Previously on GROUP CHAT: The cast takes on salary discourse, a letter to the editor, and two of the chat’s closest compatriots break up.

This week: What is Dua Lipa doing?

In “Before the Law,” a famous parable by the celebrated German modernist Franz Kafka, a man stands before a gate attended by a gatekeeper, and asks to be permitted “to gain entry into the law.” The gatekeeper denies the man’s request, but when the man asks if he might gain entry later, responds, “It is possible.” The man sits before the gait and waits for years, asking again and again to be let in, but every time the gatekeeper denies him. At the end of his life, the man asks the gatekeeper why no one else has asked to pass through the gate. As the man’s hearing fails him, the gatekeeper shouts, “Here no one else can gain entry, since this entrance was assigned only to you. I’m going now to close it.”

Early in the week, the chat is firmly in its element—trash-talking Rachel Cusk’s new autofictional collaboration with Natalie Portman—when a bizarre anonymous communication demands its immediate attention:

Fortunately or not, the cast has more pressing concerns to attend to—namely, responding to ’s new essay on gatekeeping in online lit, which seems to have inspired some backlash on another digital publishing platform:

The only gatekeepers the cast of GROUP CHAT minds, however, are the influencers responsible for defining and codiyfing the emerging microgrenre of “weird girl lit”:

After some debate, the members of the cast settle on a fitting response to the phenomenon:

Will Nick’s new identity get him through the gate? Will online lit ever forgive Alexandra? Will the GROUP CHAT stalker continue to deepen Ross’s lore? No gatekeeper will be guarding the answers to these questions; they’ll all be waiting for you, unpaywalled, in the next episode of GROUP CHAT.

GROUP CHAT is a production of Grey Fiction Media. All episodes are written, directed, edited, and produced by Stephen Piccarella. All original music by Sebastian Castillo.

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Previously on GROUP CHAT: A state of emergency, the chat’s first will-they-or-won’t-they, and the cast’s resident Iowa graduate’s possible ties to the CIA.

This week: Jobless is a mindset.

During Italy’s storied “Years of Lead,” a period of ongoing social unrest and violent conflict between the classes, the leaders of the neo-Marxist Autonomia movement identified the “refusal of work” as a foundational principle of the society they hoped to build. In the Autonomist vision, “refusal” meant more than just going on strike: it meant rejecting the entire wage labor system. According to theorist Franco “Bifo” Berardi, “job precariousness [was] a form of autonomy from steady, regular work, lasting an entire life.” Is a similar refusal, or at least a commitment to precariousness, necessary to a writer’s way of life? This week, the cast of GROUP CHAT ponders some very similar questions.

The chat is up to its usual tricks—lambasting Substack trends and the legacy authors who participate in them—when a write-in from a viewer provokes some strange behavior from James:

This new reticence on the part of one of the cast’s most vocal members persists into the week’s main event, an impromptu GROUP CHAT roundtable on the evergreen “salary discourse”:

Finally, James’ castmates have had enough, and they work together to surveil him around the clock until he reveals the real reason for his camera shyness: an irl confrontation and subsequent falling out with his closest—spiritually and geographically—compatriot in the chat:

Who is expecting James to join a call on Friday? What exactly happened between James and Nick to make James go dark so abruptly? How much money does Stephen really make from GROUP CHAT? All will be revealed next week on the premiere online text-based reality TV series.

GROUP CHAT is a production of Grey Fiction Media. All episodes are written, directed, edited, and produced by Stephen Piccarella. All original music by Sebastian Castillo.

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Previously on GROUP CHAT: The cast receives the results of the GROUP CHAT Viewer Survey, the GROUP CHAT Stalker returns, and one beloved cast member takes his final bow.

This week: Who does James work for?

In 1951, George de Mohrenschildt, a recently naturalized US citizen born and raised in Russian Belarus, settled with his third wife in Dallas, Texas to pursue a career as a geologist in the petroleum industry. Over the next decade, de Mohrenschildt established himself as a fixture of both the local oil industry and the local Russian-American community. In 1962, a colleague introduced him to Marina Oswald, another recent Russian immigrant to the area, and her husband, Lee. At the end of his life, de Mohrenschildt would reach out to his friend George H. W. Bush to explain that the CIA had engaged him to monitor Lee, then deceased and immortalized in American mythology as the man who assassinated President John F. Kennedy.

How often are the people we meet and befriend secretly working on behalf of the United States government? This week, the members of the GROUP CHAT cast ask themselves this very question.

The beginning of the week finds James frustrated about a recent post by emerging writer :

Later, Ross and Audrey address his comments on last week’s episode, in which he revealed his behind-the-scenes attempts to orchestrate a romance between them:

As the week progresses, some suspicions about James’ ministrations, and the motives behind them, begin to arise:

Finally, an anonymous respondent to the GROUP CHAT Viewer Survey provides some shocking revelations about James’ time at Iowa, and raises some unsettling questions:

Is there more to James’ relationship with the family behind the Merril Lynch financial empire? Is UFO research secretly funding students of the Iowa Writers’ Workshop? Will Ross and Audrey ever go on a real date? Only the coming episodes of GROUP CHAT will yield these privileged secrets, so tune in next week to hear them first!

GROUP CHAT is a production of Grey Fiction Media. All episodes are written, directed, edited, and produced by Stephen Piccarella. All original music by Sebastian Castillo.

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Previously on GROUP CHAT: New bombshell audrey snow matzke enters the chat, characters struggle with the limits of their power, and the castmates try to identify the GROUP CHAT Stalker.

This week: Only boring people get bored.

A popularly cited koan attributed to the Seventeenth-Century Zen master Shidō Bunan teaches: “While living, be a dead man, be thoroughly dead—whatever you do, then, will always be good.” Does the same rule apply to a group chat? Can participants in a group chat, even one visible to the public, aspire to achieve the spiritual void state of the dead man, such that whatever they do becomes, simply in and of itself, good? This week, the members of the GROUP CHAT cast will have several occasions to grapple with the implications of these teachings.

