It's the weeeeeeekend! And, it's ze perfect time for: Cutting your toenails Finding a VCR to play back your dance recital from the 80s 🧑🩰 Dusting exactly one shelf Making a strong-ass pitcher of margaritas Andddddd! Waking up early tomorrow morning and busting out a supercool new website for yourself that looks like it's actually THE YEAR 2026 and WILL SELL YOUR STUFF FASTER THAN A VAT OF VERMONT CREAMY CULTURED SEA SALT BUTTER 🧈 BECAUSE PEOPLE ACTUALLY TRUST THAT YOU ARE A REAL, LEGITIMATE...
8 days ago • 2 min read
Yesterday, I set up an experiment. 🧪 I asked Claude to re-do my 2025 books. It automatically connected to my Quickbooks account (I had to sign in and give permission), connected to Stripe and Paypal, pulled 2,957 transactions from five bank accounts, uploaded them all, and categorized everything in the same time it took me to go upstairs and wash my skull. (Don't you hate when your hair, like, hurts???) Here's the fun part: My bookkeeper already did my 2025 books. The numbers turned out the...
9 days ago • 1 min read
Yesterday I stopped in a General Store—like, a real live General Store—and I bought a coffee and the bill was $3.16 and I handed the girl $4, and then she gave me a dollar back and said: "I'll just take the sixteen cents from the penny dish. Have a nice day!" And I looked at her like she had just flashed me. 👀 I had forgotten how things were around here. It's an innocence. Even though she probably thought I was just some jabroni from New Jersey (I wear black in extreme proportions), her...
15 days ago • 4 min read
It's the age-old question: What should I write in my emails? And, I have a freaky new answer. But first, let's back this beef train up. 🚃 Last week, I told Claude to check my email every hour and ping me about any important emails that would benefit from an immediate reply. My literary agent writes me, for example. Or a journalist wants to interview me. Or a client is having an issue. Or I've received an invitation from Phil Rosenthal to come hang out with him in New York. (Dreams, bitches.)...
16 days ago • 4 min read
You know what is more annoying than the skin tag(s) I had removed this morning? (SO! GROSS! GETTING! OLD!) When your checkout page gives people *the black screen of deaaaaathhhhhh*. Woke up to 22 emails of people telling me, "Ash! Wait! I want to take your Claude Design class! But when I go to checkout, it's giving.....black screen." Which is exactly what I was hoping would happen. 😆 That's just perrrrfect. Love being a creator. Love having that happen. (In my 17 years doing this, I would say...
17 days ago • 1 min read
[ARCHIVE URL GOES HERE] Anyone remember the white screen of death? Back when I started blogging in 2009, I had to figure out how to code my own Wordpress site. Even so much as getting your posts to be centered in the side bar was a shitshow. I'd sit there in my friend's basement, where I lived in grad school, up at 11 o'clock at night, banging my head against the screen, Googling CSS, hunting through the theme files, and then inevitably deleting something very, very, very wrong. 🤣 I kept it...
23 days ago • 7 min read
[ARCHIVE URL GOES HERE] Okay, okay, okay, I have a THESIS. (How long have I been waiting to type that?) (Answer: Since 2009 when my grad school professor told me we were doing a capstone project instead of a thesis. 🙄 That guy hated me. He looked like a less attractive Stanley Tucci. I can still picture his puckered little haughty mouth, just jam-packed with disdain.) So, my thesis is this. You know how I've been yammering on for years and years and LONG INTERNET YEARS about using email...
24 days ago • 3 min read
My best friend Kendal is f*cking fantastic at three things (are you like this, too?): Going—completely—with the flow. You could be stuck in an airport for 3 days in Cairo, Egypt, with greasy hair and lost luggage and body parts that smell more like pig parts, and she would totally just be sitting there in a great mood with her journal, doodling ideas, drinkin' an IPA, not a care in the world. Making friends with LITERALLY ANYONE. Except, with her luck, she always ends up making friends with,...
2 months ago • 6 min read
You ever go to write an email to your list (or your imaginary list, lol) and suddenly you turn into the world's biggest sack? I know. Great visual. But, it's sooooooooo true: you ever have that happen? You sit down to write an email that's fun, that's real, that will "help you connect with your audience," but suddenly your butt clenches up, and your throat goes dry, and you suddenly transform into a geriatric biophysicist in a brown tweed coat, tobacco pipe in mouth, getting ready to read...
2 months ago • 3 min read
Two things in life I would completely eliminate if given a magic wand: Cockroaches Pushy people First of all, cockroaches are violent little warlords. PTSD from too many years living in Central America. Also, lobsters are 100% related to cockroaches, which means that every time I see one on a table, IT'S THE ONLY THING I CAN THINK ABOUT. Secondly, the pushy people. What a group. You ever have that person in your life who just won't accept your "no?" They invite you to do something—say, come...
2 months ago • 5 min read