So I Made a Substack

I really only made it because I didn't like the squarespace blogging feature

Now what?

One of my goals for 2025 was to “make some money on my writing.” I kept it as broad as I could, because I didn’t want to think there was only one way I could do it. Selling a script or a novel seemed pretty unlikely this year, especially since I haven’t completed one of either since the COVID lockdowns.

This was before the breakdown, too.

Writing deeply personal articles about video games was never really part of the plan. Of course I’ve got opinions, and so I’ve had a handful of ideas for these, though I always thought I’d execute them as video essays, given my 10+ years as a bad YouTube Let’s Player. But chasing motivation has been hard this year. When In Stars and Time hit me like it did, I had to write about it. So I did. And thinking about my goal for the year, I pitched the idea around. A little bit.

Truthfully, I pitched it to one platform, and as I was gearing up to pitch it to another I saw them post that pitches were going to close for a bit, they had too many in their backlog. Not continuing to pitch it is something of a failure of mine; I’m not as familiar with many outlets that would be interested in a piece of writing like that, and all of them don’t want you to be pitching a completed article, just the idea.

But I was compelled to write it. Chasing motivation has been really tough this year. So when I had an idea that captured me so fully, I had to act on it.

So that’s why this substack exists. What am I doing here, now that it’s out?

There’s a little part of me that’s like, “Hey! It’s a platform! You have some readers! That should be some extra motivation to write!” but that doesn’t quite pull my interest. Substack has a problem with promoting nazis and other hate speech, so it’s not my favorite platform. But there is a reach here that isn’t in other places, something of an inbuilt audience with people who already read other substacks, and its writing tools are pretty good (I’m writing this whole post in-line, rather than copying and adjusting formatting from a pages document like I did on my last one). When and if I continue posting here, I won’t ever put anything behind a paywall, even if that might be an easier way to hit that goal—a friend throwing me a dollar after reading something I wrote would technically achieve my goal of making money on my writing, but don’t do that, it doesn’t feel right.

I also don’t consider myself a journalist, or generally someone who writes opinion pieces or non-fiction. I’m a screenwriter, though that doesn’t fit me well anymore since I haven’t written a new script in years, and I’ve only opened final draft in that time to make tiny tweaks to a pilot I’m proud of. I like stories, and I like writing and telling them.

So, a fiction writer, then. When I have been writing, it’s mostly been towards completing prose stories. I think I tend to be drawn to writing stuff in the medium I’m experiencing the most. Over the past two years, reading novels and comics have been how I spend a lot of my downtime, and I think that’s why I’m mostly interested in writing that right now. In high school it was YouTube (and YouTube is still where I find myself at the end of the day), so I made a YouTube channel and spent a lot of my free time on that. Video games are still the media I interact with most, and I’ve had stories I’ve wanted to make into video games all my life. But prose is pulling me now.

Since I last tried to start a script, I’ve started writing three novels, putting them down when my interest lapsed, with only one of them holding it enough that I continue going back to it. If I’m still aiming for the goal of “get paid before 2026,” chances are unlikely that I’ll get there by publishing a novel, or signing some book deal. I don’t think I’ll even finish a first draft of a book before the end of the year.

I’ve come up with ideas for short stories, too. Those are what originally inspired that goal. I’ve become familiar with a few literary magazines, mostly through their free podcast feeds, and they’re some of the few places that pay for fiction writing. You’ll also notice that the three I linked are scifi/fantasy based—that’s what I like to write, mostly, though I don’t love saying that I’m just a scifi/fantasy writer.

The last time I felt the pull of motivation like I did with the In Stars and Time article was with a short story; I saw a piece of art on tumblr (that I haven’t been able to find since) that showed an astronaut bouncing in what seemed like a cave on the moon, near a sword stuck in the stone. So I wrote something called They Found a Sword on the Moon. I was happy with it when I first finished it, but since have found that I didn’t like the ending, and neither did the friends I showed it to for critique. So I think my next writing goal is figuring out that ending, and shopping that around. And then acting on the other ideas jotted down in my notes app. If no publisher takes them, I’ll probably end up posting them here.

I’m not subscribed to many Substacks, really just Margaret Killjoy’s and my friend Walker’s. I’m not sure what the market is for fiction here. I don’t think I’d like how it would look in the default formatting, but I haven’t played around with it much, so maybe I could figure out a way to make it look “right” to me.

I don’t think I’m going to keep posting opinion pieces about video games. Like I said, I have thoughts and opinions, but nothing that pulls me as much as that last article/essay/whatever-it-was did. I might pitch a place or few some of those ideas, if I see them open to submissions and I think the piece would be a good fit. If I feel the pull like I did with ISaT, then even if it doesn’t get picked up I’ll probably write it, and post it here, too.

Over the past few nights I’ve been rolling around an idea of a new D&D campaign I want to run. I’ve got some cool mechanics and story ideas thought up that I’m putting together in a doc. At worst, working on that is still worldbuilding, it’s still writing, a thing I should be doing more of. Whether or not I can regularly get four or more other adults together to play it is another story—I’ve done a really bad job keeping the one I’m currently in charge of now, and I can really only partially blame that on the breakdown.

Or maybe I’ll post things like journal entries. This is kinda a journal entry. A way to promote myself, a way to practice writing and flex those muscles to an audience, a way to keep people updated on me that I don’t talk to as much.

Or maybe it’ll be some kind of combination of all of these things.

Or maybe this will be the last post ever, and someone will stumble upon this link in 50 years when I’ve retired as an incredibly successful writer of something.

A guy can dream.

I think the tl;dr for this (which I should technically post at the beginning instead of the end, but mwahaha, you’re at the end already) is that I didn’t make this substack to be consistently putting out work. It was just a good place for something I felt like I needed to write, and maybe it’ll house other writings of mine in the future.

And if you stick around, I hope you enjoy whatever it becomes.