The Grasshopper Sunday Edition, July 2, 2023: Numbers and an Angry Voice

Trying to avoid being too shrill when I write about controversial subjects

Photo by Max LaRochelle on Unsplash

First, a number that interests me. Substack upgraded their stats pages recently and you now can see a comprehensive set of site statistics on one page. One stood out for me because it’s a number I’ve been wanting but was too lazy to calculate it manually.

The stat is the total number of posts, aka issues, for the life of my publication. This will be my 134th since the inception of The Grasshopper in March 2022. In the past thirty days I have published ten issues of The Grasshopper, including my opinion writing on The Witness Chronicles.

Those 134 articles, posts or whatever I choose to call them represent quite a lot of writing, somewhere around 130-140,000 words or a fat book’s worth of content. 

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On top of writing for you here, I’ve written hundreds of articles on Medium over the same time period, often one or more daily. I mention this because I know there are those who find the volume required to keep up daunting. 

But you don’t have to keep up. This is simply the way I work these days. I don’t believe in writer’s block because I have rarely experienced it. I started out writing book length how-to books in the nineties and the publishing schedules were tight. Typically I might have had three months to deliver an 80,000 word manuscript.

For one book I procrastinated and ended up writing the entire book in one month. Writer’s block is simply not an option in those circumstances. You learn to just sit down and crank it out.

One thing I’m quite conscious of in my political and climate writing is resisting the urge to be shrill, righteous, or cynical when I can avoid it. I don’t want to only reach the converted, I want to reach people whose ideas and opinions may differ from mine.

Not always realistic, but I’m finding more and more people are willing to talk with someone they might have avoided when Trump was in power. 

Cynicism is a period most of us go through during adolescence, a time when sounding world-weary and skeptical was an easy way to appear cool and sophisticated. But some writers, particularly political pundits, never outgrew that childish voice.

The problem with this is it turns people off. Most of us really don’t like too much negativity and venom. Yes, there are some horrible people out there and we should acknowledge them, but it can’t be your constant voice.

You’ll end up sounding like Florida Governor Ron DeSantis. You don’t want that, do you?

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It’s a Saturday morning and there is a chorus of men with gas powered string trimmers outside my windows wreaking havoc on a row of overgrown weeds on the hotel property next door. I can write through almost anything but those things cut through attention just as effectively as they wack the weeds. Ugh.

But they suddenly stopped and the relative silence is bliss. Stringing together a good sentence is challenging enough, but with that racket I just gave up and made another espresso. 

I try to never let distractions be an excuse for not writing, a skill I only developed in recent years. I can procrastinate with the best of ‘em but I have a schedule and I’m trying to stick to it. If you take on a newsletter, which I recommend, you really need to stick to a publishing schedule. This means waiting for inspiration may not be an option.

No matter how much discipline you develop as a writer, you can never be sure you’ll reach readers on a regular basis. May and early June of this year were my slowest months on Medium but now it has picked up again. I looked at past years and these slow periods don’t follow a pattern that I can discern. 

I guess in online publishing, like many things, you go through ups and downs, and the existence of daily stats magnifies those waves. The challenge is to not let the down moments get to us.

Motivation is a tricky thing. I don’t write motivational stuff, though I did once write a book titled Self-Motivation for the Self-Employed as part of a series. My editor at the time suggested the subject and I resisted, thinking there was not a book’s worth of value there.

Then I began asking my self-employed friends how they stayed motivated and they had a variety of things they did to keep themselves working and enjoying the work. So I found a book and wrote it. I don’t have a copy (that was a long time ago), so I’m really not sure what was in it or even if anyone read it. I got my advance, the publisher was acquired by a bigger one, and I stopped getting royalty notices.

Sales information for writers was a black hole back then. Unless you earned out your advance, the only real information you could get was how much you needed to sell to get actual royalties that involved additional checks into the future. 

Things have changed with online writing and publishing. Because of competition, the publishing platforms compete and the quality of the stats they offer becomes a product feature. They’re not perfect but they are miles ahead of what we got in the past.

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The Diaries of Anais Nin began to be published in the early seventies. At the time I was a serious Henry Miller fan and since she was an intimate friend of his I did my usual thing and read them, something like seven volumes of introspection, art, and a dissection of psychoanalysis. 

My usual thing was to read everything and everyone related to writers whose work influenced me like Miller. But those seven dense volumes of Nin’s writing, which were legendary, was a hard slog. But as a very young man, I stuck to it.

And then, several years later, unexpurgated versions came out, reflecting the death of people Nin wanted to protect from the truth of her life. I never read them. Nin was a thing in the late sixties and her soft porn stories were quite popular, along with her strange novels that had no plots and little character development.

I have not thought of her for years and only retain a vague interest in Miller, a writer with phenomenal talents and huge self-indulgences. Both Miller and Nin were true characters; he the bad boy and she the bored housewife married to a wealthy banker. They made an odd combination.

I’m not sure why Nin and her diaries popped into my head so many years later. That idealistic and voracious reader I was is not a very different person, but those memories provided me with a few moments of nostalgia, a little trip back in time.

It took some time for that literary kid to start writing, and my early stuff was as far from Miller as possible. I wrote it to make money and to teach myself how to construct a book. No regrets and no self-criticism, a kind of motto of mine. 

We had some very heavy thunderstorms blow through this afternoon and that is great writing weather. And reminiscing weather.

Did you write today?

Martin Edic

1228 words

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