standpoint, I got much less emotional about the story in the second book. That usually *helps* my writing a lot. When I'm less emotional, I think much more about why things work in fiction, which is good.

I have no idea how to fix this, but I'm still gonna give it a try. I know I have a handful of things to fix in the Dr. Necropolis during the next/final re-write. I need to put Zulu into ACU's when he's introduced, there's a scene in a bank where Frank needs to make a conscious decision to take off his hat, Frank probably needs to explain his motivations a little more clearly, and I need to work on Chelsea's arc. I probably also need to try to make the theme of regret more explicit in the text. 

The book itself needs to explain its themes, so that I as the author don't have to do it later. Identity is an obvious one, and if you know me, you probably already know why that is. But this idea of aging and regret was very much in my mind when I was writing the story. I need to find a way to bring this out more explicitly.

5. One final note: I'm not sure what this means for my future as a would-be self-publishing author and/or for As For Football, but it certainly jibes with my lived experiences, both personally and with AFF.

Social media is no longer social. Most of it is passive viewing of videos and pictures from people we've never met. But we're still studying social media like it's 2010. We've entered the post-social media era — and research needs to catch up. osf.io/preprints/so... preprint w/ Richard Rogers

[image or embed]

— Petter Törnberg (@pettertornberg.com) April 23, 2026 at 9:34 AM

Exhibit A: in a recent antitrust filing, Meta argued it isn't a social media monopoly because it isn't really a social media company anymore. Only 7% of Instagram time and 17% of Facebook time is spent on content from friends or followed accounts. The rest is algorithmic video from strangers.

— Petter Törnberg (@pettertornberg.com) April 23, 2026 at 9:34 AM

Again, here we are killing the thing that people like in favor of the thing that NO ONE wants. I'm honestly gonna need this kind of behavior to eventually have some kinds of consequences for at least some of the bad actors at some point someday.

***

I think I'm done here, friends. Have a good weekend.