What's Next
Planning a project 2025 but not the one that destroys America and stuff
Before I started typing this sentence, the Word document holding all the essays I’ve posted here since July of last year, not including the short fiction pieces, contained 203,179 words.
I’ve written close to three novels’ worth of words in about seventeen months, and for all of 2024, I put three-fourths of all that behind a paywall. I only got one or two overt complaints about that, one of which is a whole future entry on its own. A bunch of folks jumped on board immediately to support my time and effort, and almost all of those people stuck around till now, which is gratifying.
But I didn’t get a ton of new folks after that initial rush. I haven’t done much on the Substack app itself to promote myself, and I should. Telling people on Facebook and Threads about this place seems to be a nonstarter. I’ve walled off my Facebook to friends-only, and any of them that are comin’ aboard here are already on deck. I can’t imagine too many of the folks I did a comedy show with once in 2014, or who worked a PTA function with me when our kids were in second grade, are still following me, much less eager to read my rambling four days a week.
I’m a middle-aged man who surrounds himself with antiquated shit. I’m gonna always be guilty of, for lack of a better term, legacy thinking. When I was coming up, banging out this much prose a week in column form was a respectable way to earn a living. You might not remember Art Buchwald or Mike Royko, but maybe Mitch Albom would ring a bell. I always thought that’d be a swell job to have.
But time sucks the life out of just about any profession. One of my best friends spent the first half of his life preparing to be a professional movie critic for a daily newspaper, and was almost there, just in time for that job to no longer exist.
You know what he does now? He writes a blog on the internet about it. We might as well get together once a week and fashion buggy whips out of leather, or haul icebox ice around in a horse-drawn wagon.
“I’m not famous enough” would be a pretty gross complaint to levy at you, the person who’s read this far already, and that’s not what I’m on about. I’ve spent the last couple months trying to figure out exactly what it is that’s been vaguely bugging me about the process, and I don’t think it’s that.
My readership here is in the low dozens, with the occasional spike on free days, but that’s not it either. If anything, I’m getting more sanguine about “reach” as I get older. If I wrote a print book instead, how many well-intentioned friends would buy it and never crack it open? If I fluked my way into enough notoriety to sell a bunch of copies, how many of them would wind up at Goodwill six months later?
But I do see the numbers and I can tell you almost nobody’s reading all four columns, every week, week in and out. And I can’t blame you. That’s a lot of me yappin’!
I think I’m gonna cut the Saturday column for 2025, focusing on three pieces a week. If anyone who’s paid for a subscription does object, reach out to me personally (no judgement!) and we’ll figure something out.
I appreciate your support, and I want you to be here because you’re getting something out of this. I want to provide a service. I don’t think giving you too much homework every week meets that goal, so let’s see how three a week goes.
I’m also gonna dig back into fiction in 2025. One of my big failures on the vaunted 2024 to-do list was the stories I intended to finish and publish this year. It’s not surprising – when you’re writing 200,000 words of personal observations, you’re not creating any characters. I also centered retro games and my coding work this year, and got a lot done in that realm, including the launch of my weekly video series. But again, none of that’s a novel.
I really like the idea of putting up novel excerpts one day a week! But I’ve tried it before and the interest doesn’t seem to be there. I may still give it a shot anyway. It could just be that people chat me up less about fiction posts than about things that I saw or experienced in real life. But it’s been an unexpected evolution in this space, which used to be mainly a vehicle for that kind of writing, and has now become more like one of those newspaper columns I mentioned earlier.
We’ll do four this week, including a column Christmas Day that you can read while escaping your relatives, and starting next Monday we’ll switch to three. Monday will stay free, and the subscription price will not change (I can’t make it any lower on this platform).
I’ve gotta close here and get some sleep, but I’ve got more old computer game tape stories to work on tomorrow, plus a trip to Detroit to revisit Mike’s Famous Ham Place and see how it’s faring under new ownership. I shouldn’t run out of things to talk about, this week anyway, and beyond that, we’ll see what’s left of the world next year together.
