I’ve come to realize two things about my writing life.
I hate - HATE - maintaining a newsletter. In the deepest, darkest, cobwebbiest corners of my soul, I am an introvert, and newsletters feel to much to me like knocking on someone’s door, being invited in, and then starting on some kind of sales spiel. Even if I’m invited, I’m never going to quit squirming in my seat because of how uncomfortable I am.
I love - LOVE - blogging. Back in the Livejournal days, I found it super easy to sit down and knock out a blog post on a pretty frequent basis. For me, it was a place to share thoughts and if people enjoyed hearing them, that was a bonus. I didn’t see it as a marketing tool or a way to sell things, it (blogging) was just fun and helped me connect.
So, now there’s Substack…
My original thoughts here were that I would use this platform to practice writing, getting in the swing of a regular writing practice. I planned to write from prompts, both fiction and nonfiction, and give people a “behind the scenes” glimpse at my stuff.
I may still do this, but there were, again, two things that occurred to me.
I have contractual obligations for which I’m already behind. I could a) ignore them and do creative writing here (probably not). I could b) work on them here which, knowing my editors/publishers, would probably not be their first choice.
Who the heck actually wants to read my personally-generated slush pile? I wouldn’t. When I was Livejournalling, I would occasionally post a little poem or microfiction or snippet from a work in progress, and I may do that here, but I don’t think that’s going to be the focus. As a reader, there are MANY authors I absolutely love and adore and will buy every single next book they release. Of that cohort, there are ZERO authors I’m interested in reading their rough draft (unless they’re paying me to edit it.)
What the heck WILL I be writing about?
I’ve realized two things when I was thinking about if I wanted to keep Substacking (is that what they’re calling it?)
I LOVE reading, reading books, talking about books, talking about reading books, talking about buying books that I will someday read, talking with other readers (and subconsciously measuring TBR piles…), and basically having literary conversations.
I have a wide-ranging collection of interests, and I find that when I share those interests, I connect with people.
With that in mind, I am going to be restarting my podcast, On the Shelf, which will link here. My focus there is talking about the books I’ve read with people who also enjoy reading. I have done some author interviews, some of which I still intend to edit and post, but mostly it will be my fun online book club where I get to talk to people who enjoy reading and we can share our love of books.
Also, I plan to be doing more personal blogging here instead of trying to maintain a newsletter. Yes, I will share news about upcoming releases, my writing journey, appearances, etc. I’ll probably also share some behind-the-scenes thoughts as I go through the writing process (right now, I’m working on a military science fiction short story, the next book in my anti-fascist secret agent werewolf series, The Rick Keller Project, an unnamed, uncontracted military horror novel, as well as my editing efforts for Falstaff Dread.)
But what will I actually be writing about? To get me started, I was super sneaky and asked my Facebook feed: If we could sit down together and chat, what would you like to chat about? What would you like to talk about?
I got a bunch of great answers, and those answers have been collected into a list that I will be using for inspiration. But I’ll also be talking about things like - leaving my retail job to return to corporate America, my current educational focus (or hyper focus, I mean, let’s be real), my hobbies, trying to get back to regular working out, books I’m reading, music concerts my spouse and I attend, fun conventions we’re going to (hello, DragonCon!) and pretty much anything else.
So yeah, that’s what I’m planning. We’ll see how it goes.
And if you’re reading this, and think that sounds fun, hit the “subscribe” button. Or not.
And let me know — if we were going to sit down together and chat, what would you want to talk about?
W00t! Looking forward to seeing what you do here. Maybe it’ll inspire me to finally do something over here too.