Hi. How were your holidays? How are you doing?
I’m doing well. It was nice little break, though I have to confess I did end up doing a lot of work on a lot things when I was supposed to be taking it easy. I guess that’s the curse of the eternal freelancer, you’re never sure where the work ends and the break begins.
I originally intended to have a different topic today. The first newsletter of the year was supposed to be a long demonstration in text of Every Sentence Is A Camera, but I’m not happy with how it’s coming together (I’m worried it comes across like I’m too negative about the examples) so I’m holding that off for now. Then I had planned to put together a pretty short piece on why you need to roll up your sleeves and get emotionally messy and vulnerable with your art, but it ended up being too angry about Substack being pro-Nazi, which I felt got whiny. So I’ll take those thoughts and transmogrify them for later.
Instead, I’m going to take the advice of several people and lay out some plans and goals.
My audience, at the time I’m writing this, is just under 100 people, which is a number I thought would always be really far away but is now just on the horizon. That’s a great feeling. Looking at who makes up that nearly 100 people, most of you have known me for years, either because we go way back in gaming or Twitter or because you’re now or you have been clients. I’m so thankful and grateful to you all for being here.
It always feels weird when I open a Secret Weapon with “Hi I’m John…” because I’m writing mostly to people who know me, but Substack is supposed to be this space where new people could in theory find your work, but discoverability is atrocious here. I guess it’s easier to be a Nazi than a newsletter guy on a newsletter platform. I guess I just always expected better algorithmic potential on a place where you can get verbose among the tweedy elbow patch crowd of lawyers, journalists, essayists, fascists, apologists, and cowardly neoliberals.
old plan meet new plan
Stop me if you’ve heard this before - there’s a push to create content you can monetize out of the work you love or the things you’re passionate about. Just about everywhere you can think of offers subscriptions and paywalls and ways to cash in on readers or viewers or clicks. I like not starving, so I thought I too could get on board with this plan.
To say it hasn’t worked is a massive understatement.
I don’t think that’s your fault. You’re reading this, you didn’t do anything wrong. You’re doing what you’re supposed to be doing. The fault is entirely mine. Both out of a fear that I wouldn’t do it “right” (whatever that means) and out of a sense that I didn’t know what exactly to do in the first place, I never really sorted out what it the Writer’s Secret Weapon was supposed to be or could be or what I really wanted it to be. Was it a blog? Was it one more teaching space? Was it a way for me to duplicate material from Medium?
The fuck-up is totally mine, and I’d like to now take some steps to fix it.
The only plan was to produce … something … that would somehow make people want to spend several dollars a month to keep reading … something. And amid all the people offering classes and programs and writing little wistful daydreams, I felt lost. I didn’t want to be some professorial hard ass, but I also never wanted to waste your time by telling you to just by golly believe in yourself and share your work (and be white and able-bodied and privileged and financially stable and food secure and cis and have a strong support network and have a baked-in audience from somewhere else) and you too can rake in the bucks.
For too long I thought the really successful writing-based people here just kinda wrote shit. Throw out a few zoom links, shill your drek, reheat advice with a kind of polite varnish of middle-class humanity and then a lot of people who don’t want to get their hands too dirty or their clothes too wrinkled will gobble up what you’re saying because you’re holding their attention and distracting them from the fact that you’re not saying anything. I still kinda think there are a lot of people long overdue for swirlies and locker shoves and a substantial middle finger to the face.
Art is anarchic political and personal and collective and wild and messy and loud and it looks like a billion different things. It’s hard and slow and fast and cheap and expensive and bright and dark and lewd and sexy and horny and honest and lonely and sad and violent and calm and chill and a fugue. At least it’s supposed to. At least I think it should.
So instead of wandering around nibbling at the table scraps that the stuffed shirt crowd deigns the rest of the writing space to have, here now is my 2024 plan:
For too long I have waited for other people to do something, then I’d try and do my own version. I’d do what they were doing because I thought that’s how you get successful and that’s how you give the people what they want.
But see, that’s not right. None of that is right. I kept doing that because I thought I wasn’t good enough to do my own thing, but anytime I’ve done my own thing my way, I’ve been successful, either professionally or personally or both.
I’m going to use this space as I want. I’m going to write you plans and thoughts and guides and outlines and strategies and give you tools to help you get published, write poems, make music, create albums, do art, get laid, dance, smoke, and create whatever you want. That’s what writing can do, not just help me get asses in seats in a Zoom room or let me tell you for the thirtieth time that you can just ask an expert (in a thread you have to pay to read) to help you.
I’m tired of trying to be like everyone else. It’s exhausting. I have seen what other people are doing, and it’s not as good as what I do. I want to do my own thing, my way.
And I want to keep a middle finger in my back pocket as per usual. Those things are useful.
a schedule
There are Nazis and dipshits here making thousands of dollars. People cape for them and quail before them. They write fluff and bullshit and it gets gobbled up with ladle.
I can’t change that. I can’t suddenly Thanos-snap my fingers and wake the world up from the narcotized slumber of social media, capitalism, and boomer fatigue. But what I can do is be me. I’m really good at being me and doing what I do best - which is teaching people how to write better so they can be their best selves.
To that end, I’m going to try and release something every week. I’d love it to be every Thursday. But maybe it’ll be on a Tuesday. Or a Saturday. Or maybe it might be delayed a week because I’ve got a workshop to do or a paying gig or I’m in ten thousand directions. But I’m going to try. Because it matters to me. Helping people create better matters to me.
And what matters to you is where you put your time and focus.
So fingers up and out comrades, let’s get to work.
Love you. Talk soon.