I was hoping to title this one ‘Adventures with Substack’ or something similar, but the past couple of weeks have been more like ‘Adventures with Everything But Substack.’ All the administrivia that I’ve been sorta kinda getting to- but not really focused on- has piled up and is threatening to topple and bury me in an avalanche of paperwork.
And Substack itself isn’t helping. As with everything these days, it turns out to take ten times as long as it should, and includes five times as many steps- though that’s not entirely their fault; a lot of the extra time turns out to be my own dang fault, since I’m having trouble settling down and actually finishing… well, everything, these days.
A highly discouraging state of affairs, since a substack was supposed to be the answer to my inability to finish stories. The idea was that shorter fiction takes less sustained follow-through, and since it’s easier to post a blog/newsletter type of content than publishing on the ‘Zon, getting a few successes under my belt would start to break the habit.
It’s not going particularly well. My dad has a saying about tasks like this: “Sometimes you can’t change a lightbulb without painting the front door first.” It starts out as a simple task, then you start to dive into it, and see above about things that take ten times as long and have five more steps than you thought.
So instead of changing the lightbulb, I’m still painting the front door. That includes basic stuff like, ‘what do I call this endeavor?’ There’s also setting up a new email, setting up the substack itself, creating assets like a logo/profile picture- I think I’m going to outsource that to my other half, since my artistic ability is less-than-zero- creating a Stripe account so I can get paid eventually, and writing a couple of introductory/FAQ posts.
It’s a lot of steps, and I’m not even starting from zero. I already have the bank account that I can link to Stripe, most of the FAQ post, and the first few pieces of actual fiction content that I plan to put up. I just need a place to put them.
It’s a process, as I keep reminding myself. My other half made a substack in half a day- emails, accounts, payment methods, art assets, and all- he even made a Twitter/X account for it- but he’s slightly nuts, and was able to carve out time to focus completely on the task at hand; I can’t do that. Especially right now. See above about Mt. Administrivia, threatening to throw an avalanche. And the weather’s been so horrendous that I’m checking on my horse almost daily, instead of every other day or so. Fortunately, Skeptical Horse is living only about ten minutes away from me.
She does not approve of this weather. On the other hand, she greatly approves of all the treats I bring for her.
Update: Most of the above was written on Wednesday morning, the only spare time I thought I was going to have this week. I’m happy to say that now, on Friday morning, I’ve carved out a little more time, and now have a new email and a new substack. Nothing else, or I’d link it, but I’ve got the initial setup. I also discovered two other substacks by the same name, but I fully intend to become the most well known one, so that shouldn’t matter.
Further developments will be forthcoming.
Mad Genius Club 
5 responses to “Adventures”
It was a treat to get a horse picture.
Horsey pictures, like dog and cat pictures, are always welcome! I am starting to flirt with the (1) paid substack for fiction idea, so I am curious to see how it works out for you.
(1) at this point, autocucumber suggested “Nationalists”, which I found worrying.
Ah, yes, the Dread Zlongas. I ran into that when I fixed the roof.
“Well, ‘zlongas I’ve got the roof off, might as well re-wire the house. It needs it.” “Might as well re-structure where they joined the addition on all wrong.” “Might as well put in phone, TV and Ethernet cables. To every room.”
All those jobs are much easier to do with the roof off, you see…
Zlongas is a great word for it. It reminds me of the time I was putting on earrings and randomly decided to reorganize my jewelry box and spare button collection IMMEDIATELY before setting out for a family gathering on Easter. I still don’t know why that needed to get done then.
I call those “but first,”s. I need to do this, but first, I need to do this other thing. On the other hand you can use that as a corral for building step by step to do lists.
Choose the project that you want to finish/end up with/goalpost.
Write it down
Then write down the one thing that you need to do FIRST in order to achieve that
Then write down the one thing that you need to do FIRST in order to achieve THAT thing.
And so on.
Until you get to one thing that has no BUT FIRST, except, getting up and doing it.
That is your order of operations for that goal.
With it written down, if you only get 1 or 3 up the list towards the goal, you still know what the next thing to do is when you get back to it, so you are ready to go, instead of casting around from pile to pile to figure out the next step. It’s right there in front of you.