A Bad Substack is Hard to Find
The niche itch
I come with no manifesto, no statement of purpose. Sorry! I want to write about music, cities, and prayer. I want to write about birds, flowers, and my children. My boy, now ten months old, has just started clapping—but sometimes he accidentally claps with only one hand and is bewildered that the other hand is not there to greet it. I keep re-reading the Book of Genesis and having strange thoughts. Stranger still, I’d like to share them.
I live in southwest Florida, recently wrecked by storm. Fort Myers is populated mostly by snowbirds from the Midwest, with flat vowels and bumptious good manners. It is hot here. We are closer to Cuba than to Georgia. For reasons I don’t entirely understand, the Jimmy Buffet vibrations that you may associate with south Florida are strictly quarantined to the other coast. Many of the houses on our street are painted gray, or beige. Fort Myers is where used cars salesmen, retired and satisfied, come to die.
It is mostly dull here, but not always.
I have been a freelance writer for many years and written for many publications, some of which are still around and some of which are long gone. I will keep doing some of that, but for various reasons, I have found it a tiresome program in middle age. I’ll do most of my writing here, instead. I think my output will improve in quantity and quality. And it sounds more fun. We’ll see.
Of course, this will only really be sustainable if I can trade some of this typing for money. If enough people want to subscribe for $5 a month, I’ll be able to keep doing this and do more of it. If you like my writing, I think it will be worth it! But if that doesn’t sound good to you, I totally understand. You can also subscribe for free. I’ll make all the posts free for a while and will always keep some of it un-paywalled.
A writer pal of mine tried Substack and found that it was a hard platform because she didn’t have an obvious beat. “Like the best Substacks have a clear and consistent focus,” she said.
She’s right, of course. But I am satisfied with making one of the worst Substacks instead. No hook or theme. Just writing about whatever I feel like is a bad idea, I realize, but it’s what I want to do anyway. Why lie? I am a boggy and bloggy boy, for better or worse.
Once a week I’ll write an essay of some sort and once a week I’ll do a column on a country music song. I’ll try to write most other days, too—travel pieces and Florida dispatches, reviews, recommendations, lists, commentary, daddy blogging, and so on. Maybe some old hobbyhorses in politics and public corruption and healthcare policy. Certainly some NBA basketball. This and that.
Here is my current assignment desk:
There are nearly 400 species of parrots. Most are monogamous. Some eat dirt, some don’t.
In order to dodge the IRS, David Allan Coe stopped receiving payments by wire for concert fees, instead getting paid in cash. No $50 dollar bills were allowed. According to the Department of Justice, “Coe believed they were bad luck and would not gamble with them.”
When my daughter was three years old, she went through a spell where she only wanted her mama to put her down to bed. Come on, I said. I tell good stories, sing good songs, what’s so bad about dada putting you to bed? She said, “I just like mama’s vibe better.” So I asked, what’s mama’s vibe? She said, “Love love love.” Okay, then what’s my vibe, I asked. She looked at me and said: “Jazz jazz jazz.”
Okay, that’s it. Jean Rhys, in her eighties and apparently very drunk, told another novelist (after first saying “Listen to me”—a note of insistence I appreciate):
“All of writing is a huge lake. There are great rivers that feed the lake, like Tolstoy or Dostoevsky. And then there are mere trickles, like Jean Rhys. All that matters is feeding the lake. I don't matter. The lake matters. You must keep feeding the lake.”
See you tomorrow, trickling along.