Week seven has barely begun when James decides he is bored, and takes to the chat to try to ease his suffering:

Luckily for James, he does not have to wait long for what quickly becomes the main attraction in the chat for the week, the results of the GROUP CHAT Viewer Survey, many of which may or may not have come from current or former members of the cast:

Some viewers, though, can’t be bothered to voice their opinions via the proper channels. In the case of the GROUP CHAT Stalker, anonymity is apparently not enough:

Of course, while the truth may deliver us from boredom, it also inevitably takes its own toll. After lingering on the periphery of the chat for some time, Ryan can’t help but take the viewers’ unfiltered reactions to his relatively taciturn persona to heart:

Does Ryan’s departure somehow foreshadow another former member’s return? Does this week’s episode meet the GROUP CHAT stalker’s definition of “audacious”? Does James have any idea what the word “mog” actually means? As always, the answers to your questions may be only a week away, so do not miss the next episode of GROUP CHAT!

GROUP CHAT is a production of Grey Fiction Media. All episodes are written, directed, edited, and produced by Stephen Piccarella. All original music by Sebastian Castillo.

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Previously on GROUP CHAT: Rachel Cusk and Natalie Portman, more on transgressive literature, and bookshelves versus edibles as the truest representation of the self.

This week: The pill of a greater god.

In Twelve Steps and Twelve Traditions, the founders of Alcoholics Anonymous identify the ability to “believe that a Power greater than ourselves could restore us to sanity” as one of the vital responsibilities of recovery from alcoholism. What unique challenges does such a responsibility pose to that most mercurial of personalities, the writer? Is it possible for people who make it their purpose in life to expose and test the realities of the human condition to recognize that they themselves are subject to its vicissitudes? This week the cast of GROUP CHAT is forced to take up these questions in real time.

Last week, several members of the GROUP CHAT cast underwent a process of self-reflection that led them to reckon with their identities as television personalities, as writers, and as people. This week, the arrival of a new castmate prompts them to project that interrogation outward:

Having only just arrived, Audrey is still secure enough in her own identity to submit to questioning without losing her composure and resorting to aggression. For others in the chat, however, the burden of performance seems to have triggered acute crisis. Writers, by nature, prefer to control narratives. What happens to writers when they become another writer’s characters? Can writers, like recovering alcoholics, successfully relinquish control to another, higher power? For some, the pill of a greater god may prove too big to swallow:

Of course, even the author of a text must sometimes answer to critics. Now that Ross is back in New York, he’s free to enjoy the benefits of literary community like attending readings and soliciting gossip. However, he’s also accessible, if not vulnerable, to the designs of the robust GROUP CHAT readership. When he wakes up after a night out to find a mysterious parcel on his doorstep, he enlists the chat to help him puzzle out the identity of an even lesser-known quantity in the GROUP CHAT calculus, the “GROUP CHAT Stalker”:

Is the GROUP CHAT Stalker calling from inside the house? Will Audrey maintain her equanimity? Exactly how and when did Nick’s “milquetoast insolent thing” first emerge? Tune in next week for another episode of GROUP CHAT to see what answers—or further questions—await.

GROUP CHAT is a production of Grey Fiction Media. All episodes are written, directed, edited, and produced by Stephen Piccarella. All original music by Sebastian Castillo.

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Previously on GROUP CHAT: The ghost of Isabel(le) haunts the chat, Ross is back stateside with even fewer clues, and Nick asks the biggest question in publishing: what about men?

This week: Can the self occupy virtual space?

In Jungian psychology, the “self” is defined as “a transpersonal power that transcends the ego.” Jung’s writing on the self is foundational to our understanding of the concept, but contemporary culture presents many questions Jung failed to anticipate. Can the self occupy virtual space? Is appearing onscreen an opportunity for liberation from the ego, or is it a further indulgence of the ego that ultimately forecloses one’s ability to access the self? Is it possible to transcend one’s ego on a reality TV show? Luckily, the cast of GROUP CHAT is here to take up Jung’s work for the rapidly changing present.

After establishing himself early in the series as the chat’s token Canadian, Spencer kicks off this week determined to show off another dimension of his character:

Spencer’s ontological crisis proves contagious when he challenges his castmates to define his character based on his bookshelf, and others quickly follow suit:

The true avatar of Jasmine’s identity, however, is not her bookshelf, but her preferred brand of edibles:

Meanwhile, Ross may be a retired stoner, but thanks to the contact he made in Japan, he’s not retired from the workforce just yet:

Back in the chat, the question of the self and its mediation finds its perfect focus in the recent controversy over Rachel Cusk’s forthcoming collaboration with Natalie Portman:

In fact, Cusk is not the only Rachel the cast suspects of presenting an inauthentic self:

What is James talking about? Is there really more to Spencer than being Canadian? What ever happened to Ryan? If asking these questions leads you to wonder who you really are, tune in next week for another chance to live your truth!

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Next week on GROUP CHAT:

GROUP CHAT is a production of Grey Fiction Media. All episodes are written, directed, edited, and produced by Stephen Piccarella. All original music by Sebastian Castillo.

Previously on GROUP CHAT: Ross lands in Japan, a new bombshell enters the chat, and one of its most dynamic participants makes her exit.

This week: Winning but at what cost?

In many cultures, ghosts appear in spirituality and folklore as reminders of past failures or misdeeds. A house is haunted by the specter of someone its residents somehow wronged, a plot of land or nation state by the population from whom it was stolen. Do ghosts haunt digital spaces as well? This week, with the loss of one of their own fresh in their minds, the remaining members of the GROUP CHAT cast find out, and the answer tests them all in more ways than one.

In the wake of Isabel’s sudden departure, the chat is a house divided, unsure whether to pause and reflect or cut its loss and never look back:

Some take it as a reminder of their own precarity, an opportunity to consolidate power and single out common enemies:

Before long, though, Isabel’s exit turns out not to have been as final as it may have seemed. When Van calls James out for his bewildered comment on her recent Substack post about the two French actresses who dominate her writing practice—Isabelle Adjani and Isabelle Huppert—the ensuing debate makes clear that the spirit of Isabel(le) isn’t finished with the chat just yet:

In fact, ghosts of the past seem to be haunting several members of the cast. James apparently has not gotten over his “perfect raw score” on the verbal SAT:

Meanwhile, Nick is still struggling with his college years. Toward the end of a long and spirited debate about the role of the literary agent in the publishing ecosystem, during which he cites the recent findings that over 70% of employees at traditional publishing companies are white women, Nick reveals that his entire approach to publishing his own work emerged as a way to cope with his failure to impress the women at his liberal arts school:

In Japan, however, Ross has been fighting more than just metaphorical demons:

Will Ross’s mystery contact show up? Will Isabel’s spirit ever leave the chat for good? Will the rest of the cast be able to put their own demons to rest? If these questions haunt you over the coming week, make sure you tune back in for the next episode of GROUP CHAT.

