June 2nd 2023

A year done

This is the eve of my first anniversary. I was just going through the new “Dashboard” Substack has provided me. It has a list of all my stories, and I was rather shocked to see that I had 203 posts. They range from Scribbles—like this one—short stories, a novella, a novel, and another not complete but sitting on the back burner. I even put up a song I wrote with my chiropractor, Dr Dave. (Just so you know, all I do is give him the words. He does all the rest…except singing. You don’t want to hear him singing.)

Anyway, let me get back to it. This is my first year completed. I have 172 readers. I can’t figure out if that’s bad or good, or just about the average. I’m going for that one. I started this because someone sent me an email. I’d never heard of Substack before. At the time, I was using Vocal.Media. I was so frustrated with it as a platform. They were doing that algorithm thing, and censoring you. No gratuitous violence, no scenes of rape. Okay, I understand that, but I was writing a story that involved a couple that were into role playing. They said I was glorifying rape. They were playing sex games. He’s the Knight and she’s the Princess; he’s the pirate, she’s the governor’s daughter; he’s the shepherd and she’s the milk maid.

And in my email one day is something from someone I don’t know, asking me to read their story on Substack and subscribe to their page. I didn’t delete it. I Googled it. I looked into it and found myself being drawn in like a fish on a hook. I ended up starting my own page…

And now comes the hard part.

I’d been off work for half a year. There was a horrific accident at work resulting in the death of one of my best friends, and I was directly involved. To put it as simply as I can I was driving a big machine and he was entering the log yard. I had a bucketful of hog fuel (an easy five tons). He was behind a row of logs. It was winter. There was ice. He slipped, and slid under the wheel of my machine. Unseen. Unknown.

My world fell apart that day. January 10th 2022.

When I finally decided that Substack was actually legit, I thought I could put some stories up on my new page. The problem with that I had no new stories. I’d started a novel on Vocal.Media, (JACK OF DIAMONDS) but stopped writing when the accident happened. The stories I had were old, and are generally long…ish. Okay, they’re long. They average anywhere from 12-19,000 words. I thought I could divide them into smaller sections and maybe have enough material to last the year. I didn’t. I knew I had to start writing again. I actually started a story (NO SIMPLE REMEDY). It was the first time I’d written anything in ten months. And then I decided I’d try my hand at the National Novel Writing Month (NaNoWirMo) with takes place in November. I stopped the story, started the book, and almost fucked that up too, because I was unprepared. I was going to write something about Hollywood in the silent era. Wasn’t working out, so I thought I’d try something about one of this city’s biggest shames, and that was the Komagata Maru, a ship chartered to bring Indians to Canada, Via Japan. That one’s gonna take a lot of research, and maybe I should think about that now that the weather’s nice. I can go to the library downtown and find all sorts of cool shit. By the time I got myself ready for the Month, I was two days behind.

The whole idea of the NaNoWriMo is that it’s a direct challenge to the writer. There’s no prize, and there’s no promise that you’ll get published either. The whole idea is to write a novel in one month. 50,000 words. I had a story laying in my files that had maybe 5,000 words, maybe less. It was a fantasy about time travel. I thought, What the Hell, why not? By the time I hit 28,000, I knew the 50,000 word limit wasn’t going to be enough. I kept writing until I had about 96,000 words.

But I was also doing my Substack. I’d decided I was going to re-write my JACK OF DIAMONDS book and do it the way I wanted it to be. I invited people to come along for the ride and help me edit it. I was putting a chapter up on Tuesdays with the edits I planned to make. On Thursday, I was putting up the finished chapter. I was also putting out the pieces of my short stories. It was too much. I decided to put up the NaNoWriMo story: A BEGINNER’S GUIDE TO TIME TRAVEL instead. I put “Jack” away, and explained I was going to put my time travel story up in its place. I loved writing that. It was fast paced. I kept doing things to flip the story on its head. And then I came up with the twist. Once I figured out how I wanted it to end, I didn’t worry about it anymore.

