AN UPDATE

It’s been a lot longer than I intended since I last contributed to the ‘stack. If I was a YouTuber the thumbnail for this post/video would be a sombre still of my face with a title like: “I’m Not Quitting, But…”. And it’s true that I’m not quitting, but.

I took a Substack sabbatical for a few months to focus on the novel I was writing, and enough time away from anything will let you know how you feel about returning to it. For the most part I haven’t found myself rushing back here. It doesn’t help that the first thing I see when I log on is a social media feed – an unusually learned one, but a social media feed all the same. I used to make time to log onto Substack and read through my subscriptions, now it’s getting harder not to just use it as another time-killing scroll.

I don’t imagine this is as severe an issue for everyone, but this year I’ve been trying to adjust to living without access to internet at home, and as with any addiction, my decision to try to extract myself from the web has only made it obvious how tangled up in it I am, and I find myself breaking my abstinence more often than I’d like (usually by downloading a horde of YouTube videos to watch offline whenever I go to the Tesco at the end of my road). I live on my own, and although the prospect of sitting alone with myself was one of the main things I intended to practice when I got rid of my router, the reality of it is often harsher than it seems in prospect, and I regularly dip into the old comforts of distraction.

So when I log onto Substack, my cold turkey of a brain starts yapping like a dog that knows it’s getting treats (memes). On top of that, I seem to have developed a chronic incapacity to write an essay under 8000 words, which was why so many of them ended up being split into two parts. They demanded a lot more from me than I had originally intended, and even publishing one a month was eating drastically into the energy I needed to put into longer projects.

But this won’t be another 8000 worder. To get to the point – I’m not quitting, but I will be posting longer essays less regularly. If I can figure out how to opine on something without making a dissertation out of it then there may be more regular shorter posts. And whenever an idea for a longer essay comes to me demanding to be written, as they often have and will again, then I’ll write them. But there won’t be a schedule, at least not for the foreseeable future. I’ll post when I have something to post. In the meantime, I’ll still be writing, but secretly, by lantern light, possibly in blood.

Thank you to everyone who subscribes, and for some of the extremely encouraging words that some of you have left under my posts. And especially thank you to the few of you who have become paid subscribers – I’ve paused paid subscriptions indefinitely now, maybe I’ll turn them back on if I ever get to a point where I feel like I can offer regular and reliable content. Because I won’t pretend that that isn’t what it feels as though Substack is making of our writing: more content. Though it still seems like about the best place to share it, and the best set of people to share it with that I’ve ever found online.