GROUP CHAT is a production of Grey Fiction Media. All episodes are written, directed, edited, and produced by Stephen Piccarella. All original music by Sebastian Castillo.

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Previously on GROUP CHAT: The poll function as passive-aggressive coup, Honor Levy starts a war, and Ross teases a mysterious side quest in Japan.

This week: Is a group chat a thermodynamic system?

In the posthumously published notes to his 1824 treatise Reflections on the Motive Power of Fire, French physicist Sadi Carnot observes, “Wherever there is destruction of heat, there is production of motive power.” This notion has since been refined into what we now call the first law of thermodynamics. Heat can move in any direction, in or out of any one position in space, but it never disappears completely.

Is a group chat a thermodynamic system? For the physicists of digital space who take up this question in the future, this week’s episode of GROUP CHAT will serve as a foundational case study.

The experiment begins in the first minutes of week three, when most of the cast is either asleep or otherwise occupied in the real world, but one member is awake and looking for answers:

What is James asking, exactly? What does he mean by “cake slicer person”? And is there really one “in the room”? The next morning, all is revealed. has officially joined the cast of GROUP CHAT, and she’s brought along a tiramisu from Philadelphia’s own Termini Brothers bakery, as well as a few riffs on a classic Patricia Lockwood tweet:

Before long, however, the pleasantries are over, and the tough questions are back on the table:

Meanwhile, on the other side of the world, Ross has officially landed in Japan, and the mystery surrounding the offer that brought him there has only deepened:

Of course, the other members of the chat don’t have to fly to Japan to find that questions tend to beget further questions, whether or not they come with satisfying answers:

So far, Ross is managing to keep his head in a strange environment that continually fails or refuses to answer his questions:

Others, however, can only hold back for so long before they start demanding answers. When a casual prompt about recent works of transgressive literature leads to some unfiltered critique of the “trauma plot,” static builds to a critical point:

Mere days after the arrival of a new member elevates the temperature of the chat to an all-time high, one of its most dynamic participants makes an exit that leaves the rest of the cast depleted of energy. Will these fluctuations resolve and restore the chat to a state of equilibrium? Will Ross ever meet “the other American”? Will the cast share even worse opinions as the season progresses? Join us again next week to find out.

GROUP CHAT is a production of Grey Fiction Media. All episodes are written, directed, edited, and produced by Stephen Piccarella. All original music by Sebastian Castillo.

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Previously on GROUP CHAT: Tone-setting icebreakers, the first potential rivalry of the season, and an inaugural hot-take-off.

This week: What is the point of being alive?

What is the point of a group chat? Is it to workshop your writing? Is it to solicit advice or support from friends? Or is it to performatively bait your peers into aggressive low-stakes conflict for the entertainment of whatever audience may or may not be watching? In this week’s episode, the cast of GROUP CHAT takes up this very question, and the answers are more far-flung and far-fetched than you might think.

In its second week, the chat is no longer a territory in search of a map. The cast members have poked around the interior and sized each other up. Now they’re ready to let their individual strategies guide their way.

A couple of the cast members prefer to hang back, cultivating aloof mystique. Jasmine makes a weekly cameo appearance to share excerpts from her in-progress erotica:

Ryan is also a stealth player, dropping off for days at a time only to casually resurface at a critical juncture:

Other members, though, are determined to engage at a much higher level:

Different approaches are borne of different motivations, and sometimes of different origins. Three members of the cast (Isabel, James, and Nick) are based in the San Francisco Bay Area, and three (Jasmine, Ross, and Van) in the New York Metropolitan Area, which by the beginning of week two has already bred contempt:

Friction intensifies when one of the West Coasters shouts out antediluvian lower Manhattan lightning rod (and fellow Bennington College alumnus of GROUP CHAT producer Stephen Piccarella) Honor Levy:

The lightning rod of the chat, however, appears to be Isabel, whose unwavering commitment to self-promotion leads first to speculation about her motives as a cast member and then to a poll that may or may not be a passive aggressive attempt at a coup:

As polarizing as her behavior may be, though, Isabel is not the only member of the cast with an eye toward promotion. In an attempt at a different kind of coup, James nearly spends $100 on an advertising contract with Ross Barkan, who, despite being identified in Episode One as a likely GROUP CHAT spy, refuses to engage:

Fortunately Barkan is not the only Ross in the GROUP CHAT universe. In fact, it’s Ross Devlin’s poll that really sparks the chat’s curiosity:

Will Ross follow a mysterious rich looking person to Japan? Is Isabel here for the right reasons? What is the point of being alive? If you find yourself asking any of these questions as the summer heats up, you know where to find the answers. In the meantime—back to the CHAT!

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Next week on GROUP CHAT:

GROUP CHAT is a production of Grey Fiction Media. All episodes are written, directed, edited, and produced by Stephen Piccarella. All original music by Sebastian Castillo.

Greetings, Grey Fiction readers! You’ve heard the buzz, you’ve met the cast, and now the wait is over: welcome to the first episode of GROUP CHAT, the premiere online text-based reality TV series!

What happens when eight writers from across the world, none of whom have met before, join together in one digital space to monitor and dissect the entire literary Internet—and they do it all in public? Over the course of this season, GROUP CHAT will answer this question and many more.

As of this writing, the cast has been chatting for exactly one week. In these early days, personalities and relationships are still emerging, but their initial expressions will set the tone for the weeks to come. Let’s take a look at what’s been going on in the CHAT at this exciting and formative time.

First, some classic icebreakers help the cast counteract the caginess of the first few days:

Although a couple of the guys are a little confused about what Jasmine does for a living:

Momentum picks up during some back-and-forth about book design and the best way to mic a reading:

The real conversation starter, however, is the recent Vulture profile of Joyce Carol Oates, with whom Van is apparently acquainted:

Predictably, pretty much everyone has something to say about Joyce:

In fact, James’ takes on Joyce inspire Van to double down on what may or may not be the first legitimate rivalry of the series:

The question of when to publish and how is a familiar one for some, like Isabel, a committed self-publisher whose main contribution to the chat seems to be sharing links to her own work:

Not everyone is sold on the merits of self-publishing, though:

Feelings like this turn out to be an ongoing struggle for James:

Luckily, James makes at least one request the cast is well equipped to satisfy:

Here’s Ross on Ben Lerner:

Van on AI-adopter lit:

And Nick on Sean Thor Conroe:

Nick actually has several takes to offer. Here he is on Whoa Vicky:

And again on Ross Barkan:

Barkan comes up when the cast discovers that he may or may not have a mole in the group chat:

This revelation is one of just a few that hints at more to come. For the moment, the atmosphere in the chat is lively, but friendly. The only sources of tension so far are the lingering questions on all of our minds: Will James and Van keep their heads? How exactly does Van know JCO? And just what is Ross Barkan up to, exactly? The answers to these questions are all still to come, so make sure you tune in for another episode of GROUP CHAT next week, right here on Grey Fiction. For now—back to the CHAT!

