I've had almost weekly bouts of insomnia lately, and to those of you who deal with this on a more frequent basis, I tip my sleeping mask to thee. (I don't use one of those, but if you have a sleeping mask for the brain that isn't covering one lobe with gin and the other with tonic, let me know.) I'm not sure if the insomnia was from Mickey-17 (yep), Reservoir Dogs (yep), Sundial (yes, Catriona Ward, you stole sleep from me with your beautifully intense writing), but last night we watched Crocodile Dundee and I can tell you it wasn't that which stole my sleep.
It was writing.
To quote Mr. Dundee himself, “Ah, no. I thought I’d go walkabout”…through my writing life tonight. It's been a while, so I'd like to get a look at the new growth that’s come up and some of the stuff that's been chopped down.
I've written some new stories recently, and that felt good. I enjoy, or at least can get behind, most aspects of the writing process, but writing something new might be the most gratifying. I say "might" because I'm honestly not sure anymore. That's what I used to think, and that's the sexy thing to say, but man, I struggled with this last story.
First, there was Violet, which I posted here. It is so short that it almost doesn't count and was almost entirely fun—even just posting something brand new to Substack was a thrill—but then I dove into a story that was more science fiction-minded and I developed an eye twitch. Literally, I had an eye twitch a total of three times in one week, and two of them came upon me like a sudden squall when working on this story. I finally got to the end though, and I'm convinced it sucks. Who knows. I'll find out someday. What I do know is that, at about 16,000 words, it's another awkward length piece of potential dreck that has no real place in the world. I've learned that your story either has to be under 8,000 words or between about 60,000 and 90,000 in order to get anything useful out of it. Useful.
(You can see the stress tendrils working their way into this whole writing thing, right?)
Oh, and I spy another new sprig jumping out of the loam...would you look at that? It's a rather fun interview series I kicked off with my wife. It centers on her art, and it's become a delightful little way to do something new and get both of our talents out into the world at the same time.
Otherwise, I have three vastly different projects in wildly different stages.
Gull Island: Oh, is this one seductive! I still can't believe I haven't read this story, but my writing project plate has been so full. After much hemming and hawing, I decided to give it a go this last weekend at our family cottage in the U.P. After all, it was there that I started writing it EXACTLY ONE YEAR TO THE DAY before I opened up the PDF and began reading. The problem was, the weather wasn't great, and there was no way I could focus enough in a small cottage full of six people and a dog to give it the attention it needed. In the end, I read enough (a few pages) to know that I'm going to love and hate reading it again in equal measure once I can dedicate the proper brain space to it.
The Wheel: Jenelle and I are still mulling over the art for this story. I recently broke it into more digestible sections for you all, and it will now span the length of sixteen different Substack posts, rather than nine. My wife has a lot of jobs, and letting her hubby demand that she help him chase flimsy dreams should be less than a side gig, so we are working through how we can take sixteen posts—sixteen chapters—and make them into a manageable number of art pieces.
On that note, I need your help. The goal in chopping The Wheel up even further was to get every section within 1500-3000 words. This will ensure you don't have to read for too long each time a new section drops. My question is: how often would you like to see new installments, considering that I will probably post unrelated content at least once or twice throughout the process?
Rue: This one, my novel, is almost there. I've gotten great feedback on draft three (three?), and I think it might be time to start farming this thing out to agents. Scary.
This is where we get to the part where things aren't growing or being maintained, but rather chopped down. I've done all sorts of reading and listening about the publishing industry/process lately, and continue to find that my already massively reset expectations are still too lofty. In a nutshell, even if you do get a book deal (which is very hard), it means next to nothing other than a few more dollars in your pocket. A book deal does not mean anything in the way of future success or income.
Hello, day job! I've done some soul searching and determined that you, while you aren't young and sexy anymore, do load the dishwasher and change the sheets from time to time. Oh, and you love me back. Thank you, my svelte lady!
I'm noticing I have a toxic pattern with this whole writing thing: I start off by saying, "I'm doing this for fun and that's it!" and over time, fun starts to take a back seat to expectations for the future. Writing stories for fun turned into writing stories so I can quit my day job and write full-time. Writing on Substack for fun turned into trying to build a platform, worrying about how to monetize it, and questioning if I even should. “Andrew I Thomas’s Substack” turned into, “how can I brand this thing to be more than just Andrew I Thomas’s Substack?" I've read all the pieces on here about why I’m not gaining a bunch of new subscribers and how to monetize and it's all the most worthless bullshit, in my opinion. Sure, there are individuals on here who have so much to offer and should be paid for that. Sure, there are people who have a niche—an expertise—and we can benefit from them on this platform, but I'm not one of those people. Trying to be one of these people sounds like the most draining, least fun thing in the world.
This brings me to the latest thing that has cost me sleep: my brand.
I really wanted to be cool and name this Substack something interesting. I even settled on a name inspired by my song Grey (lyrics and origin here) but in between the idea and waiting for Jenelle to wrap up a few business commitments so she could create the art for it, I decided it was a shitty idea.
While I was trying to fall asleep last night, I thought about Wes Anderson's The French Dispatch. How idyllic would it be, I thought, to work for a small newspaper, writing stories alongside passionate writers and editors, bringing light and color to the world?
It's not the first time I've had this thought, but it is the first time since I've had a website, since I've been searching for a label to brand myself with. Then I thought about the vignettes in the movie, and it all hit home for me. There are true-to-life stories, fictional stories, over-the-top whimsical stories, and stories about art.
In some way or another, that's what I've got here, right? Even if I don’t check every box?
I haven’t settled on a brand yet, but I can tell you that I’m going to keep writing this array of content that I have been writing for the last ten months. I'm not going to try and find a niche, I'm not going to spout breathy, generalized validations to my fellow writers, but you can be sure that I'm going to keep having fun.
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Well put. You've captured what it's like to be on Substack for any extended period of time ❤️
The great thing about substack is that word length doesn’t matter for a serial! Screw publishing norms, give us however many words you want