A Torrent of Words
Writing on Substack has opened the floodgates, sorry-not-sorry 😁
As I write this, it is Sunday, July 9th, 2023 and I simply cannot NOT write it.
(Not sure when I’ll post it, but I guess if you are reading this, you know better than I!)
Normally I would not write (or post) on the weekends too much, but Saturday I wrote up a quick post explaining the difference between sections and tags on Substack, and today I am working on this essay.
This is a bit meta, but the fact is that writing more has led me to needing to write more.
Honestly, I’ve always been that way. It’s not obsessive in the way some people can hyper-focus on topics or tasks, but it is pretty comprehensive. The more I write, the more I think about writing, the more I come up with things I want to write, the more time I devote to writing.
Two things have led to this current “flare up,” and one of them is Substack itself. The ability to write about a lot of different things, share them, talk about them, and follow other writers doing the same honestly has the early LiveJournal buzz about it: so many possibilities! No restrictions! No gatekeeping!
That era of LJ, roughly 2002-2010, was expansive, mind-boggling, and liberating for me. After years of tepid writing here and there on personal projects, dejected by the state of the publishing industry and knowing I would not find a place in it, I was suddenly able to write everything. I wrote fanfiction, original fiction, occasional very terrible poems, political diatribes, personal reflections, and my now infamous Hurricane Charley post (since moved to my now “old” dreamwidth site).
Between 2010 and now?
It’s been a wild ride. I did end up getting picked up by an indie romance publisher and saw several books published by them. I got my master’s degree. I got divorced. I got THE BEST DOG. I got screwed over by my publisher and switched to self-publishing. In between fanfic and original fiction, I wrote nearly 2 million words.
…I once again got run down and run over by “the publishing industry.”
Honestly most of that last part was “on me,” as they say. I was excited about the new era of self-publishing, and embraced it as much as I could, but the other side of that was trying to (once again) fit myself into a shape that wasn’t good for me. Instead of feeling joyful about sharing my stories, I felt oppressed by the restrictions being set around me: write to market! Find a niche! Develop a brand! Rapid release! Chase the algorithm! Don’t go off-topic!
I tried.
I tried.
I failed.
Well, it would be more accurate to say that I burned out, got frustrated, and failed myself out.
I constrained my creative writing until it withered — I posted a lot on twitter and tumblr, but could not bring myself to invest in essays or fiction writing much at all. I started a short daily blog about walking my dog in 2019 as a way to force myself to write something. But that was it. What was the point of writing anything if I was so unable to stay on topic, write to market, constrain myself to my brand?
Which leads to the second reason for the current writing spree: Authorecosystem.com.
I follow Russell Nohelty , who along with Monica Leonelle has created this archetype system to help authors learn about how to build, maintain, and expand their author business. He posted a link to the test and I found out that I am a “forest” ecosystem, as an author, which I thought was kinda silly. A forest? What am I, a tree?
Well, no, but turns out that I am 100% the acme version of a forest author ecosystem. I was astounded by how accurately the forest archetype described me, specifically. Sorry, other forest authors, it’s ALL ABOUT ME.
As I started reading up on it, one aspect that jumped out at me and also grabbed my throat was this:
Forests tend to be consistent creators who often have multiple pen names or major projects going at once. Other types are unable to juggle these, but forests are natural gardeners, watering each project in the same amounts over time. This means that a forest can explore several different genres or niches competently and all at once.
That’s my entire life as an storyteller. The only reason I don’t “water projects in the same amounts over time” was because I forced myself not to. After all, being spread out all over the place and writing a lot of different types of things was not, I was relentlessly informed, how an author becomes “successful.”
But it was so hard to squeeze myself down like that. I was suffocating my forest ecosystem, as it were. My natural impulse is to swing across genres and build multiple major projects that roll along together but are all significantly different. I can’t help myself, and the only way to stop myself is to stop entirely. That’s what I did in the past, and it was always the most destructive choice for my creativity. To effectively stop myself from watering all those projects, I had to stop nurturing my creativity in general.
Ironically, holding myself back from working on multiple projects simultaneously resulted in me not being able to work on any single project at all.
So, when I first got on Substack I was a little (A LOT) concerned about being, you know, off topic. I tried to think of subjects to write about that fit into a niche…the regular, bog-standard approach to marketing as an author for the last mumblemumble years. You know, that thing I failed so spectacularly at doing multiple times before.
But then I looked at what other authors were posting, and it was all over the map. Short fiction! Serialized stories! Personal essays! Meta about writing, and publishing, and sharing! Pictures of their dogs!!!!
That’s when I was struck with those early-LJ era feels, where all opportunities were open and people could read my posts, or not, but we were all in it together and trying to connect.
Encouraged, I made a few preliminary posts to test the waters. Should I stick to one thing? Yes? No? Unsure, please try again!
And then I took that author ecosystem test.
I realized that maybe being off-topic is my brand. As they say these days: IT ME.
For instance, I am working on an MMF epic fantasy series and a MM diesel-punk urban fantasy cozy mystery series both set in the same second-world I’ve created…just occurring 3,000 years apart. They don’t have to be in the same ‘verse, but it just felt right to me. It’s the kind of sprawling world building I’ve always dreamed of creating.
In the meantime, I also write about:
Personal productivity
A.I. and technology
The history of text technology
My life as an author
My dog (THE BEST DOG)
I decided to crack the door open on all of that, just like I did once before a long time ago, and embrace it.
Substack readers continue to welcomed it, and friends support it.
And me? I love it. I get to write about it all, without the guardrails of “should” and “ought.”
My brand is me, after all. I can only be who I am…and write about it. All of it!
We’re all having a great time partying here in House of York!
The topic isn't as important to me as whether it's well-written. You have no worries there!
I love this :)