Newsletters and Vegan Cake

This post originally appeared on SubStack.

I’ve never been a big fan of newsletters.

Okay, that’s not exactly true.  At one point in the early days of the internet, I had a newsletter called C.J.’s Weekly Facts.  14-year-old me would write down all the random knowledge I accumulated that week by chasing down internet rabbit holes late at night and on Saturday I would blast it out to all the AOL email addresses I knew.  Friends.  Their parents.  Friends of friends.  Their parents.  The lady who sold my mother Mary Kay makeup.

I considered myself very interesting at the time.  At 14, we all considered ourselves either very interesting or completely uninteresting with very little in between.  My readership had no unsubscribe button.  I like to think I contributed to the development of early spam filters.

Let’s try this again.  These days, I’m not a big fan of newsletters.  See, that’s a truer statement.

The vast majority of newsletters that enter my inbox do so against my will, which I assume is karma for the spam I sent Mrs. Finch the Mary Kay lady.  So as you can imagine, when all the internet wisdom told me I absolutely must create a newsletter mailing list to make it as an author, I did so with a pinched nose.  After all, my last foray into newsletters was one of those gut-punch embarrassing memories that sneaks up on you when you’re trying to go to sleep.  I’ve sent a grand total of 2 newsletters so far.  How’s that for reader engagement?

I’ve been thinking.  After deleting all my social media both personal and professional (A+, 5 Stars, would recommend), I’ve had considerably more time to think.  And work.  And read.  Dear lord, the doomscroll ratchet strap of anxiety on my brain was such a time suck.  Anyways.

So I’ve been thinking, and I’ve come to the realization that I don’t want a newsletter.  Just like I didn’t want an author Instagram account or an author YouTube account.

See, it’s like vegan cake.

I’m not vegan, so I wouldn’t know a good vegan cake if I tasted it.  In fact, my opinion on vegan cake is that cake isn’t vegan, so you’d probably do better to make a different dessert.  This means I have no business making a vegan cake.  I don’t want to make something I wouldn’t normally consume.  See, my first step in becoming a writer was a lifetime spent reader, developing a strong sense of the medium.

I hated being an author on Instagram because I couldn’t give two shits about seeing an author’s mood board and daily writing routine.  It was all candles and corkboards.  Leather notebooks and post-its arranged just so.  Setting up a camera to film themselves typing on their little Macbook Airs while they sip their writerly matcha lattes.  Short of reinventing the reel, I was never gonna turn that account into anything.

So back to thinking.  You know what I wish I could do?  Just start a freaking blog.

It seemed like everybody had a blog back in the day.  It’s kinda weird that I didn’t.  I was a constant consumer of blogged content back when people still unironically said the word blogosphere.  My wife had a blog.  My friends had blogs.  That kind of old school internet writing sounds like such a nice change of pace from social media.  Casual.  Comfortable.  Familiar.  Do people still write blogs these days?

Enter Substack.

Now, I’m not exactly sure what to call Substack.  To be fair, I don’t think Substack knows what to call Substack.  It’s newsletters that smell like blogs.  Or maybe it’s blogs in your email.  It’s definitely blog adjacent, since there’s an RSS feed.  But it’s also podcasts!  It all goes to your email, except when it doesn’t.  Oh and there’s paywalled stuff in here, too.  Also, there’s some kind of tweet / threads thing happening.  But those don’t get emailed.  You need the app to read those.

You know what? I’ve decided I’ve got enough grey in my beard now that I can opt out on giving a damn sometimes.  I don’t need to know it all anymore.  If Substack is good enough for Margaret Atwood, it’s good enough for me.  So here we are.  I’m using this platform, whatever it is.  Am I following the meta?  Who knows.  I’m not going to learn the meta.  Maybe ignoring the meta is punk.  Maybe ignoring the meta IS the meta.  Meta is owned by Zuck, and I don’t deal with alien turtles.  

In any case, I’m moving my old newsletter to Substack now.  I’m treating this thing like a blog and pretending we’re still in the golden age of the internet.  If you read this in your email, well, you’re a weirdo.  But I’m still glad you’re here.