📩 In Today’s Email

• TL;DR - Creativity isn’t constant. It changes with your weather, outside and inside.

  The Deep Dive - The city without seasons. From endless summer to eternal spring and how I finally finished my 499-page novel.

  The Read - On Writing by Stephen King. The only book that belongs on every writer’s desk (other than maybe Rilke).

  The Stream - The Pigeon Tunnel. Errol Morris meets John le Carré in one of the most quietly electrifying creative interviews ever filmed.

🤿 The Deep Dive

Los Angeles is a blank slate in terms of seasons. This is one of the reasons movie studios thrived there, the endless summer. Easy to shoot.

I spent years on film sets and in production offices, script doctoring between shoots while palm trees stood shimmering in the light breeze outside the window. Sunlight was currency there, a daily performance of easy street.

I’d watch the same cloudless sky, under which nobody merged, frame the same unchanging palms and, maybe you will think I am about to say something inside me died, get all dramatic…

But no, it was wonderful!

The work was good. The weather was perfect. The surf was up. Life was good.

But somehow, without contrast, without rain, my mind flattened. No friction.

I didn’t realize how much I missed rain until I caught myself writing about it: every screenplay had rain orchestrating the background of the heaviest and most dramatic scenes. Like a filter.

Of course, the irony of complaining about a place with perfect weather, to a place with even more perfect weather! From endless summer to eternal spring.

Medellin has rain. And rain is when my own creativity comes alive. The air goes electric. The sky breaks open. The day is hidden. Streets shine like mirrors.

Then it’s over and the sun returns.

Something in me synced to it. I’d sit by the window, the city below, and words would move through me again, unforced and un-errored.

Rain became a metronome. Every drop saying, “go ahead, start again.”

And that’s when I finished my novel. Two days ago. 499 pages. I wanted to pad it to get to 500, but it stopped there, and it told me to stop. It had cost the whole year until now, not in a burst of discipline but in a daily cycle. Brick by brick. Word by word. Bird by bird.

The Myth of Endless Summer

We treat creativity like a permanent harvest. Online, everyone's producing daily, posting daily, optimizing daily. But nature doesn't work that way, and neither do we.

Real creativity moves through seasons:

Spring - curiosity, new ideas, false starts that matter
Summer - momentum, production, the work that shows
Autumn - editing, refinement, killing your darlings
Winter - rest, reflection, the space between projects

Endless output is just L.A. weather, beautiful, sterile, forgettable. The kind of productivity that looks perfect in screenshots.

How to Stay Creative (Without Burning Out)

1. Name your season. Are you blooming or pruning? Don't demand summer behavior from a winter mind. The fastest way to creative burnout is forcing spring energy in December.

2. Build rituals, not routines. Coffee and rain is a ritual; word-count spreadsheets are weather reports. One feeds the soul, the other just measures it.

3. Protect your winter. Don't share everything you make. Let roots grow unseen. Some of your best work will never see Instagram, and that's exactly why it matters.

4. Change the forecast. If you're stuck, change your light, your soundtrack, your view. Weather is portable. Sometimes the creative block is in your environment.

When I stopped chasing perfect conditions, my work got freer. Some days I write in thunder; some days in fog. Both count.

What Rain Taught Me

The rain proves you are not a god. You cannot summon it or stop it.

L.A. taught me the danger of endless sun. Medellín taught me something subtler, that even in eternal spring, you need the daily break. The storm that clears the air. The pause that lets you begin again.

Creativity needs light to grow and darkness to deepen. But it also needs rupture. The thing that stops you mid-sentence and makes you listen.

If you're in a creative drought right now, maybe you don't need more discipline.

Maybe you just need permission for a different season.

Or maybe you just need to let it rain.

What season is your creativity in right now? Hit reply and tell me. I read every response.

📢 Newsletter News

1. The Novel is Done.

499 pages, written between thunderstorms in Medellín. I’ll share more soon, including what I learned about endurance, madness, and why finishing feels less like an ending than a new beginning.

2. New YouTube Film: Danger Monk.

If you missed last week’s drop, it’s live on The Edward Effect. A cinematic confession about solitude, rebellion, and staying human in a machine world.

Watch it here → DANGER MONK

3. Coming Soon: The Art of Reinvention, Part IV.

The next piece in this four-part series, The Self Threshold, is next. Expect philosophy, psychology, and a few sharp edges.

4. Toolstack Update.

We’re testing a tighter AI + Notion workflow for ATN members. Including a new “Creative Systems Dashboard.” Early access details coming soon.

