Is Substack the new LiveJournal?
If so, I probably wouldn't have used my actual name
Everyone’s escaping Twitter, hating Threads, frozen out of the Bluesky cliques—is Substack now the new golden age of social media? Can Substack ever be the kind of place where people unload their souls to strangers who then go on walks with them in an effort to visit every tube station, or set up groups where they read Ulysses together1, or create life-long friendships among people who are deeply connected, at a soul level, but who never would have met otherwise? It doesn’t feel like that to me (maybe yet, or maybe I’m too old), but we can all give it a shot, I guess.
I have written on Substack a lot over the last year, but it’s all been on my Deixis Press account, not so much here, because do you really want my angsty self-reflection and indecision all up in your face? Probably not. Maybe it’s ok when filtered through a lens of “I am trying to make a thing happen but the universe/the industry/someone who hates me is against me.”
Since I wrote that post, I have continued to push against the universe/the industry/people who hate me, and I have continued to make things happen, and I’m very proud of my press’s books. I’m not particularly in love with the industry at large, especially its tendency not to take risk or to innovate (and that’s before we even get into the shoddy editorial work, which I have to say is probably not the fault of the editors who are doing it, but that’s a totally different conversation). But there are great presses who are actively pushing against that stuff.
Personally, I’ve also spent the past few months trying to finish a story I’ve been writing for far too long; I went to an artists’ retreat this past summer and finally completed the first draft, and I’m on the home stretch now with editing. I had a conversation with my fellow indie press dudes about whether they would ever publish their own work. Some said absolutely not, some said they would, some started with their own work and then branched out into other people’s.
Then I asked an editor at a huge publishing company and she was like, why wouldn’t you? And that’s the question, really. It’s a novella; novellas are not likely to get picked up by virtually anyone. And I believe in self-publishing. And I have a bunch of ISBNs and that shit is expensive. And I like having my own creative freedom. So watch this space. Or maybe that space.
So yeah. Long-time subscribers might recall that last year I was here desperately trying to journal myself into mental wellness, and then I stopped, and that was not because I became mentally well, but because I became extraordinarily busy, and for me that’s probably as close as it gets. And that busy-ness has fruit, tangible fruit, with more to come. I don’t imagine this will be the new LiveJournal for me—after all, you can never go home. But I do look forward to watching Substack grow, and, at heart, this is a better format for me than any of the other time-wasters that are currently available.
those “coming soon”s shame me every time I look at them