HeyJaredMysterious Goings On with Alex Greenwood
Explore the world of creativity and writing with Mysterious Goings On with J. Alexander Greenwood. Named a 2022 Top 5 Literature Podcast by CrowdUltra and a "New & Noteworthy" show by Apple Podcasts in 2016, this show is a magnet for top-selling authors and creative minds.
- Indexed episodes, last 90 days
- 6
- Latest publication
- Sep 12, 2026
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- Earliest in this view
- Jul 22, 2026
Latest episodes
Death by Snails and the Heart of a Movie with Lucas Hardwick (opens the original)
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What makes a movie work—even when it seemingly shouldn’t?Film critic, screenwriter and returning Mysterious Goings On favorite Lucas Hardwick joins Alex Greenwood to discuss his debut book, Death by Snails, Volume 2: How to Watch Anything Through the Art and Majesty of Film Criticism. A finalist for the Rondo Hatton Classic Horror Award for Best Book, Death by Snails collects five years of Lucas’ writing on more than 100 films, ranging from Apocalypse Now, The Birds and American Psycho to forgot
What Keeps Running When You're Not in the Room (opens the original)
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Bob ran the invoices for twenty-two years. Then he retired on a Friday, and by Tuesday nobody could open the spreadsheet. This week it's a solo episode: three essays from the Radical Competency lane of my Substack, All the Fits That's News, read back to back for the first time. On their own they're about a small business I ran for fourteen years, a guy named Bob and my first newsroom job on the obituary desk in 1991. Together they turn out to be the same story, told three ways: the operating ins
James M. Scott on Empire of Ashes (opens the original)
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The bomb ended the war in one sentence. The real story took five months and a president three weeks into the job. Everybody thinks they know this ending: two cities, two bombs, one date, case closed. James M. Scott has spent twenty years proving otherwise. He's a Pulitzer Prize finalist, New York Times bestseller, and the author of Black Snow , Rampage , Target Tokyo , The War Below , and The Attack on the Liberty (plus Targeted: Beirut , co-written with Jack Carr) . He teaches as scholar in res
How Matty Dalrymple Turned Substack Readers Into Beta Readers (opens the original)
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What if readers paid to help you make your next novel better? Author, podcaster and indie publishing advocate Matty Dalrymple returns to Mysterious Goings On to explain how she serialized her seventh Ann Kinnear suspense novel on Substack, releasing one chapter a day for six weeks to paying subscribers. Matty walks Alex through the mechanics of the experiment: how she structured free and paid access, encouraged reader feedback, navigated Substack’s subscription quirks and used comments to fine-t
Everybody Wants a Piece of You (opens the original)
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Everybody wants a piece of you. At some point, that stops feeling like flattery and starts feeling like a bill coming due. This episode, Alex steps away from author interviews for essays on what happens when being good at something quietly turns into being available for anything. One essay looks outward, at the moment a favor stops being a favor. The other looks inward, at what it costs to keep saying yes long after yes stopped being free. Plus updates on speaking gigs , and a preview of what's
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