Phasmatopia, Year 1

Looking back at the year that was, and looking forward to the year that will be.

Whew. Goddamn. Here we all are, I guess.

I published my first SubStack post on January 13th, 2023. This little experiment has been running for nearly a full twelve months now. Below is a quick retrospective and some thoughts about the year ahead.

Most importantly—as always—a deep and heartfelt thank you to everyone who has supported my work this past year, financially and otherwise. Thank you, thank you, thank you.

What I’m Proud Of

1. I exceeded my personal goal for the number of published posts. Back in March, when I decided to set up paid subscriptions, I was aiming for “twenty to thirty posts,” published every couple of weeks. I went on to notch up over sixty posts in 2023. Not every post has been a full essay: a handful have been low-effort housekeeping notices. Several have been guest posts, including my ‘Defining Utopia’ cross-post series with

   Elle Griffin
   , and
   W. McCrae
   ’s guest posts (including her Seely short story) while I was off for summer break. (An extra-big thank you to Elle and W. for their willingness to collaborate and share their work here.) Nevertheless, even with those factored in, I went well above the goal I set for original content. In hindsight, this was probably a medically inadvisable amount of writing, with everything else I’ve got going on (full-time parenting since August, consulting work, family stuff, etc.) I won’t promise to keep up the same pace for next year. But I’m glad I was able to follow through on my original proposition for paid subscribers.

2. I published two short stories (and one microfiction story.)

   1. The original version of “The Sea Witch”—my first short story—was published on my old email list before I made the move to Substack. I was able to share an updated version with a new audience here, after doing some substantial editing that significantly improved the original.

   2. The big lift for this year was completing “All Green”, the story that was half-done when my dad died suddenly in September 2022. Since finishing it in December, I honestly haven’t had a chance to go back and read the story in full. I’m sure it’s not as strong as it could have been if I wasn’t red-lining the engine to get it done before Christmas. But it has an ending, finally, and after everything I’ve been through with that story, I’m glad to see it completed.

   3. “The Multiplicity” was a delightfully unplanned success. This was a weird little microfiction tale that I dashed off as a spontaneous reaction to the real-life X-Files episode from June 2023. It was super-short; it basically just fell out of my brain, fully formed; it ended up being one of my most popular posts for the year. (Makes me wonder about the wisdom of killing myself to crank out a 12-part serialized short story. More on that anon.)

3. My audience grew immensely. After jumping over to Substack from a small, private email newsletter, I declared back in January 2023 that I would be “over the moon if I could get forty subscribers on here by year’s end.” Now, a year later—I am, indeed, over the moon. I’m not bragging about my subscriber count because I (still) suspect it includes a fair amount of bot traffic. But even if half of my subscribers are non-human, my audience has grown much faster than I dared to hope for when I first got started. Once again, a huge thank you to all the verifiably biological organisms who have been along for the ride this year.

What I’ve Learned

Less is (usually) more, even on Substack. The most important new skill that I’m hoping to develop in 2024 is editorial restraint. I’m still proud of the long essay series that I wrote this year, especially the ‘Spirit of Place’ series. Nevertheless—despite the fact that people gamely followed along as my interest in the topic ballooned and the series stretched on—it would definitely have benefited from some judicious trimming. Meanwhile, ‘Anatomy of a Curse’ (like ‘The Multiplicity’) was a relatively short, one-off reaction to current events, and ended up being one of my top posts of 2023. Lesson learned.

Serialized fiction doesn’t work (at least for me.) Substack seems like an ideal place for serialized fiction, which has been touted as the next logical step in the evolution of storytelling. After publishing three serialized stories in 2023 (including McCrae’s piece) I’m not convinced that serialization is the way forward. Even back in the Dickensian days of print serials, the model was primarily driven by commercial interests, at the expense of stronger stories. The reader never has a chance to get fully immersed in a serialized story. That might serve well enough for straightforward genre thrillers—but a story with nuanced character relationships will suffer from being chopped up. It’s murder for the author, too: I fully plotted both of my stories in my head long before I published the first installment, and it was still agonizing to get the thing transcribed on a deadline. I’d rather write and edit the whole story to completion; at that point, why bother serializing? It’s not better for contemporary readers, either: despite our supposedly short attention spans, I think people still enjoy the option of “binge-reading” several episodes of a story at once—or, as we used to call it back in Ye Olden Dayes, “reading a book.”

What’s Next

First, a rest. I left it all out on the field this year. I’m bone-tired. There’s housecleaning and home projects that have gone wanting while I’ve been writing. I planned to start my winter break a month ago; finishing up ‘All Green’ pushed well beyond that. I’m taking the next two months off.

All paid subscriptions will be paused until March 1, 2024.

As for next year’s writing—it looks like I’ve come full circle. I’m back to where I started last January. Despite my best efforts, after twelve months, I haven’t been able to talk myself out of writing a book-length story. One particular story has been latched onto me since before I started writing ‘The Sea Witch’—albeit in a different form—and I can’t seem to shake it off. While there’s plenty of opportunity for weirding it up, the process will still be writing something vaguely book-shaped. My experiments with serialized fiction have shown me that there’s still a place for immersive storytelling. Commercial prospects be damned.

There will probably still be some microfiction and essays published here in the year to come—but I think the main project for 2024 will be unearthing this story, in whatever form it chooses to take.

I’m also looking forward to spending more time engaging with the community here. I spent the past year testing how far I could push my creative output; this year, I’d like to shift the balance more toward participating in conversations with readers and other creators. I’ve done almost nothing with Notes or Chat, and I’m hoping to experiment with those features.

In the meantime, here’s my reading list for the next two months:

• The New Annotated H.P. Lovecraft, edited by Leslie S. Klinger (a beautiful Christmas gift from my wonderful and extremely patient wife.)

• This Year You Write Your Novel, by Walter Mosley

• Technic and Magic: The Reconstruction of Reality, by Federico Campagna

• The Master and His Emissary, by Iain McGilchrist

Happy New Year, everybody. See you in a few months.