State Of The Substack Address

I Might Be Posting Less Here For A While Because ...

Hi everybody! It’s been a minute since I’ve posted an ol’ Substack post, which I feel bad about. I made a commitment to myself to post here regularly because I want to grow this as a viable vehicle for reaching my readers/listeners. Right now, I rely a lot on social media, mainly Twitter/X, and I would like for that to be not as true in the future. For several months, I was good about throwing up posts on a weekly basis, and I’ve really enjoyed this as an outlet for for thoughts that don’t fit with my more professional pursuits. (It also makes me tweet less, as my Substack posts typically start out as potential tweetable nuggets that I force myself into expanding. Like, you know, a writer is supposed to do.)

Anyway: This preamble is meant to set up the unfortunate news that I might be posting here a bit less for the near future. Actually, I have already been posting less but now I want to explain why. There is a very fortunate reason for it! I’m in the midst of writing my seventh book! I’m about 25 percent into the rough draft, which is of course the most challenging period of writing a book, because what you have isn’t nearly as good as the book you have written in your head. And you just have to constantly remind yourself that a rough draft doesn’t have to be good, it just has to exist. Making it good is an ongoing process and luckily I have many more months to do that.

What’s the book about? I’m keeping that secret for now. But if you’re familiar with my other books, this one will fit in well with those. It’s very much my kind of book … but also different! So that will be keeping me busy until next summer. I will try not to neglect Evil Speakers too much in the meantime, but if I do, now you know why.

In the meantime, here are some recent work in case you missed it.

• I wrote about MJ Lenderman’s Manning Fireworks, my favorite album of 2024.

• Neil Young has a preposterously large box set covering his weirdest era (1976-87) out this month, and I watched/listened to all of it.

• The War On Drugs put out an awesome live record yesterday and I was legally required to rave about it.

• I saw Bob Dylan on my birthday and I recorded this monologue about middle age in response.