Starting over

Those of you who have been following this folly of mine for however long I’ve been keeping it up have probably noticed I haven’t been doing much with it. I have also noticed this, of course, and haven’t been terribly happy about that. A few of you are paying for my nonsense here, and if nothing else I’ve felt like I was not giving you your money’s worth.

(We want to believe we are above such crass concerns as money, but since we can’t opt out of the money economy, we probably ought to drop that conceit.)

Part of the problem is I keep wanting to write these self-contained pieces — you know, real articles and stuff. But I can’t seem to focus long enough to put out something actually good, and then I get impatient near the end and rush through just to get it done. And that’s when I actually finish them. You cannot know how many times I’ve started something only to delete it about three-quarters of the way through. Mainly because I don’t know. It’s been embarrassing.

I have been very, very upset for the past few days. And I have this quirk that when I’m very, very upset, I tend to trash anything I’ve been working on that I am very, very unhappy with, in a bid to start over with a clean slate. This is why I’m not one of those multi-decade bloggers with a following in the thousands. You should see my export files. It’s ridiculous. Anyway, I’ve now done that here. I’ve been all over the place and I haven’t even had good output by my own standards. Enough. Let’s try this again.

Everything I’d put here since the last time I started over is in an export file; I at least did that much this time. It’s not lost. It’s just put away. I didn’t want to delete the Substack itself, though, because I’d mess everything up with subscribers and so on. So I’m just going to start over again in this space.

I had thought about renaming this, too. I came this close to doing it. Had a name picked out. But… nah. Too much work (among other things, I’d have to change the name at Stripe also). And I already have some social-media accounts with the same name (though usually different spelling: “urthboundmisfit” instead of properly) and I really don’t want to rename those too. They don’t have to match, but it’s nice when they do.

But enough of the frivolous nonsense. You are probably wondering what the heck I’m going to do with this space now. Valid question. Especially for you paid subscribers.

Well, I want to write more, not less, and I tend to write more when I am more… stream-of-consciousness isn’t quite the right term? But like that. I want to talk about what’s on my mind without having to develop it into a whole fucking essay, and I want to talk about multiple things in one post, which will probably work a lot better for you because it will mean more material in fewer emails. Yay!

(I used to drive the LiveJournal nerds crazy by writing multiple short posts in a short span of time. Shove it, LiveJournal nerds.)

I may still do the occasional one-topic wonder-post if I come up with something really worthwhile for it. But it won’t be the norm. At least, I don’t think so.

As for the paid stuff. I haven’t changed the comment settings and I won’t. That’s still paid-only. I haven’t seen many of you take advantage of it, which makes me wonder how important paid features really are for this particular project. (If you can call it a project. Well, that’s a harmless conceit to hold onto.) Also, I have the chat feature set to paid-only. Would me scheduling hosted chats be interesting to anyone here? Because I wouldn’t mind having some conversational company. It’d be more than I get around here in meatspace most of the time.

Mind you, it is important to ponder why you’ve paid for a membership here in the first place. I tend to nab the occasional paid subscriber when I write about feminism or gender-identity politics. I do have specific outlets for those topics, you know:

Born With Ovaries

Clownfish Don't Need Gender Clinics

I’m similarly Not Happy with both of those and will probably junk posts and start over but the point is, there’s a place for that stuff. It really is just down to what you would most want to follow. I’m not going to ask you to pay for all three Substacks. That’s just crazy talk.

(In fact, a paid status on one is a comped status on either or both of the other two for the same subscribing email address if you message me to let me know or if I happen to notice. I’m easy.)

Okay, well. I have a little more cleaning up to do here. Just wanted to let you all know what’s going on. And now I’ve done it. ‘Later.