Category: WritingCategory: Writing

Cody Cook Parrot said in their recent Witnessing Practice workshop that you can make a thing and share it with a few people.

You don’t need to launch your new website with a big press announcement. You probably don’t need to post it on social media, either, because 95% of your followers won’t see it anyways.

This is why we need a few people we can send snippets via email, get on a Zoom call, meet in person, even get on the phone.

MrBeast says that when he was starting out, him and a few friends would be on Skype all day and night, working together just trying to figure out YouTube.

Imagine if you spent just an hour a week doing that with your creative friends?

I’ve seen so much fear in people’s eyes over picking the right email marketing platform (Substack, Kit, Flodesk, Buttondown, Mailchimp).

People’s voices start to shake when choosing the right online store (Shopify, BigCartel), the right website builder (SquareSpace, Cargo, Wix, WordPress).

You’re not getting married. You can break up with these tools at any time.

Instead of spending the next few weeks bouncing between platforms or watching 24 hours of “Beehiiv vs Substack” comparison videos, talk to other creative folks in your orbit.

I host weekly virtual co-working sessions with musicians, writers, and artists.

You can ask me direct via my Email Guidance offering and I’ll get your going in the right direction.

I also host paid-community Zoom calls, where we talk about zines, IRL events, and make fun of social media (it feels great). Get a 30 day trial for $10.

Alex runs BATCAVE, “a place to help one another dive deep into the stuff.”

Cody runs Landscapes, “a writing group for all genres.”

Jes is a musician and hosting a “hands-on session exploring the four most powerful and underused practice tools.

Kate Ellen is hosting a “Go Dumb Meet Up” which is “a zoom meet up to chat about how to temporarily or permanently break up with your smartphone.”

Mansi has The Ripple Circle, a place for “authentic sharing, gentle witnessing, and the longer echo of our practice together.”

It’s not just about deleting an app, it’s about finding new places to inhabit, daring to believe in a world without Musk or Zuckerberg being central to our ability to earn a living.

This is how we escape social media, and we’re getting better at it every week.

My childhood included a home foreclosure and a family split because of it. Calling my parents in their later years meant talking into an answering machine, “hey guys, it’s me, Seth” and then my dad (usually) picking up the phone. “We’re here, we’re here, yes, hello!?”

They screened their calls to avoid debt collectors.

Somehow my sister and I have avoided any major financial disasters, so long as you don’t count credit card debts that come and go every few years.

All that so say, I’ve got some shame around money and (of course) taxes.

I had a phone call with a good friend and we laughed about a tax situation I’m currently facing (don’t worry, it’s fine). We shared our collective money horror stories and I felt better afterwards. Shame crumbles under the weight of laughter.

(more…)

I won’t be thinking about platforms when I’m dead, and I’d like to think about them even less right now.

Recently I got to hear Kato share some wisdom she received from her time working with playwright Paula Vogel:

“…most playwrights, you’re not writing for your current generation. You’re not writing for your peers. You’re actually writing for the generation coming after you. That’s who’s going to pick up your work. That’s who’s going to have the energy for it. That’s who’s going to make things happen.”

Vivian Maier passed away in 2009 and her photography didn’t become widely known until months after she passed.

In my conversation with Ryan J. Downey, he explained how all the work he did at MTV News over 15 years was wiped out when Paramount Global took the archives offline.

The music blog I wrote from 2001-2008, the very foundation of my entire career, is gone now, too.

What do we contribute to future generations when all our work is erased from the internet after we die, or does it even matter?

Inspired by Lindsey Adler’s recent Note, I decided that on Monday’s Escape Pod Zoom call we’d go around the room and each of us would read aloud for one minute.

Someone read their first Substack post. Someone else read old journal entries their daughter wrote at age nine. An inspirational quote and a paragraph from “Letters to a Young Poet” by Rilke. Excerpts from “Hysterical Blindness and other Southern Tragedies that Have Plagued My Life Thus Far” by Leslie Jordan. A paragraph from the Combahee River Collective Statement.

I read dialogue between two civilians signing up to run a cantina from “Death Star.”

Over the last several months, we’ve built enough connection that this activity didn’t break us. No one logged off.

And while I’m pretty sure this didn’t help anyone “quit instagram,” this was a small act of performance. This was curation. This was taking and giving of ourselves.

And the mere act of sitting there and listening to a person read? This wasn’t a YouTube video or podcast, but a Monday morning group of misfits simply reading to one another.

Not everything needs to be useful, but all of this has purpose.

Two things of note from our June 27th Escape Pod Zoom call.

Don’t niche too much. Or rather, don’t make two seperate newsletters, two separate Substacks, two separate websites – especially at the start. Show up fully as you first, before you go chopping yourself up into all these little pieces.

Then also, if you’re starting to move your Substack archive to your own website (just in case, ahhhh), take your time. It’s hard work moving everything over manually, and reformatting images, and cleaning up links. Find a pace that works for you.

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