Writing on the internet

Maybe I do have something to say to the masses

I've been writing or blogging on the internet most of my life. I joined LiveJournal in 2003, and I was on Blogger before that, so let's say about 25 years and 3-4 Wordpress sites. It's been a decade since I last wrote publicly/screamed into the void of the internet, but I recently got back into a kind of longform reflective essay practice on Facebook of all places. I suppose Substack is the newest in a long line of online writing platforms to get a feel for.

Writing has always been a process that helped me order my thoughts, but the problem(?) with private diaries and journals is that you never need to be coherent or persuasive or structured or artful. Plus people have described me as "wise" more than once, and who doesn't love the validation that comes from writing for an audience? Give me comments, faves and likes please. (But seriously, comments, faves and likes were our way of being in community on the Old Internet before it became a clout-chasing, existential hole-plugging mess.)

Immediately before deciding to start this substack I decided to crosspost something from my Facebook bubble to Mastodon - something I don't usually do - and it went a little viral. In fact it is currently still going viral, and the ego-affirming buzz from my phone has now become a slightly stressful list of comments and follow requests I feel compelled to manage and respond to. Strangers seem to think I have valuable things to say, and I’m also reminded that strangers on the internet are occasionally kind, thoughtful and insightful.

But if I'm honest with you the viral thing only got me halfway there. The biggest push came when I stumbled across this literary substack except it was really, really bad. I love me some weird metaphors and wanky spacing, and I have paid real money for books of poetry written in the last 5 years, but art is pointless posturing when there’s nothing honest about it. There’s nothing there. I thought, “Well I write way more truth than this person ever has; should I start a substack?” (People had also previously told me I should start a substack.)

I’m a bit intimidated by Substack, alright? All these people doing what I thought was the Very Serious Writing (you have to pay to read some of it, it's that good), and I'm not that widely read or literary - I’m the guy opening 10 Google tabs for that one post. In retrospect part of the problem was because I was reading and getting recs from my bestie who writes and recs the extremely good shit only. The push came from the realisation that there is also the bad shit and the mid shit, and of course they vastly outnumber anything else.

To be clear I'm not promising the good shit here either, so I've named the substack "bad art newsletter" to appropriately manage your expectations about this. Good taste doesn’t automatically translate to producing good art unfortunately.

The real annoying thing about art and life is that you're rarely good at anything the first time or even the tenth time, AND you always have to start at the first time AND AND you don't have infinite time to psych yourself up or edit to perfection. I'll get better at this (probably), and my pal writing the really bad literary substack will get better this (probably), and if not, well, bad art forever babyyyy.

I have been learning to paint with gouache. On the left is the good art I made and on the right is the bad art I made. I painted both of these on the same night.