And Yet.

I have two literary tattoos. The first is Kurt Vonnegut's asterisk on my hand, a reminder to write clearly and respect the reader. The second is smaller, two words, tucked against my collarbone where only I notice it most days.

Freshly tattooed in Kaiserslautern, Germany, 2022

"And yet."

From Nicole Krauss's novel The History of Love. The character Leo Gursky is a Holocaust survivor and an elderly locksmith living alone in New York. He’s invisible to the world and he is lonely. He’s facing the end of his life. And yet.

Leo taps his radiator every night so his neighbor knows he’s still alive. He writes. He remembers. He refuses to fully fade away. The phrase "and yet" runs through his narration as a quiet, stubborn refusal to give up. It isn’t optimism though. Optimism assumes things will work out. Leo has no reason to assume anything will work out. Instead of optimism, "and yet" is just the opposite of giving up.

Why Those Words Stay With Me

We moved to Thailand in 2017 with four suitcases and no real plan beyond Halie’s 2-year contract. Everyone told us it was risky. And yet. We moved to Germany in 2020 during a pandemic. Everyone told us it was the worst timing. And yet. We moved to China in 2023 when most expats were leaving, while Halie was pregnant. Everyone told us we were crazy. And yet.

"And yet" doesn’t assume success. It just refuses to stop. The sentence is not finished. The story is not over. The reasonable thing is to quit, but here is one more clause.

That’s what this tattoo means to me. Resilience. Survival. The choice to keep going even when no one is watching.

What This Has to Do With Writing

Copywriting is a series of "and yet" moments. The client rejects your first headline. And yet you write a second. The brief is confusing. And yet you ask questions instead of walking away. The market is crowded. And yet you find an angle no one else has used.

The writers who succeed are not the most talented. They are the ones who keep writing the next sentence. The ones who look at a blank page, feel the weight of it, and type "and yet" before continuing anyway.

My Vonnegut tattoo is about clarity and discipline. My "And yet." tattoo is about persistence. One tells me how to write. The other tells me why to keep writing.

One More Thing

In The History of Love, Leo Gursky writes a book for his lost love, Alma. She never reads it. She never knows he wrote it. He kept the manuscript in a drawer for fifty years. And yet.

So here I am. Still writing. Still editing. Still sending emails that might be ignored. Still pitching clients who might say no. And yet.

Let's Work Together

If you need copy that keeps going when other writers would stop, I am your guy. Website copy, blog posts, email newsletters, cultural localization, editing for non-native English speakers. I bring clarity, persistence, and a few literary tattoos to every project.

Send me an email. Let's write the next sentence together.