October Laughs and Recs

Monthly newsletter including funny seasonal viewing, a freelancing rates spreadsheet, and a motherhood memoir

Welcome to my monthly recommendation newsletter for October!

I am trying out a new name for this monthly post. I was calling it the Links Roundup, but I decided I didn’t love that name, so I’m trying out Monthly Laughs and Recs. Will I stick with this name? I can’t guarantee it, but it works for now.

In this edition, I’ve got recs for humorous viewing, funny writing resources, and a guest rec from Jocelyn Jane Cox, whose memoir about motherhood, ice skating, and zebras came out this fall.

-JV

• Funny seasonal viewing: This month, I took one of Sarah Allen’s suggestions from this post and watched Over the Garden Wall with my family (we found it on Hulu). We had never seen it, and it made us all laugh and is a good seasonal watch. If you are looking for some quirky/funny/slightly spooky viewing, I would check it out.

• Louvre heist humor: I enjoyed my writer friend Leslie Gaar’s Threads post that she then turned into a full piece for McSweeney’s.

• Standup clip: Sarah Aswell’s comedy clip about kids and aquariums also made me laugh. We had a similar experience when we first got an aquarium (luckily, the situation has now stabilized).

• Advent calendar: I am also going to make a recommendation for the Costco wine advent calendar, which I purchased and then opened early because I don’t actually need a half a bottle of wine every day in December. I don’t drink wine that much, so a full bottle is often too much for my husband and me, but I like the smaller bottle size and the chance to try out different types. So consider getting one (or another Advent calendar) and then throwing caution to the wind and opening it early.

• Freelancing rates sheet: This freelancing rates database has good info if you are trying to figure out what different publications pay.

• Funny personal essay guidance: Elissa Bassist’s post about funny personal essay writing has many helpful tips.

• New humor challenge. Alex Baia’s newsletter, Comedy Bizarre, is running a humor challenge to write a new piece in November. I am going to try to follow it to finish one of the many humor piece ideas that have been living rent-free in my brain.

• Motherhood creativity book: Friend of the newsletter Heidi Fiedler (who interviewed me a while back for her Mothers Who Make series) released a new book called Quickening, with inspiration and exercises for creative mothers. If that is you, learn more about it here.

• Author spam mail podcast: I (and it sounds like many authors) have recently been getting spam emails from book marketers. But they are different from stereotypical spam in that they are often more personalized and probably easier to be fooled by (I think because of AI). In any event, I appreciated this episode of the #Amwriting podcast that discussed these.

This month’s funny guest rec comes from memoirist and humor writer Jocelyn Jane Cox. I appreciated the honesty, humor, and bonus zebra facts in Jocelyn’s new book Motion Dazzle, and I think that readers who are in the sandwich (or as she writes, panini?) generation will appreciate it too.

Tell us about your book.

Motion Dazzle: A Memoir of Motherhood, Loss, and Skating on Thin Ice follows the day of my son’s first birthday, the day I hosted a zebra-themed birthday party for him and also the day I lost my mother to dementia and other medical complications.

Of course, most one-year-olds will never remember their parties and I could have canceled, but I was determined to DIY this celebration with vigor and pull off an event that would both live up to my mother’s hosting brilliance and also distract me from her declining condition.

In the preceding years, while caregiving for her and my son simultaneously, I drew on the strengths I developed on the ice as a competitive figure skater: I’d learned to “fake it till you make it” (for better or worse), push through all kinds of pain, and use distraction as a coping mechanism. In these pages, I combine heartbreak with humor and darkness with light, a constant toggle embodied by a zebra’s stripes.

What is a funny book you recommend?

I recently had the chance to read Mama Needs a Minute: A Candid, Funny, All-Too-Relatable Comic Memoir about Surviving Motherhood by Mary Catherine Starr of Mom Life Comics. Hoo-boy! Yes, “relatable” is the word that kept going through my mind throughout.

This illustrated memoir will make new mothers and new-ish mothers laugh out loud, not just because parenting is difficult, but because parenting with another person is rife with nuanced complications. If you’ve attempted to share the family laundry slog with another (supposedly reasonable) human, navigated the nighttime routine together (or more likely: alone!), or tried to feed tiny beings from your own body or your own refrigerator, then you know that the process rarely feels fair, and often feels infuriatingly out of balance.

This book is intermittently hilarious and aggravating. It’s an entertaining clarion call for expectant mothers and women across the land. Starr encourages readers to proactively create boundaries with our partners and communicate clearly in order to avoid the most typical ruts couples find themselves in. I highly recommend it.

Thanks, Jocelyn! Learn more about her here:

Jocelyn Jane Cox is a recovering figure skater. Despite a boatload of physical and psychological injuries, she competed in the sport for 11 years and went on to coach for almost two decades. Her essays and humor pieces have appeared in The New York Times, Slate, The Offing, HAD, Belladonna Comedy, Frazzled, The Weekly Humorist, Greener Pastures, Little Old Lady Comedy, Jane Austen’s Wastebasket, and Slackjaw. Her fiction has been nominated for a Pushcart Prize. She lives in the Hudson Valley of New York with her husband who is an artist, her preteen son who recently surpassed her in height, and her charming (and/or: pretentious?) collection of vintage eyeglasses. More information at www.jocelynjanecox.com and on her Instagram @jocelynjanecoxwriter.

• New humor: Sally Miller and I teamed up to co-write this McSweeney’s piece that reimagined 1980s teen movies.

• Funny kid listens: I wrote about funny audio listens my kids (and I) have enjoyed for Yahoo.

• Pitching list update: I also recently updated the paying subscriber bonus pitch list, as (per the usual) there have been some amount of changes at several publications.

• Annual subscription discount: And I’m offering a special bonus for reading all the way to the end of this email — a discount on annual subscriptions.

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  Thanks for reading Humor Me, a newsletter featuring funny stuff and writing tips. In case you’re new here, I’m a humor writer and freelancer whose work has appeared in New Yorker Shouts, McSweeney’s, Real Simple, and more. Find out more about me at julievick.com.

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