GROUP CHAT is a production of Grey Fiction Media. All episodes are written, directed, edited, and produced by Stephen Piccarella. All original music by Sebastian Castillo.

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The boundary between media and reality is long gone. All fiction is autofiction, all TV is reality TV, all digital content is as intimate as a first—or third—date. With this brave new world beyond the binary unveiled, it’s only natural that even the purest abstraction, the written word, would eventually evolve (or collapse) into mass broadcast culture. Welcome to the future. Welcome to the GROUP CHAT.

GROUP CHAT is the premiere online text-based reality TV series. Following eight working writers as they collaboratively navigate the total mindfuck of the literary Internet, the series lets readers in on all the vulnerability, solidarity, and competition of a group text conversation, one week at a time. As the season progresses, various unexpected developments will shake the equilibrium of the chat environment, but it will be up to the core cast to decide whether order or chaos prevails. In advance of the series premiere, the stars of the show have joined us today to introduce themselves, in their own words, to their viewers at home:

ROSS DEVLIN: “Born in Glens Falls, raised in Brussels and Memphis. 31 years old. Deeply pretentious zillennial. Outsider storytelling through text, radio, and music. I buy groceries at Valentinos. 2 ISBNs and counting. Publishing on Substack as .”

ISABEL PABÁN FREED: “I am Isabel, and I am here for the right reasons.”

NICK GREER: “Hi everyone, I'm Nick. I'm a writer and migraineur from Berkeley, California. I am excited to participate in GROUP CHAT. I'm looking forward to making new connections with fellow writers and showcasing my unique perspective on current events as well as my growing passion for amphibian husbandry.”

VAN KIDA: “Hi, I’m Van Kida. I write in New Jersey. I’m currently working on a diptych about Isabelle Huppert and Isabelle Adjani. You can find me occasionally on Substack at .”

SPENCER OAKES: “I write the newsletter and recently started a publishing house called Helmet Books—I like to call it a house and not a press because houses are worth way more money and no one under 30 knows what a press is. Our first book will be out next year. I’m also a fiction writer and I also play in a band called PC Dagg. I’m from Saskatoon, Saskatchewan but live in Vancouver, B.C.”

RYAN O’TOOLE: “Hi, I’m Ryan. I’m a writer and editor living in Chicago. I write mostly fiction, some of which has appeared in journals like storySouth and Heartwood Literary Magazine. I also write occasionally for my Substack, .”

JASMINE WYNONA: “I'm a Brooklyn-based writer and filmmaker. My work specializes in the intersection of sex, media, and comedy. I'm currently developing a dark comedy centered around BDSM, a limited series exploring the secret lives of sugar babies, and a solo show about how I found my sense of humor again after a tumultuous relationship.”

JAMES CHAN YU: “I write and interview writers and make films. At Iowa I anonymously launched a fiction prize for poets that offered $20 and a pack of American Spirits. No awardee was decided as the contest made a lot of workshoppers upset. Later I made a zine called The Nepotist. Recent work has appeared in Guernica and the Brooklyn Rail, and I’ve been in residence at MacDowell and the William Flanagan Memorial Creative Persons Center. I write an occasional bcc’d email to friends on Mondays with no signup or opt-out. In April I sent over a hundred postcards to those friends as a form of semi-public self-help. I’m often confused for another James Yu who writes sci-fi and sells AI slop, and whom I once interviewed for an unpublished essay titled ‘Self as Opponent.’”

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As of 12 AM EST this morning, production has officially begun on Episode One of GROUP CHAT, which will document the first week of the chat’s activity and air on June 24, 2026, right here on Grey Fiction. The scope of the first season has yet to be determined, but all cast members are committed for the time being. GROUP CHAT is produced, directed, and edited by Stephen Piccarella. All episodes will include original music by author and literary media personality Sebastian Castillo.

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Friendship. Rivalry. Drama. Chaos. Romance? This Summer, for the first time ever, everything you love about reality TV comes to Substack. Welcome to the premiere online text-based reality TV series, only on Grey Fiction.

Effective immediately, Grey Fiction is seeking writers active on social media to star in a series with the working title Group Chat. The series will follow the cast as they maintain a group chat following and commenting in real time on various happenings on the literary Internet, and in the literary world at large. Each episode will provide recaps of the chat’s activity over the past week, screenshots capturing the most memorable takes, tussles, and twists, and occasional unexpected surprises. The scope and arc of the first season of the series have yet to be determined.

As this format is untested and still in development, there are very few criteria for eligibility to apply. Potential cast members should be able to demonstrate some form of consistent public writing practice (blogging and self-publishing included), and some level of active engagement with the literary social media ecosystem. Besides that, eligibility is open. Grey Fiction cannot guarantee that anyone who applies will ultimately be cast, but all completed applications will be considered.

To apply to join the cast of Group Chat, complete and submit this short application form. Applications will be considered on a rolling basis until the final cast is announced. Whether or not you choose to apply, be sure to subscribe to Grey Fiction for updates on what is sure to be the most talked-about new series of the Summer.

UPDATE: All roles have been cast as of today, June 15, 2026.

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Although I assume very few of my readers notice one way or another, I generally do my best not to miss my weekly deadline for these posts. This past week, however, after an eventful and by all accounts successful trip to New York, I found myself laid up with a virus bad enough to prevent me from manufacturing any spurious literary gossip or ersatz Internet ephemera. For whatever, reason, though, I don’t have it in me to drop off of an otherwise steady, mostly one-way correspondence without any warning, so here’s a belated throwaway placeholder update post to keep us all happy.

