My name is Andrew, and I use this Substack to share stories and learn from other writers. I am the author of The Wheel, a serialized novella about loss, grief, and the way forward.
Thanks for reading!
Friends, family, subscribers…the winds of change are shifting, and I’m letting them carry me. If you haven’t read one of my posts in a while, I’d encourage you to stick with me on this one. It won’t be long.
I started this Substack almost a year and a half ago. It’s been a wild ride since then. I’ve used this space to try a lot of things, because, as I said early on, I joined Substack to grow, to do new stuff, and to get myself out into the digital world a little more. Some of those things worked, some didn’t. Some resonated with my Substack friends, and some worked better for my direct friends and family.
One of the things I tried last year was a series called “On Writers”. A guy named Jay Wilcox was my very first guest, and our live interview turned out to be fateful in the best way. Neither of us had any clue what we were getting ourselves into; we only knew that we had to figure it out in front of a (small) live audience. Considering we didn’t know each other at all, it was an absolute shock to me when Jay and I hit it off immediately, had an absolute blast on air, and began to learn things about each other that seemed really telling. For instance, we are both guitar players, our favorite guitar player is David Gilmour, we are dads, we love Stephen King…I could go on, but the biggest one was that we had immediate chemistry on camera.
Days after our first video, Jay and I connected again. I tentatively offered that I’d been thinking that we should do a podcast together and, to my surprise, he said he’d been thinking the same thing. The stars were beginning to align, but the kaleidoscope had to be twisted a little further. Jay and I stayed in touch, frequently sharing our enthusiasm to do something together, but with no clear idea of what that should be. Months later, we began to have new ideas, then we started to try them, then we realized it was time to start a new Substack publication.
Why?
Well, here’s the deal:
I’m not a big stats guy anymore. I used to watch my stats pretty closely until I decided it didn’t matter. However, I did notice a shift as I branched out into the Substack universe more, and it presented a bit of a problem.
I was posting all sorts of stuff, but it really fell into three categories: Me Stuff, Story Stuff, and Community Stuff.
What started to become clear is that there wasn’t a lot of crossover among these things. Family latched onto the “Me Stuff,” Substack friends reacted to the “Community Stuff,” and everyone decided that the “Story Stuff” was take it or leave it.
So Jay and I decided that when we launched a new publication to host all our live, podcasty content, we wouldn’t import all of our current subscribers. It’s a bit of a risk because we could have started with 500+ people, but we opted to start with zero—let’s build it and see if they will come. More importantly, let’s not bombard our friends and family with a whole bunch of crap they don’t really care about.
I’ll get into all the “Me Stuff” and “Story Stuff” in an upcoming post, but for now, I would like to announce that Jay and I have officially launched our new publication! It’s called Prompt Response with Jay & Andrew and has a completely ridiculous logo. Why? Because we wanted to throw something out there and then dare everyone else to do something better. Here’s the logo, and our very brief introductory post:
So, what does this all mean?
Well, if you are in my current subscriber list and would like to keep tabs on what Jay and I are doing, click on the post above, subscribe, and restack it for your audience.
If you couldn’t give two shits about all that Substacky, podcasty, middle-aged dad crap in 2026, know that I won’t be inundating you with Substack and writing specific posts anymore.
That’s really it!
I hope that you’ll happily subscribe to Prompt Response with Jay & Andrew, or happily ignore it in favor of a more curated Andrew Thomas experience. God, that sounds pretentiously arrogant. Please know that it’s not.
Either way, thanks for being here, thanks for reading, and I hope you benefit from this separation a bit, regardless of which side of the spectrum you fall on.
Nice art Jay 😃
Hell (and I cannot stress this enough) yeah 😎