Still Chasing a Disney Empire Dream

Last year, nearly on this exact date, I posted a welcome article prior to posting my first weekly Friday article to Substack. I’ve since posted every week, plus three bonus articles. I started writing these pieces on LinkedIn years ago, and most of those are reposted on Substack as well, and all in all, I have posted approximately (titles, dates, possible extraneous words copied and pasted together into one long document in Microsoft Word makes it approximate) 175,261 words on Substack since May 16, 2025. Leaving out all the reposted material, all the original, new writing totals 126,913 words. Project Hail Mary is estimated at around 119,000 words and 496 pages. If I put all this writing without a single drop of editing into a printed and bound book, it would be about the size of this beefy bestseller. Science fiction and fantasy novels tend to be between 100,000 and 115,000 and the average general fiction novel is about 80,000 to 100,000. Usually to be considered a novel instead of a novelette or middle grade children’s book, the word count must be at least 40,000 words. I have more than three short novels written in a year.

I’m not talking about this because I want to brag; nor is it to complain. I’m describing how these Substack articles were meant to be a supplement to all the other things I’m doing at Last Plutonian, L.L.C., but instead, trying to write weekly intelligent pieces has mostly consumed my time and hasn’t really met the goal of expanding my audience in any substantial way. The many creative projects (and a smattering of nonfiction projects) I’ve had in the works at Last Plutonian have not meaningfully moved forward in this year, so I find myself taking an accounting of the company’s goals and directions now that I’ve had a year of weekly posting on this Substack to look back at. I like writing these pieces and I have no intention of stopping them completely, but I need to change the schedule to once a month, with occasional bonus articles. In 2026, attention is a commodity that creative companies like Last Plutonian need, but the kind of attention is always changing.

Attention spans are dwindling. We see it in the news, I’ve written about it previously, and we can talk to any teacher of any grade in the United States for about two minutes and we’ll find out all about how much the shape of society’s attention spans is changing, and it is especially distinct in younger people. At first, I thought that if I just added audio narration for all my articles, this would be a bridge for attention. However, recording audio in my tiny motorhome across weather, with either air conditioning or heating loudly ongoing most of the year, became something I just completely fell behind in doing. While I was keeping up with it, it didn’t seem to make any difference, though. Lately I’ve been thinking that short videos with some interesting parts of my articles might be good to post on YouTube and TikTok under Last Plutonian’s respective accounts, but again, that feels like a lot of extra work, but not necessarily a means to seek an audience. Even if an audience discovers these hypothetical videos, will they be looking for more nonfiction clips? Would they proceed to consume my long-form nonfiction? Would this potential interest span across worlds into my fiction works? And, importantly, how in the world do I put out that fiction work if I’m so deeply engaged in the nonfiction work?

Last Plutonian’s biggest long-term goals have always been to create a story empire like Walt Disney. But, I’ve never pretended that Walt just did everything on his own, had all relevant skills mastered, and was the sole reason for his success… and I have always known that I needed to figure out how to do the same thing. Without losing control of my intellectual property, like Walt had lost control of Oswald, I need to find a few important starting “resources” and most of them are human: I need a Roy, Walt’s brother who was a master of figuring out financing for all of Walt’s projects; I need an Ub Iwerks, one of Walt’s main partners who did single-handedly complete large portions of animation and design tasks; I need a team like Walt’s “Nine Old Men,” a group of animators that worked across Walt’s earlier years as his core animation group; and I need financing. But in 2026, none of the factors that were in Walt’s favor are quite the same now. I’ll need to translate somehow across a century of innovation and societal change to figure out a path to success that works for me, a disabled woman without a financially savvy supportive brother, a trusted creative partner with similar skills to mine, nor a team of dedicated creatives to bring my intellectual properties to life. Last Plutonian has produced several purchasable items, but the return on investment for these has not been meaningful enough to expand from being just me with the occasional freelance hire. While I do admire Walt Disney’s work and successes, he was also known to be… less than generous, both in his pay of the brilliant people who brought his works to life and in credit. The Walt Disney Company of today is still known to be quite rigid in its control over intellectual property, so much so that it is possible to work there and accidentally provide one’s own intellectual property to the company without meaning to. Unsurprisingly, these are not qualities of the Disney empire that I admire, but it does limit examples of building a media empire that was not founded on advantages that could be labeled as unfair. Even if I wanted to use unfair advantages, it isn’t like I can just find those labeled on a box somewhere with my name on it.

On January 31, 2023, I posted the first of my LinkedIn articles mostly just describing my goals for Last Plutonian for the year and my ideas about larger growth, and I titled it Chasing a Disney Empire Dream. In that article, I described a bit of what I’d been doing and what I wanted to do still for Last Plutonian, and in response to trying to craft a One Page Business Plan for the year, I wrote, “my biggest question that I’m trying to get that plan to answer is, ‘How does this tiny company achieve that big dream of Disney Empire proportions?’” It’s been over three years and my attempt to craft interesting, intelligent content and make consistent use of social media has not meaningfully changed my position relative to that question. Last Plutonian is a tiny company that is struggling to gain traction. Even if I were able-bodied with the most energy in the world and never needed to pause to eat, sleep, or even take a break, I’m just one single person and can never master every skill to create every tiny piece of large-scale projects, nor would I be able to accomplish this in a single lifetime even if I could work endlessly, because the scale of these projects is simply not for a single person.

In a time when elite college students have never read a book, it seems like the potential for Last Plutonian to move forward and grow will not stem from thousands and thousands of words written in articles that mimic a magazine or editorial style. Perhaps I needed to do these years sooner, but even magazines are struggling and have become niche compared to the thriving magazines experienced thirty years ago. Instead of chasing a niche area for a niche audience that isn’t even really smaller versions of the projects I most want to work on, I’m going to take some time to find better ways to spread Last Plutonian’s work without simply spreading myself thin. I hope you’ll continue to join me on Last Plutonian’s journey through its upcoming changes.