Above is a picture of me reading at Kelly’s Limitless Hangout III, in which I’m exhibiting a textbook case of “reader mouth.” More pictures and some mixed criticism can be found in this note by . The day after the reading, The Baffler published my review of Missouri Williams’ The Vivisectors, a book I’ve spent the days since proselytizing tirelessly to combat the dismissals of critics too lazy or out of touch to get it. These are all the updates I have for the moment, but rest assured that I’m on the mend and looking forward to resuming regularly scheduled programming as soon as possible. Watch this space…

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Like countless others, in the dog days of the COVID-19 pandemic, I took up a personal creative project designed to both occupy my time and keep me connected to the civilization then collapsing just beyond my front door. The project, as I described it, was a “crowd-sourced systems novel” documenting the pandemic and the quarantine it occasioned. I put out a call for submissions of autofictional “chapters” which I then assembled into a “novel” written by many authors, most of whom were also writers living in cities. The novel, Hell Earth Catalog, appeared online at a custom domain I have long since given up on paying the bill for. One of the standout submissions came from a writer named Kelly Karivalis, now host of the celebrated reading series Kelly’s Limitless Hangout.

Kelly is a fabulous writer whose fiction and nonfiction have done at least as much to bolster her formidable online presence as her music career. She’s also a singular literary citizen and tastemaker, which is why I’m thrilled and honored to have the chance to appear at the latest iteration of her Limitless Hangout series at St. Dymphna’s on New York City’s Avenue A. The reading will take place at 8 PM on May 27, 2026 (tonight!) and will feature a peerless lineup including Tulpa Beat, Mackenzie Thomas, Riley Mac, and . I very much hope to see some if not all of you there.

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This past weekend, the Commonwealth Foundation announced the winners of its Short Story Prize, which annually honors five writers, one in each of five global regions, with, among other rewards, the opportunity to publish their submissions in Granta. Not long after the announcements, numerous social media sleuths read the story and used AI-detection software to determine that it was almost certainly written, or at least enhanced, using AI. Understandably, writers across the literary ecosystem are scandalized by the revelation. Normally, I would count myself among the writers so scandalized. However, I’m unable to pass any unbiased judgment on these particular goings-on, because I may or may not have played a role in them myself.

As I detailed in one of my earlier posts, several years ago now, I was employed for a time by a startup “incubator” conducting research and media “strategy” campaigns treating very specific topics of interest, namely the then-emerging “Internet novel” trend. At the time, the Internet novel was the focus of most debates about the intersection of literature and digital technology, which this organization existed to support—or, more accurately, manipulate. As part of my work for this company, I created a large number of fake social media accounts, and used them to stimulate discussion of novels with a “high yield” position on digital technology, particularly the products the larger tech superpower funding our nominally not-for-profit organization aimed to market.

Not long into my tenure there, our funders unceremoniously dissolved our organization, and we were all laid off. However, no part of our offboarding process included canceling these many fake accounts we created. In fact, I remember occasionally checking up on some of them to see that, not only were they still active, but they still produced occasional updates, mostly around the times the company was publicizing a major new release. I even managed to log into a few of them, mostly to post occasional non-sequiturs or overtly anticapitalist statements. No one ever contacted me to try to stop me from doing so, but the posts never stayed up for long.

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I hadn’t thought much in recent years about this frustrating chapter in my career, until I started looking into Jamir Nazir, the author of “The Serpent in the Grove,” the winner of the Commonwealth Short Story Prize in the Caribbean region. According to Nazir’s LinkedIn account, he works in “organizational transformation and business expansion” in the tech sector. Many of his posts offer concise but clear perspective on common challenges and obstacles cited by companies seeking increased integration, adoption, and expansion of available AI technology, like balancing compute demands with supply of natural resources and scaling data-driven models without reproducing institutional bias.

All of these posts, down to the keywords they disproportionately repeat, conform directly to the templates and style guides I was instructed to use on the job for my own dummy posts. Nazir hasn’t posted about the internet novel, but not long after my team was dismissed, the company pivoted across its marketing channels to pushing its AI models and solutions, and many of the accounts I had created went from debating the impact of the death of print on literature to mindlessly explaining how brands and independent producers can use LLMs and GPTs to “streamline creative workflows” and “optimize storytelling.”

Obviously, I can’t prove that Jamir Nazir is not a real person, or that a company that used to fund a non-profit of which I was once an employee is now ghostwriting posts under his name after assuming ownership of all of my contributions. All I can say is that, from what I know about this company, inventing an author with a deep investment in AI adoption, writing a short story using AI, and submitting it to contests under his name as some kind of bid in favor of AI as the future of reading and writing would not fail to meet its minimal standards for professional ethics. What the whole affair suggests about the future of reading and writing itself, I’m almost afraid to guess, but I doubt it’s anything good.

Some novels cast a shadow over culture. Moby Dick, Middlemarch, 2666—simply mention one of these titles and you can leave whole rooms full of supercilious literates speechless with shame and awe. For those who consider it a personal duty to scale as many of these peaks as possible, one looms larger than the rest: The Recognitions, the 1955 debut novel of future National Book Award winner William Gaddis, an operatic satire of art, pretense, and mechanical reproduction that even the pathological self-parody of American empire still hasn’t managed to outdo. Reading it is generally regarded as a feat in itself; adapting it for the screen is, to put it mildly, a whole other can of worms.

I first read the novel around the turn of the 2010s, a time of robust speculative investment in the then-dominant New Sincerity. Dave Eggers and Michael Chabon secured high-profile screenwriting credits, another of the movement’s flagship authors finally settled an almost decade-long feud with Oprah Winfrey, and everyone from coffee-shop indie rock ensemble The Decemberists to Office star John Krasinski managed to cash in on the suicide of David Foster Wallace. In this media climate, it was not just feasible but even potentially lucrative to bankroll a shamelessly indulgent tribute to the legacy of postmodern literature. In fact, in 2012, HBO came tantalizingly close to doing just that.

I was in college when I first read about HBO’s The Recognitions, an hour-long drama series with a first season planned to debut in the fall of that year. When I read that a pilot episode directed by Spike Jonze from a script by Donald Antrim was already in production, I reported the news with manic excitement to anyone who would listen, namely my girlfriend and my father. I followed the production as closely as I could on an Internet that was only sporadically forthcoming when it came to such expensive vehicles. I had only just heard that Paul Dano and John Malkovich had officially joined the cast as Wyatt Gwyon and Recktall Brown respectively when I discovered that the series had been shelved indefinitely.

