Rebranding the 'Stack

A new name, and some thoughts on why.

via Wikimedia Commons.

I started writing on SubStack without anything that could be called “a plan.”

First, there was a vague notion about seriously pursuing writing. Then there was an email list, and then the rough outlines of a website as a public portal for my work. The writing went well enough; the email list was serviceable, but mostly limited to friends and family. SubStack seemed like the next logical step. When I started on here back in January, it was a tentative experiment, just to see how it worked. I took my old handle along with me and set up shop. In my first post, I enthused about maybe picking up another dozen-or-so subscribers by the end of the year.

Again: not a plan.

Over the past three months, my audience has increased exponentially—which is not saying a hell of a lot, considering the small number of very charitable subscribers I started with. But still. This thing seems to have more horsepower than I realized.

(As always, I really appreciate all the support and interest I’ve gotten in just a few months. Thank you to each and every one of my subscribers¹.)

So now I need a plan.

Part of that will be writing more subscriber-only content, as I wrote about previously. Beyond that, I want to tighten up the focus of my work and think about how I want this thing to grow. The old moniker worked well enough to get me out the door as a person who writes; still, it doesn’t say much about what I write, and it also pigeonholes me as a solo act.

I’m not announcing the new name just yet. The mechanical process of changing my domain name on SubStack could cause trouble with my old links; I want to publish the rest of The Sea Witch before I start messing around with the worky bits. Until then, I don’t want to tempt fate and have my prospective name stolen out from under me.

However—I did want to write a bit about the reason behind it, because in thinking about the name itself, I hit on a new direction for the work that I’ve been doing.

For a few years now (even back before my dad passed away) I’ve been preoccupied with how the past lingers in the present, and how the future will be haunted by what we leave behind. This has shown up in my writing in a number of ways. Sometimes it’s literal ghosts; sometimes it’s ruins; sometimes it’s just old wounds and bad memories.

I never really clocked it before, but I think that’s all a reaction to the temporal dimension of The Big Story—something I hadn’t recognized when I originally wrote those essays. An important part of the meta-narrative that modernized people live with is the idea that we can purge the things that haunt us from the present. The Big Story isn’t just about spatial control within The Wall: it’s also about living in a continual present of our own making, which will eventually—inevitably—catch up with the future we’ve always dreamed. The two dominant factions within our culture are fighting over different versions of this same imagineering: one wants to live forever in an idealized version of the past, while the other wants to leap forward into a better future by erasing the relics of our painful histories. Both seem to be living in denial. Neither is reckoning with the limits of selective memory.

Just as we’re reaching the limits of spatial control within the closed system of The Wall—we’re also accelerating into a future in which keeping things buried in the past will be increasingly difficult.

And it’s not all bad dreams climbing up out of the shadows. We don’t really have a word for “haunted in a good way.” The cultures that modernized people seem to envy the most are, by and large, the ones that have found ways of living with their ghosts, of drawing strength from them.

I love a good ghost story—used to scare myself sleepless reading the classic old stuff when I was little. While the Gothic horror genre is still a guilty pleasure, I think there’s plenty of room for those echoes out of time in other stories: magical realism is an easy fit, but even solarpunk could benefit from some restless old bones.

Beyond fiction, I’ve got some other project ideas that deal with similar themes—some nonfiction work, and maybe an audio project down the road. Most of all, opening up this space to more than a single author means more room for potential collaboration. I’ve discovered so much great thinking on other SubStacks in just the past few months. Keeping the focus solely on myself feels limiting.

A new sign to hang out front seems like a great place to start.

Anyway, stay tuned.

1. I know for a fact that a least a few of you aren’t bots. Thank you to the flesh-and-blood people who are actually reading this stuff. And thank you to the bots for making my numbers look better.