I’m gonna be taking a break from this thing till December and will be doing weekly reruns until then. (Nothing that’s ever appeared here will be reposted, of course.)
The long and short of it: I haven’t been writing any fiction lately, and that’s really the stuff I most want to write. (For anyone who didn’t follow me onto Substack from elsewhere, I write novels, and I’d like to think I’m better at them than I am at thinkpiecing.)1 I literally have three separate piles of chapters for three separate novels I’d like to develop, and and I’ve been flitting between them, trying to figure out which has the most potential—and I’ve been finding it difficult to shift gears lately. As soon as I get in a groove where I feel like I can make progress in what I’m doing, four or five days have gone by since I last updated this thing. So I’ll throw something together and then get back to what I was doing before, and it’ll be slow going because I’ve taken myself out of that headspace. Two or three days later, I’ll start to pick up steam again—and then another day or two will pass, and it’s time to think about updating again and I haven’t given a moment’s consideration to what I should write about.
So I’ll be turning my attention to fiction for a bit. In the meantime, I’m going to ponder how to make this thing work better for me. I do enjoy writing this stuff, but I need to make it a bit less bandwidth-intensive if I’m going to juggle it with writing fiction. (It’s really just too bad that I also have to work five days a week.) Either I need to learn how to do shorter, pithier posts for real this time, or otherwise settle for more sporadic updates. (And actually I’d be curious to know which of the two anyone actually reading this stuff might prefer.)
I really should put up some evergreen links to the damn things.
I discovered this Substack relatively recently (I'm familiar with your writing from that sublime Rise and Fall of Final Fantasy you wrote, I think I saw it first on Hardcore Gaming and then continued to read it on SMPS). I'm hoping to have more time to read your work over the holiday season this year. I'd be happy with either of the two options you present, and if you ever feel the need to go to a paid subscription, I would definitely be on board.
Fwiw, I had a really great experience reading Zeroes: The Reunion last year, one of the best times I’ve ever had with a novel and one of the things that made me decide I needed to commit myself to writing. Personally, I would like to read longer posts more than sporadic updates but I understand how it is fitting things into a cramped schedule so do what you think is best of course.