From not having written anything in ten months, I was now putting a book up on my page, and short stories as well. I was down to two post a week. Sunday has always been the night I put my short stories up. I use Wednesdays for my book. I finished my Time Travel Novel, and decided I had to have something to give to my seven Paid Subscribers. I started a new novel. I had some notes laying around for a novel I was thinking of writing a long time ago. A story that takes place in the days of King Arthur.

But more important was the sense of accomplishment I felt when I finished writing the story I’d begun in October. I’d had two months away from it. Looking at it, I knew I had it all wrong. I wrote the father out of the story within the first 500 words. Finishing that story was like lifting a heavy weight off my shoulders. My writing has served as a great outlet for my emotional distress. I mean, I’m not writing all doom and gloom. I’ve changed over the years according to whatever drama life has brought about. With the passing of my parents, I feel comfortable enough to write a sex scene and put it in my story if I want. I think it was my mother’s passing that was the most freeing. I don’t mean to imply that my mother was a prude. Far from it. Her favourite show was RED SHOES DIARY. She used to watch it when she was in her mid 80s. She told my wife: “…during the war, if you got horny, well, that’s what candles are for, aren’t they?” But even with that, I didn’t want her reading sex scenes. It must be all that Catholic guilt I brought out of childhood, because I gave up on that shit years ago.

And what are my plans for the next year? Well, I’ve taken down my paywall. I only have 6 PAID Subscribers. I couldn’t justify writing something just for them. I know all of them. Shit, one of them’s my brother. They want to offer support. In fact three of them signed up on the first day. I didn’t even know what the hell I was doing, and they already had me putting up a paywall. The paywall is too stressful at the moment. I need more PAID subscribers to warrant having one. I’ll put stuff up on there randomly. Most of my Scribbles will go up behind the paywall. Sometimes, I write stories about the mill that seem rather popular. I’m going to put those behind the PAYWALL. Once in a while I’ll read something; that’s going behind the PAYWALL. I’m thinking I might do all sorts of stuff this next year. I might even screw with everybody’s head and start reading poetry. A little Shelly, maybe Wordsworth, or Byron—can you tell I like the Romantics? Maybe all—what is it? 154?—of Shakespeare’s sonnets? I’ve noticed over the years that people like it when someone reads to them.

And how many subscribers do I want to pick up in this next year? I’m gonna try to not let myself fret over it too much. Really. I’m gonna make a conscious effort. I mean, if I put up a story on Sunday night, after 8 in the evening, why would I be looking in the morning to see how many people actually opened it? I already know I’ll have to force myself to distance myself from looking. The readers will come in time. As long as I have stories, and as long as the writing’s good. It would be nice if someone who had 1,000; 2,000; or even 5,000 followers Cross-Posted, Recommended me, or even Shared my page. So my goal? I’d be happy if I doubled my page. So let’s say 350 Subscribers. I’d be good with that.

The very first story I put up was “THE AFRICAN SONGBOOK: A Tragedy In 5 Acts.” I put it up on June 2nd-3rd. Something like that. I don’t know how other people write, or what their thought process is, I just know how it works with me. I like titles. I like structure. ST. FREDA was one of the first stories I published, and that was because it had a different kind of structure. I wanted to do the same with the “Songbook.” I knew that it was going to be a tragedy. It has to do with the Mau Mau, how could it not be a tragedy. But I wanted to structure it on the idea of a Shakespearean tragedy. Instead of calling them Chapters, I called them Acts. I tried to model it on a Shakespearean structure. I don’t know if I succeeded, that’s up to the reader to decide. I like it. But I like all of my stories.

Anyway, as a way of celebrating my 1st anniversary, I’m going to post a link to my story here so if you didn’t get a chance to read it, well, here it is…

WHAT?! June FIRST!? Wow, I really fucked that up, didn’t I?

Well, I guess all of that up there is moot now, isn’t it?

Whatever.