Halftank Fuel from Mary Carns

Fuel from Mary Carns and Halftank Studio Most people picture a book editor as someone who double checks your Oxford commas and tells you your writing is beautiful. The reality is closer to someone handing you back a puzzle and saying: I think some of these pieces belong to a different box. As a writer, I need the latter. I started writing about workplace dysfunction as a series of Medium articles. That format has its own logic: you make one point, you land it, you're done. An article is a...

Fuel from Mary Carns and Halftank Studio What would you call a boss who takes calls from his realtor during Zoom calls, without muting himself, during pandemic-era Zoom calls when everyone is terrified of getting fired or worse? I could use a lot of curse words to describe him, but to describe him to people I now call him Mr. Beach House. Thinking about, then writing, a memoir meant that I carried around a cast of characters for years: the people, the companies, the situations. And when I...

Fuel from Mary Carns and Halftank Studio There's a moment that happens reliably on critique day. The student who has been confident all semester — the one with strong opinions, the one who always has something to say — goes quiet. Their work is on the wall. The room is looking at it. And they are suddenly, visibly, somewhere else entirely. I taught introductory graphic design for three semesters as an adjunct at George Mason University School of Art. Critique days were when I learned the...

Fuel from Mary Carns and Halftank Studio My editor's note was diplomatic, the way good editors are. It arrived first as a comment in the Google Doc — a small flag in the margin — and then again in a letter, which told me he'd thought about it carefully enough to write it down twice. The ending of my memoir, he said, was too dark. He wasn't wrong. I'd written thirteen chapters about nine layoffs across fifteen years, about being labeled a bad fit so many times I started to wonder if the label...

Fuel from Mary Carns and Halftank Studio You saw them. Every single one. The interviewer kept checking their phone. The vague answer about why the last person left this role. The way everyone on the team looked exhausted in that final round. You saw it all and took the job anyway. This isn't about them. This is about you. After nine layoffs, I've gotten uncomfortably good at spotting dysfunction during interviews. I can read the room like a survival skill now: the tiny hesitations, the...

Fuel from Mary Carns and Halftank Studio I had layoff brain for a very VERY long time. Think of your brain after a layoff like a phone that's been dropped one too many times. It still works, technically. You can make calls and end texts. But the battery drains faster than it should, the screen sometimes freezes for no reason, and certain apps just refuse to open anymore. You've learned to work around these glitches so automatically that you've forgotten they're not normal operating...

I’ve spent fifteen years paying a bill I never agreed to. It’s the cost of being fluent in two languages that should speak to each other but refuse to learn. On one side: creative thinking. The ability to see what doesn’t exist yet, to hold ambiguity long enough for patterns to emerge, to know that the best solutions rarely arrive in the first meeting. On the other: business logic. The need for certainty, measurable outcomes, clear timelines, and decisions made yesterday. Both are legitimate...