On Starting a Substack

A hopefully-not-too-annoyingly-meta piece about the Substack process thus far.

I would describe myself as tech literate but behind the curve. I didn’t join Facebook, for example, until 2009. I didn’t get a cell phone until 2005, and didn’t get a smartphone until 2014. I tend to be 5-7 years behind the technological cutting edge, and 2-3 years behind the cultural zeitgeist. 

I’m not suggesting this makes me better than early adopters: I mean, I get just as addicted as anyone once I pick up a new platform or technology. And before I had a cell phone, I’m pretty sure I was one of those annoying friends who called the one guy who had a cell phone anytime I needed to find out plans, like a former smoker always bumming just one from their still-smoking friends. I just tend to be behind: I think about how the platform might be of value (it usually kind of makes things better and in other ways makes things worse), I dither, I delay, I think about a bunch of other shit, I finally, after much overthinking, take the plunge. 

I bring this up just as a little context for my decision to try Substack. 

As soon as I became aware of Substack, I considered making one, though I don’t recall exactly when that was. I do know I had graduated from “thinking about writing/beating myself up for not writing” to “pretty consistently writing/sharing my work/sending it out,” a significant step.

Sidenote: Whenever I feel overwhelmed (often!) or like an imposter (frequently!) I remind myself that I’ve actually come a pretty long way, if for no other reason than I am in the habit of trying. And while trying is difficult and frustrating and uncomfortable, I can say that not trying feels worse. And it is easier to limit that vicious voice, the one that tells you to be daunted by the scope of a project, or by the volume of work in front of you. It’s still there, and sometimes it gets to me, but it’s less powerful than it used to be. 

I guess that’s a really long-winded way of describing why trying to live in that “perpetual beginnerness” has value. It keeps things in the proper perspective, which makes the act of creation enlivening. Without that perspective, it feels daunting as hell. 

Anyway, when I first started toying with the idea, I couldn’t decide what the newsletter would be about. It’s not like I was planning to send readers poems or stories. I wasn’t ready to share my novel-in-progress. So what the hell was I going to do? 

I knew one thing: I wanted to write about music. First, a few of the music-oriented pieces I’d posted on my earlier Patreon (a pandemic experiment) received an enthusiastic response from some readers (which, thank you!). But I’ve never considered myself a music writer (and I still don’t). I don’t do music journalism. I don’t write album reviews or interview musicians or write biographical pieces, though I enjoy reading all those forms. I haven’t edited an oral history (one of the great rock’n’roll forms, really). But I had a few ideas that felt promising. 

Could I use a newsletter as a landing spot for a different sort of writing? Something beyond my usual fare? I doubted that I could sustain a music-focused Substack for long, though. There are way better music writers to follow, people with connections, experiences, who have put in the time and effort for much longer than me. While I did (and do) think I have something to offer, it didn’t feel like the whole thing. Was there a way to make it a part of the thing?

I thought about it, composed an email telling friends and family the idea, and left that email unsent for about a year. During that time I also began my annual residency at the Visual Arts Center of Richmond, an experience I’ve spoken about at some length in this space already (to the archives, reader!).

But the residency meant that I suddenly had not just access to, but also permission and encouragement, to explore all these other mediums. And, I had the chance to display my progress and thus foreground the process of learning in the exhibition itself. Sort of this large-scale chance to be vulnerable, to get involved in the space in a new way, to make friends. Pretty early on in the residency I imagined presenting some small visual pieces in a little corner of the gallery during our group exhibition and calling the corner “A Beginner’s Mindset.”

I won’t belabor this point, which I’ve already made better elsewhere, but this was the turning point. It allowed me to reframe early intimidation with the visual arts as opportunities for learning and to see these opportunities for learning as ways of cultivating connection. And, by deciding to present some of this work, I could make the act of learning part of the finished product. This appealed to the teacher in me immensely. Typically, expert practitioners hide the learning, the technique, the process. By focusing on beginning, I would highlight those same elements of art-making that were usually not public facing. 

As a bonus, this attitude has been enormously helpful in maintaining perspective and momentum in my writing life as well. 

I must admit that my original plan was to use this theortetical Substack to document the residency, but the residency was too engrossing for too many reflective pauses, and I was still working three other part time jobs, playing in a couple of music projects, and both taking and teaching classes at VisArts. I also wanted to use my time at VisArts in those studios, not writing about being in them.

So, I delayed. Soon the only manageable choice presented itself: I decided I would use the culmination of the residency as the launch of the newsletter and go from there. 

That was all well and good of course, but it didn’t mean I suddenly knew how to use this platform. How to post on it, set up subscribers, activate a paid plan, promote it, etc. No idea, other than the few examples to which I’d subscribed. 

Again, I’m reasonably tech literate, but have also spent a lot of time arguing out loud with Microsoft Word and giving the literal finger to slow internet connections or ill-timed automatic updates. (I’m always reminded, when I think of any kind of tech learning, of staying up until, like, midnight, three school nights in a row, with my father as we stubbornly tried to figure out how to install a mid-90s D & D game onto our family computer. I remember it required using DOS, so pre-Windows 95, and that the game was on four floppy disks. Eventually a friend of mine came over and installed it for us. It took him 10 minutes. Something about having to manually install the mouse driver in DOS before launching the game or something. DOS! Fun!) 

A former version of me would have asked a friend, or taken a class, or checked out a book, or some version of all three. But this version of me decided that if I was going to start a newsletter about the concept of a beginner’s mindset I could at the very least apply that concept here and jump into this new venture feet first, and make the learning an essential part of what I wrote about. Could I really do that if I prepared and consulted experts before I started? If I did that, would I EVER start? 

If my old struggle with chronic pain has taught me anything, it is that an attitude of “fuck it” holds immense power. If you hurt no matter what you do, then you might as well do the things you dream about and do them right away.

So I wrote a post, signed up every friend whose email I could find (thank you, and apologies, by the way), and scheduled it. 

A few days later, I realized I ought to maybe write more than one thing before committing to delivering RIC* to you all on a regular basis, and resolved to cancel the automatic sendout and stock up a bit the following morning. 

Satisfied with this plan, I went to sleep. When I woke up and checked my email, I saw the post had already been sent. 

Too late. We were in it. 

Thanks for reading, as ever. Appreciate you!

*Rollicking Inbox Content