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I was not quite devastated by this news, but I did hold out hope for years to come that the adaptation might someday see the light of day. This hope fueled many hours spent scouring corners of the Internet usually reserved for phishing scams and malware traps looking for a rip of the produced pilot. I downloaded many files that purported to be the one I was looking for but, naturally, most of them were just porn. Occasionally I would read something online that suggested the writer had seen the pilot, and get worked up all over again trying to find it, but eventually I failed one too many times and resolved to take the loss.

My one lucky break came years later, when I casually mentioned the planned series at a party to a critic who claimed to have seen the pilot. He had been assigned to review the new NYRB Classics edition of the book, and managed to weasel a screener link out of a friend who worked for the network. He offered to pass it on to me, and for a few days I was as excited as I was when I first heard the series announced. After those few days I received an email and clicked through a link to a shared Google Drive file to find that I still needed to request access from its owner. I did, once, and then several more times, before the owner, a current HBO employee, wrote me back to demand in no uncertain terms that I leave him alone.

If you have any info on the Recognitions pilot, or if you might be able to finally get me access to it, please do not hesitate to write me back.

Two weekends ago, I was lucky enough to attend a screening of Sátántangó, the seven-plus-hour film adaptation of Laszlo Krasznahorkai’s first novel, directed by the late slow cinema pioneer Béla Tarr, at the Harvard Film Archive. The sold-out event, which included an introduction by filmmaker and former Tarr student Patrick Marshall and two extended intermissions, concluded the Archive’s retrospective of the careers-spanning collaborative relationship between Tarr and 2025 nobel laureate Krasznahorkai. The film itself was as revelatory as I had always imagined it to be, and brought no end of associations to mind, but the one I have since been unable to put to rest is to another 1994 black-and-white landmark of independent cinema: director Kevin Smith’s debut feature Clerks.

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Most viewers familiar with both films would hardly consider them comparable in any meaningful respect; Clerks is a lo-fi slacker comedy primarily concerned with the selfish complaints of college-age suburbanites, while Sátántangó is a maximalist odyssey through the dilapidated landscape of rural Hungary in the last years of the Soviet Union. However, watching the two films consecutively reveals a parallelism that reaches far deeper than coincidences like those mentioned above. One might even go so far as to suggest that Smith may have conceived of his film as a conscious homage to Tarr’s masterpiece.

At first glance, the superficial similarities between Sátántangó and Clerks point to larger trends in the cinema of the time as opposed to any real kinship between the two. Many independent films of the 90s cast non-actors and friends of the production in major roles and favored minimal, long-take cinematography to achieve a lived-in, homegrown feel. The episodic structures of the films, characterized by elliptical title cards segmenting action that takes place largely or entirely over the course of a single day, is of a piece with this aesthetic. These broader commonalities of style could easily be attributed to the influence of the indie cinema boom of the time, if not for certain far more specific correspondences that are easier to miss but harder to dismiss once identified.

Certain common touches that seem incidental are, upon reflection, too unique to ignore. For example, the cheese roll Mr. Schmidt balances on his nose during the extended barroom dance sequence in Sátántangó reappears as the loaf of bread either Dante or Randal uses as a weapon when the two get into a fight at the end of Clerks. Other congruences carry more weight, like the wake that serves as a bridge between acts in both films. In Sátántangó, the deceased is Estike, the little girl whose suicide comes after one of the most memorable sequences in the movie, in which she tortures her pet cat and then feeds it the same rat poison she uses to end her own life. In Clerks, a black cat who lives at the Quick Stop instigates several memorable scenes; attentive viewers will know the movie’s credits identify this cat as one improbably named “Lenin’s Tomb.”

This last detail illuminates what is by far the most meaningful affinity between the two films. In 1994, both would be released into a world supposedly liberated from the burden of history, specifically the history of struggle between the classes and the warring ideologies of capitalism and communism. The scheming, boozing underclass of Sátántangó, the source text of which was published and set in the mid-80s, suffers the indignities of decayed Soviet austerity just as the dead-end-job twentysomethings of Clerks moulder on the margins of late-capitalist competition. The symmetry between these positions is made most literal in the penultimate chapter of Sátántangó, in which two actual clerks of the Hungarian bureaucracy trade off-color summaries of the reports they’ve received from Irimiás, the covert state agent who ultimately betrays the cast of the film.

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Of course, definitive proof that Smith inserted these nods deliberately is scarce. The early, scrapped cut of Clerks technically premiered at Sundance the month before Sátántangó premiered at the Hungarian Film Festival, and to see Tarr’s film before the theatrical premier of Clerks in October of 1994, Smith would have had to be more tapped into the international festival circuit than most debut indie filmmakers. However, both Tarr’s first collaboration with Krasznahorkai, Damnation (1988), and the novel Sátántangó existed long before either film. Can Kevin Smith read Hungarian? Was he in contact with Tarr while he was writing and shooting Clerks? These are questions only one man still living can answer. If you have a line on Smith, or any information that might be relevant to the above, please write in and let me know.

Literary criticism is a dying art. Fewer publications are publishing reviews, and fewer people are reading them. For a debut author, it’s no longer a viable strategy to try to place reviews in major publications and interviews on major talk shows. These days, a writer has to think outside the box. What does that mean? Here’s an example:

Murder someone. It doesn’t matter who; find someone on the street and cut their throat with a kitchen knife. Then drag the body back to your apartment and drain the blood into the bathtub, but: collect a couple of pints in a bowl or bucket first. You’ll need them.

Once all the blood is drained, strip all the clothes off the dead body and throw them in the trash. Then dress the body up in your own clothes. This part will take some legwork on the front end: you’ll want to establish in some public way that these clothes are yours. Not just for your friends––for anyone who knows who you are. Wear these clothes as often as possible, but also post pictures of yourself wearing them on the Internet, make long posts describing exactly where and when and why you bought them, develop some running jokes about each article so that each becomes a kind of trademark of your brand. Then once you put the clothes on the dead body, it will be clear to anyone who sees it that it’s wearing your clothes.

You’re also going to want to make sure you have several of each article of clothing. At least two, but ideally more, in case you want backups, or to repeat any part of the process, which you likely will.

Why two? Because you’re also going to be wearing the clothes. But first: if the person you murder is the same gender as you, that’s preferable, but if not, you’ll want to do whatever you can to obscure that fact. Cut their hair, or yours. Shave their face, or yours. Put their breasts in a binder, or yours. Etc.

