A “retrograde rocket” is a rocket engine on a spacecraft that helps slow the craft down enough that you can bring it out of orbit or land it safely. I’d like one for my spacecraft, please! (Collage from the newsletter.)
Holiday practice

From my (de-paywalled) letter on making time and space for your art this season:
Around the holidays, I often have to rely on the advice I give creative people who have new babies: “Find the one-armed, half-brained, miniature version of what you do.”
Put another way: What is the bare minimum amount of creative work you can do in any one day and still feel like a whole person?
The answer will be different for everybody. For me, the bare minimum is pretty bare. If I go for a walk, write at least two pages in my diary, and read a few pages of something decent, I can be pretty functional. For somebody else, the bare minimum will be much more.
Take a little time to figure this out for yourself. Once you know your bare minimum, then you can figure out what you have to do to make it happen.
Read the rest here.
Apply ass to chair

In last week’s newsletter, I wrote about the meaning of discipline:
In his book Discipline is Destiny, my friend Ryan Holiday writes that courage is “the willingness to put your ass on the line.” Discipline is “the ability to keep your ass in line.”
My writing teacher, Steven Bauer, used to joke that the first rule of writing was:
APPLY ASS TO CHAIR.
In my early writing days, I used to have that tacked up on a 3×5 card above my desk.
There’s a German word, sitzfleisch:
“Literally translated, sitzfleisch means ‘sitting meat’ or ‘sitting flesh’ – in other words, a term for one’s behind or bottom. But this German word has strong connotations in the working world, where it implies a great deal more than just the physical part of the body you sit on.”
“To have sitzfleisch means the ability to sit still for the long periods of time required to be truly productive; it means the stamina to work through a difficult situation and see a project through to the end.”Ryan points out that sitzfleisch was noted in the ancient world: “Many a great conqueror in the days of horseback were called ‘Old Iron Ass’ for their ability to stay in the saddle.”
Read more here.
Dispatches from California
Every time I’m in California, there’s at least a little bit of magic to the visit.
The family and I were in Los Angeles for a few days and the nice surprise of the trip was popping down to Huntington Beach for an impromptu Dairy Queen picnic, hunting for sand dollars and playing fetch with random pups we befriended.
California visits also usually inspire newsletters — see our “Let’s Talk Travel” Tuesday discussion and my “A Path With A View” Friday letter. (At least one reader mentioned that the photo below reminded them of Hockney’s Pearblossom Highway.)
3 recent newsletters
I’m doing some of my best writing, I think, in my Tuesday newsletter.
This week, I wrote about “entering into the spirit” of the holidays:
For artists, we get to play at Halloween all year. That veil between the material and the immaterial stays razor thin. Every day, we get to step into our costumes, don our masks, perform our rituals, and enter into the spirit.
Two weeks ago, I shared three poems from the sports section:
For years, my favorite section of the New York Times for making newspaper blackouts has been the Sports section. (Ironic, considering they recently disbanded their sports department.) This isn’t because I’m a huge fan of sports, but because you find good nouns and verbs there: I like the way coaches and athletes talk in plain language — and sometimes clichés! — and how they speak a lot about “seasons,” etc.
I stitched those poems them together with quotes from my commonplace diary and the result was really fun. I’m going to try to do more letters like this soon.
Three weeks ago, I wrote about the art of forgery:
Because I wrote a book called Steal Like an Artist, some people think I’m really interested in plagiarism. Actually, I’m much more interested in forgery.
“Plagiarism is the flip side of forgery,” wrote Andrew Potter in The Authenticity Hoax. “Forgers pass off their own work as that of someone else, while plagiarists pass off the work of others as their own.”
In other words: Plagiarism is taking credit for someone else’s work. Forgery is giving someone else credit for work you create.
The difference is you doing the work.
Though I love having the deadline and the form to play with, what’s best about the Tuesday newsletter is the comment section — a sane corner of the internet that makes me feel better about the world. (See our recent “What’s Good?” discussion thread for a lift — there’s a free trial at the paywall.)
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