The Grasshopper #70: A Bigger Life
I love the idea but getting there is the challenge
It’s been a week of change for me- the good (my mom will go home from rehab after nearly dying) and the bad (Medium went south on me as an outlet). A lot of ups and downs and then the usual period of ‘what now?’. I’ve been here before, like a lot of us, and somehow I know I’ll move on. It’s the ‘how’ that is the challenge.
One steady thing is my writing. It’s been my center the past few years, the place I circle back to. So seeing Medium will no longer be viable, basically overnight, was unexpected, to a point. The unfortunate thing about writing for a living is its essential unreliability.
You put work out there and then you check on it once in a while and hopefully it resonates. This week it didn’t and then, gradually it did. I’ve mentioned the ‘didn’t’ part. The good part is when change is thrust upon us we either hide or rediscover certain core things about ourselves.
I learned that money is not the primary point of why I do what I do. It seems like a lesson I have to relearn on a periodic basis, like all of us who have chosen not to hide. For the writing part of my life I decided that all was not lost. The Grasshopper and The Witness Chronicles will be my focus with my continuing day to day writing.
I am still going to publish my opinion writing on Medium but it will not be the focus it has been. Still, I have over 6000 readers that have chosen to follow me and publishing there is really a matter of clicks once you have written the work. But that kind of writing is going to migrate over The Witness Chronicles on a steadier basis.
The other action I’m taking is to serialize my first novel, The Rememberers, which I’ve referenced here many times, on its own Substack. It’s an experiment, but to do it has been just a bit more complex than expected, but it is in progress and you will get invites to subscribe or just check it out soon. It will be free plus any donations via Buy Me A Coffee, a patronage platform.
The actual revenue model is where the project gets a little more complicated. The novel has been finished and edited for several years and you’d think that serialization would simply be a matter of copying and pasting a chapter every week. Of course nothing is that simple.
I want readers who might just want the whole story, as an ebook or a paperback, to have the option of buying it, which required me to revisit the entire formatting process including layout, cover art, etc. I’m far from a graphic designer but I did go through this when I first tried Amazon self-publishing, but a lot has changed. It can’t look homemade.
So I’m working on that and will make it available via Gumroad, a site designed for creators of all kinds to set up sales on our own terms. Like Amazon they provide a marketing platform and print on demand but unlike Amazon, they don’t imply you’ll get sales simply from being there.
You have to either have a following or give readers a good reason to consider buying. Anyway, that is the current plan. But all this gets me to a reality I’m dealing with in the wake of this Medium stuff.
I was commiserating about this with a close friend over drinks and she stopped me and said, “you need a bigger life”. Bazinga! Pretty obvious but sometimes a simple observation like this hits hard when timed right.
My sights have been set too low.
A few years after writing my first two novels (my only novels), when I went into the big library nearby and scanned the shelves of new books, it was discouraging. There are so many and each represents a big chunk of a writer’s life. It basically discouraged me from pursuing the agent/trad publishing route as I thought, ‘it will be too easy for my stories to get lost in the sheer volume’.
So, I set them aside and moved on to online publishing of essays and opinions. But now, with the beginnings of a reader base it’s time to do this and I want to do it right.
As for that bigger life, I’m letting my subconscious consider what that means and how I get there. More on that as it unfolds.
The two big reality stories this week have been the latest Trump indictments, which I have written about this week in Witness, and the unfolding climate catastrophe in Lahaina on Maui which is shaping up to be potentially our worst disaster in years. It’s heartbreaking.
I have not really written about that because it is a story that is just getting started. It has all the elements of human tragedy and now we are seeing greed as developers try to take advantage and buy up land from under the lost lives and livelihoods of the unfortunate people there who went from paradise to hell in a storm of fire.
This newsletter is about the writing lifestyle and some are put off by my talk of politics and climate, but writers are observers and communicators, regardless of what kind of writing we do. Some do their work around personal challenges, some simply tell stories, and others deal with the changing world.
The reality is that all of us likely do all of these things. Writing, like all art, is a personal idea that plays out in public and the effect may not be that originally intended by the creator. Often it is us thinking through very specific things about life and readers finding common ground in that, but in the context of your own lives.
I can’t comprehend something like the Lahaina fire experience, or what goes on in the mind of a man who knowingly takes criminal actions and when caught defends himself with the argument that he is above the law.
But both things tell us a lot about the human experience. These two examples may be largely negative, and a lot of us who comment on them may feel we need to find positive alternatives to them. Personally I think the act of writing and sharing is itself a positive act. Shared human experience, etc.
All pretty existential stuff. But so much better than the empty fluff so many writers indulge in. But I suspect many of them are younger and have been sucked into the influencer/side-hustle mythology so prevalent today.
To get good at this stuff we have to dig deeper into a lot of things. That’s the job of writers and the challenge is to do it without appearing too complex. Don’t think too much about that!
Because Medium is no longer viable for me, I am changing direction a bit and the most compelling thing I keep running into is AI, and man, is it a deep rabbit hole. You might call it the science of language. If you want to attempt to understand how it works, you can try reading this article, but be aware it will twist your brain into knots.
I have two takeaways from what I’ve learned just from the beginning of my research. First, the human mind has an extraordinary ability to process language, a mind boggling ability. For example, the current AI model, ChatGPT 4, has reached the language level of a seven year old.
The second takeaway is that, somehow, humans created this thing. I have yet to find information about how they did this. As a writer it seems to me to be a huge leap in human consciousness to even build a model like this.
We can do things like that and we still have people who deny climate change. Go figure.
Did you write today?
Martin
1342 words
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Keep going, bonne continuation.......your writing is very important to all of us ‼️
Please explain what happened with Medium; thanks