If the person weighs significantly less than you do, pad their body to match yours. If you weigh significantly less, gain some weight and document yourself as you do so. If they’re older, make them up to look younger, and vice versa. You can probably tell where this is going: you need to make this person look as much like you as you can. Once they do, you can finally move forward with the publicity initiative itself.

Find a studio or set where you can set up with the disguised corpse and film and mic a decent interview. Prepare some interview questions, enough for at least a twenty-minute segment. Think about the kinds of questions you’d want to be asked yourself. Try to cover a wide range of topics; your background, your personal life, your writing style, process, influences. Throw in some fun, unexpected questions, to give people more of a sense of who you are. All of this will make it that much more impactful when you pose these questions to the dead corpse of the person you just murdered.

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Film yourself asking the questions one by one to the corpse. Of course, leave some space in between questions, about as much as you think you’d need yourself to answer them. If your publisher has budget for a film crew, that will help; get some real professionals to handle the production. You’ll want the picture and the sound to be as clear as possible.

After you film yourself asking the questions, you’ll need to record the answers. You can answer the questions yourself and record the audio. In post, edit the audio so that the dead corpse seems to be answering the questions, as you. Try to get some closeups of the dead corpse’s head, so that you can edit the video together with the recorded sound to make it at least appear that the corpse is answering the questions.

Once all the video and audio is recorded, return to the set as before. This is where you’re going to need the blood. Hire some extras, maybe friends or actors, but ideally other successful authors or influencers who will be recognizable to viewers. Once you’re back on set, prepare to ask one of the questions you have prepared. Before you can actually ask the question, have the extras storm the stage and throw the blood around, covering both you and the corpse, shouting accusatory words like “Murderer!” and “Monster!” Make sure they’re all miked as well so you can get good sound when they shout the accusatory words. Also, if you have extras of the outfit you and the corpse are wearing, it might not be a bad idea to get the extras to wear the same outfit too. This is a creative choice. Then, in post, edit the video so it looks like this happens at the end of the interview.

Once you have the video shot and miked and edited, distribute it to as many influential outlets in the literary media as possible. However: do not give any indication that you yourself are responsible for this video. Instead, in all of your communications about it, claim that the video is coming from an organization called Letters for Peace International, a radical organization devoted to exposing violence and criminality in the publishing industry and the literary establishment. Include a statement describing the event at which you appeared in conversation with a dead corpse and the group’s disruption of the event for the purpose of exposing you as a dangerous assailant.

Once media outlets begin to cover the interview and the action by Letters for Peace International, write to these same outlets pitching an interview or an editorial in which you will explain that Letters for Peace International is actually a satirical organization, and that your interview itself was actually just a staged performance, the dead corpse was actually just a model, and Letters for Peace International disrupted the event as a hoax to try to stir up controversy and generate publicity for itself. Explain that the organization has been harassing you for months, trying to get you to participate in their bizarre staged happenings, and that in the weeks and days leading up to the interview their communications had become increasingly aggressive. Paint yourself as an innocent victim of unwarranted hostility on the part of this illegitimate organization; this is also a good opportunity to plug that you filmed the interview in the first place to publicize your debut novel.

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When the interview or op-ed is published and establishes some traction, appoint one of the extras you hired to play the members of Letters for Peace International––preferably the most recognizable one––to play the leader of the group. Coordinate to simultaneously reach out to the media, this time to bigger news outlets, so that you can publish multiple statements in response to one another, until they amount to a public feud. The feud should culminate in some kind of live segment in which you appear in conversation with one another, mediated by someone in the news media, and lodge increasingly damning accusations at one another. Refer back to the original interview with the dead corpse as much as possible, so that it will be shown over and over again onscreen while you debate.

Just before this happens, reach out to the outlet preparing to host the debate with an anonymous claim that you and the leader of Letters for Peace International are both actors, and that the entire public feud is actually just a publicity stunt designed to generate public interest in your debut novel. At the same time, reach out to the Federal Bureau of Investigation anonymously, claiming that you have information implicating you and the leader of Letters for Peace International as members of a terrorist organization whose members pose as artists and political activists to spin and legitimize what are, in fact, violent crimes against innocent people intended to sow confusion and unrest. When they follow up to ask what information you have to offer, give them all of your personal information, including your name, address, phone number, email address, credit card numbers, ID and passport numbers, and social security number.

The FBI will launch an investigation. When they arrive at your apartment, make sure the dead corpse is immediately visible and identifiable as a dead corpse. They will likely draw weapons. Put your hands up and comply with their directives. They’ll take you in, charge you, and book you. A trial will be set.

As this is happening, the actor you appointed to play the leader of Letters for Peace International should be reaching out to the media leaking information about the FBI case against you, pitching coverage of the trial. If all goes as planned, the media should arrange to televise the trial live as it occurs.

On the day of the trial, have the actors you hired to play the members of Letters for Peace International appear to represent their organization on behalf of the prosecution. In addition, hire more extras to play protesters, who have read online that Letters for Peace International is in fact a front for a terrorist organization of which you are a part. Make sure at least one of these protesters is interviewed on live television and aggressively claims that the trial itself is a farce and that all of the members of Letters for Peace International should be convicted not only of murder but of treason. At this point, you may also want all of the members of Letters for Peace International and all of the protesters at the trial wearing the same outfit you and the dead corpse were both wearing in the original interview.

If you can accomplish all of the above successfully, by the time your debut is published, you should have generated enough publicity to be able to sell out a modest advance.

One of the most deceptively difficult elements of fiction writing is the simple description of routine actions like sitting, standing, walking from one place to another, and, particularly, entering and exiting rooms. Describing these actions in too much detail can immediately betray a writer’s prose as unschooled or sophomoric, while failing to adequately render them can risk sacrificing the reader’s comprehension. For any writer (or reader) who might be curious about how to find the right balance, here are ten effective ways to “get someone in and out of a room.”

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1. The Wrong Way

He walked into the room. He walked out of the room.

2. Drunk

Dizzy and seizing, he managed to stumble through the doorway just in time to collapse face-down on the floor. The next morning, his head throbbing, he forced himself up and across the hall to the bathroom.

3. Teleportation

The beam absorbed his body, and then it was gone, and in its place a room he barely got a look at before the beam descended again.

4. Metempsychosis

When he relinquished his grasp on his body at last, he saw nothing but light, until he found himself, weightless but alive, in an empty room. Then, as quickly as he had left his body, he materialized again inside another: the body of a gigantic insect.

