Piling onto the stack

Why would I do that?

Books are slow. Magazines can be slow. Academic journals! No. Sometimes the publishing machines are pointlessly grinding, but I’m also happy to have a lot of time to figure out what I’m doing. I love editors, I love editing. I like adding a fortieth .docx to the drafts folder, _FINALOL. The writing does get better when you come back to it at intervals. The writing does get better when other people are involved. I’m not writing masterpieces alone in some private Gdoc.

My rule forever has been to avoid publishing unfiltered crap and instead spend plenty of time squeezing my shit into compact diamonds that I can offer with the confidence that at least if they are not good, they are belabored. But sometimes… times like today… right now… even the good the ideas are getting lost or buried. It takes too long to explain them before I write them. The entire world is happening at all verb tenses at once. What is the right pace? What is the right thing? If someone in the front row of my life were to raise a hand and ask the compulsory “Where do you get your ideas?” I would say (yell) that the issue is not having ideas, it’s about deciding which ones are worth belaboring for months/years, and which ones are worth just putting on Substack.

There’s no real answer to the Getting Ideas Question that isn’t a dodge or a lie. To get ideas you should just write a lot. You write to get ideas, not the other way around. The making is the thinking. That’s it. Maybe you write nonsense but you have no other choice. (People also tell you that going to the gym will give you more energy but that’s not true.) I write all the time, sometimes graphomanically, but it gets stuck in folders for reasons of The Industry and reasons of The Brain. Until now that’s felt fine. There’s enough inbox content and one good thing about books and art is that they evade time because they demand dedication and attention on both the making and the receiving ends as opposed to reaction in the moment. I believe this, HOWEVER I’m impatient. This is a place for writing faster.

TARDY TO STACK

After posting on Instagram last year that I needed a BREAK from writing as a job (podcasted about that), I realized that I also needed a BREAK from Instagram, so I quit, and then I also tiptoed away from trashtwitter everything else “social,” and not being on The Internet all the time has been a form of palliative care/sobriety that I recommend. (It’s okay; the group chats will become Your Internet). I managed to avoid the Stack. But I still have the think-fast illness that comes from being raised online, so I’m crawling like a lungfish back onto a small piece of internet land. (The bigger question might be WHY SUBSTACK, not a less busted place than the rest. I’ll write about that l8r.)

In this Stack you will find fast(er) writing about objectively interesting things, FOR EXAMPLE learning a language, Moby Dick (spermaceti?!), circadian rhythms, sex, the number of plant species in one painting by Botticelli, contemporary discourse on medieval shrouds, why that is the real convo about AI, why that is not the problem with art, and maybe even the story of that time I was on Court TV.

I liked this recent roundtable about newsletters, which is correctly inconclusive but points out many things that are probably-definitely good in newsletters—snooping, niche interests, loose writing—which I will do. I will try not to serve “some random weekend update newsletter of a writer who [you] subscribed to because their work [used to be] interesting,” because essayists becoming listicle-ists is a feature, not a bug, of Substack.

In the hopes of finding a middle ground between the glacial opus and unfiltered slop, I’ll try a steady trot. Would it be better with an editor? Ya. Would it be better with a salary? For sure. I will NOT get post-frantic. Some may say that this is another form of procrastination and they’d be right!

IT’S A BLOG

You know what a blog is. It happens in realish time. I will also repost my new/old medium/slow writing so you know what I’m doing and what I did.

Am I constitutionally a slow writer? Maybe. We can find out.

I TOOK THE LIBERTY

Of adding you to the free subscription, if this is arriving in your inbox unbidden. Please unsubscribe right away if you want to.

Or…

Botticelli, La Primavera, which features at least 138 species of plants.

Something called a natal plum. I ate it before asking what it was.