Category: WritingCategory: Writing

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.

◼️ Become a member of Social Media Escape Club to be a part of discussions like this every week!

Life should inform the writing on your website, your newsletter, your creative output.

This from Lyly Dhommar, from a recent Email Guidance exchange.

Uncle Seth aka Lord of Social media escape club, confirmed that yes, connections and actions in the real world are the way I should live now. Then, I’ll write about them if something happens, not the other way around.

Do all the things. Go to the shows. The art openings. The ice cream stands. The hikes. The book shops. Live in the world as much as you can withstand, read, draw, dance, and dream.

Then, when it’s time to write your newsletter, you’ll have a rich life to pull from.

I hear it all the time – “my inbox is overflowing, I can’t keep up,” which usually leads to the idea that your newsletter is going to get lost in the shuffle of your subscribers inbox.

I subscribe to a lot of newsletters. I’m drowning, too. But there are names that pop up in my Newsletter folder that I will absolutely read. Names that make me smile. Newsletters that I know I will read and get something from.

You can be that for someone else. Believe that.

If you’ve got four subscribers, 40, or 400 – there are a certain number of people that will make time for you, week in and week out. Not everyone, but a subset of your total subscriber count. That’s the way it works.

So don’t be dismayed by the numbers, the trends, whatever – celebrate the few people who love the work that you do.