5. Hallucination

When he opened his eyes again, he was staring at the ceiling of a well-lit, plainly decorated room. When he tried to move, though, he realized he couldn’t. He wasn’t himself anymore; he was a wooden table, around which every night a family gathered for dinner. Then, after an eternity of these dinners, he left the room and returned to the campground, where the fire was still going.

6. Impossible Crime

“A lock of this make can’t be turned from the outside, and this window is far too high up from the ground for the killer to have come in through it or out,” the police commissioner insisted once again.

“Which means,” said the detective with a wry lift of his brow, “the killer must have somehow persuaded the dying man to lock the door behind him on his way out.”

7. Shaggy Dog

As he was poised to cross the threshold, he halted mid-step, his eye momentarily caught by a curious idiosyncrasy of the construction of the doorway itself; here, he observed, was not a doorframe of construction commonly found in residences characteristic of the region, but rather something far more peculiar and remarkable—namely, a near-masterwork of finely handcrafted joinery more typically (although, such workmanship could scarcely be said to be typical even in the most extravagant of homes) reserved for the lavish estates of those of royal birth or considerable wealth; observing this, he was unavoidably transported in mind to the unprepossessing artisanal works of his cousin, once removed on his father’s side, whose humble apprenticeship to a carpenter well-respected in the region was some years along interrupted (with no warning to speak of) by his conscription to serve his country’s armed forces in its recently embarked upon engagement with the French…

8. Deconstruction

Doorway, entryway, threshold: the liminal space of delineation between “interior” and “exterior,” two modes determined only in retrospective analysis to mark concrete zones or nodes of a spatiotemporal movement which, at the moment of “entrance,” instantiates the “trance” state of being-there which is always already problematized by the question of being as such.

9. Canceled

She sashayed into the room, hips swinging with each step, the lively bounce of her breasts only adding to her building excitement. When she was sure he hadn’t arrived yet, she slipped into the bathroom and shut the door behind her; she had just enough time to get herself ready.

10. The Right Way

But there was no one home. Later, at the bar…

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’s It’s the Characters! begins with a question: “Who assassinates a novelist?” This is just one of many questions I found myself asking as I read Pabán Freed’s account of what turns out to be a series of murders of novelists across the Bay Area. By the time I finished the book, I had more questions than I would ever be able to answer on my own. Pabán Freed is a frequent presence on the Substack platform, and she generally doesn’t mind answering questions about her work. In the following interview, I try my best to get some answers out of the author of It’s the Characters!, in hopes of bringing us all that much closer to the truth.

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Stephen Piccarella: So

Someone has been assassinating novelists.

Isabel Pabán Freed: tea

someone(s) even

SP: Tea.

In addition

At least one character in the book seems to suspect the narrator of being connected to the victims in some way

Besides, you know, selling them weed.

IPF: people have lots of ideas

not my business

SP: Well

Why do you think the murder victims are always novelists?

IPF: wym

SP: Is the killer (or killers) trying to make some kind of statement? Do you think the killer(s) is/are novelist(s)?

IPF: It’s the Characters!

SP: Ah

Tea.

IPF: tea

SP: That brings me to another point…

After you establish that the first murder victim wrote a story about her, the narrator mentions “another me walking around.”

This makes for an interesting alibi, no?

The narrator of the book—who you do not name—has a double of some kind, with whom she might easily be confused.

Is this not, in a way, a convenient reason not to hold you—excuse me, the narrator—responsible for anything the person of whom she may or may not be merely a “double” does—or vice versa?

IPF: totally. very canonical way to get out of stuff, jekyll-hyde type maneuver

SP: Very.

Along those same lines, a number of memorable scenes in this book describe experimental use of a research chemical called CHARACTER, which seems to produce hallucinations in the user.

There’s also a FICTION study you mention later on.

Is it possible the murders are just hallucinations? Or, maybe, that these substances are causing blackout periods that make it hard to remember committing the murders afterward?

IPF: im pretty sure they’re real

it’s a realist novel

some unrealistic stuff happens

but it’s a realist novel, i think

i think that’s what it’d be like if some of that stuff went down here

SP: I see.

I notice your responses have been somewhat terse so far.

The language in the book, also, is completely unadorned, stripped of all but the most basic signifiers.

Is there any kind of information you particularly wanted to exclude from the novel? Any kind of evidence, if you will?

IPF: yeah some of the people asked me to leave their names out

but then i figured like, probably a little uncouth to have some names and not others

so i left them all out

wait one sec i gotta grab this bus

SP: Of course.

…

Some of the people like…

the families of the novelists

?

Have you been asked not to reveal the names of the novelists who are being murdered?

Sorry did you not get a seat…?

IPF: right, i get you, so basically what happened was they brought me into “the station,” and then inside “the station,” i was brought into a secondary room, interrogation vibes — single table, terrible overhead lighting, pissed off cops — and they did their back and forth for a bit, although, one of the things i’ve really gotten better at over the years is not internalizing other people’s emotions when they are clearly originating from somewhere deep inside them, and having little to do with me, which seemed to be the case in this instance, as they were less mad at me and more mad at the fact that “the feds” had arrived to take over the case, which i believe entails some sort of bureaucratic clusterfuck i am thankful not to be a part of

oh no sorry, got a seat, it just took me a while to spell “bureaucratic”

also i think the cops were confused because i was supposed to be the first dead novelist

like right at the start of the book

SP: Wait

…

Tea?

IPF: T, even!

it’s alright though

SP: So

What you are saying then

Is

It’s the Author?

IPF: (Posts a screenshot from It’s the Characters which reads “It’s the story!”)

as well

SP: It’s the Author

It’s the Story

It’s the Characters

But

It’s NOT the narrator?

IPF: sort of just a wrong place wrong time thing for her

and then maybe she made some bad decisions after that

shit happens, with basically idiomatic certainty

SP: Wow!

Well

How’s she doing now?

IPF: A little broken, but you have to keep living

think she gets that now

taking a new bus now one sec

SP: Lmk if you can’t get a seat.

Anyway

Sorry for the mixup earlier.

I hope you can understand.

IPF: i got one dw. think this teenager thought i was pregnant

SP: We have to look at all possible angles here.

IPF: all good!

yeah it’s important to do that

SP: While I have you though

Would you like to address the issue of the wetsuit?

IPF: her roommate’s a surfer

sometimes they leave those in the shower

SP: Okay we’ll have someone follow up on that.

IPF: sounds good

i don’t know his name

but i’ll help however else i can

SP: Much appreciated.

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