1. Internal ATN update

2. Another internal update

🌎 Visa Watch

• 🇸🇮 Slovenia to launch a Digital Nomad Visa, Nov 21, 2025

  Remote workers will be eligible for a one-year permit, though early reports suggest it won’t be renewable. 

• 🇲🇩 Moldova rolls out Remote Work Visa

  As of September 2025, Moldova officially added a digital nomad visa program allowing remote workers to live and work legally for up to two years. 

• 🇺🇸 New H-1B visa fee jump

  President Trump signed a proclamation raising the annual fee for new H-1B visa applications to $100,000 (from ~$215), as part of a broader immigration policy overhaul.

🤓 The Read - On Writing: A Memoir of the Craft by Stephen King

The only difference between any old writer and a literary writer is the same as the only difference between any old person and a supermodel. One was born with higher cheekbones. Out of their control, in other words.

This, in his true-to-form everyday working-class metaphors, is both funny and how Stephen King defends his own writing, in case you dared ask why this self-ordained “shit-shoveler” dared write a book about writing.

If you've ever tried to explain how writing works, or why you keep doing it even when it's miserable, On Writing is the book you hand people.

It's half memoir, half craft manual, and all Stephen King: funny, sharp, unpretentious, and sneakily profound.

In a coincidence that doesn't work well in fiction, while writing this book, a walking King was struck by a van. The driver, as King puts it, seemed straight out of one of his novels, as if one of his characters had come alive. This elevates the book beyond a how-to guide into an existential study of life, death, and why we write at all.

He starts with childhood, addiction, near-death, and rejection letters, and somehow turns all of it into a story about survival through storytelling. It's the only how-to book that reads like a rock song.

It's a brutal, hilarious truth that feels more freeing than discouraging. Talent matters, but work, daily, unglamorous work, matters more.

He defends his style with the same clarity he writes with: clean prose, big heart, no tricks. Yet anyone who's read 'Salem's Lot or The Body knows the man can be literary when he wants to be, just without the pretense. His his detail, his dialogue, his grasp on your spine, they all spin with that strange electricity that only happens when you write honestly about fear and grace in the same breath.

On Writing is still the best book for writers, except maybe Rilke's Letters to a Young Poet. If Rilke gives you the soul, King gives you the shovel.

🦜 Rio’s Corner

🍿 The Stream - The Pigeon Tunnel (Apple TV+)

A no-good gambling father sends his son to pick up a bag of money in dangerous circumstances and deliver it to him. The father cannot believe it possible, against human nature even, that his own son, David, would not have stolen a small handful.

But David had not. His father gave him five pounds for the delivery.

Talk about a loaded psychological scene. Were I to turn this into a fictional movie, not a documentary, that would be my establishing scene.

What better way to sum up the psychological collapse on all sides of David Cornwell, who later adopted the pen name for which he became famous as the anti-Ian Fleming spy novelist: John le Carré.

If On Writing is about how stories are made, The Pigeon Tunnel is about how a life becomes one.

Directed by Errol Morris (the master documentarian behind The Fog of War and The Thin Blue Line), this film captures John le Carré in his final long conversation before death. Morris, with his signature patient intensity, frames le Carré not as a man confessing but as one dissecting the human condition with surgical calm.

Le Carré's story sounds too good to be true for forging a spy novelist, though not necessarily a life someone else would want: the son of a conman who became a spy who became a novelist. He knew deception from every angle: the moral gray of Cold War intelligence, the performance of diplomacy, down to the small lies that keep ordinary lives intact. Yet unlike so many who wander into the dark and stay there, he never lost his moral tether. He studied corruption without surrendering to it.

That's what makes his novels endure: the understanding that the line between truth and manipulation is not a wall but a fog you must navigate. His creative genius wasn't fantasy. It was empathy sharpened by experience.

Watching The Pigeon Tunnel feels like listening to an elder season of creativity, one that's less about output and more about reflection. A level of confidence, calm, and mastery very few reach. It reminds you that storytelling isn't invention, it's excavation: digging through memory and motive until you find the small, beating truth underneath.

🛤️ Outtro

Reinvention begins not with where you land, but with what you make.

Every place is a blank page. What you write there? That’s your legacy.

If this newsletter sparked something, pass it on to a friend, a fellow explorer, or anyone rewriting their life.

This community grows through real connection. One story, one share at a time.

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See you next week. Don’t Escape. Design.