Hard to believe, given my general pattern, but I seem to be doing pretty well with the three-posts-a-week format. I didn’t keep up with it as well when I was on the road two weeks ago, but the Substack app is for readers much more than writers and I just did not have it in me to write new posts on a phone browser. Half the time I was nodding off. The thing about bus travel is you seem to stop every two hours (and sometimes more often!) and about half that time they expect you to actually exit the bus even when you don’t need to. There is no way you’re going to get enough sleep like that.
If I had it to do over and had a few thousand more dollars I’d have broken the trip down into smaller chunks and then stayed at motels to take breaks at reasonable intervals. Road-warrioring in a car is bad enough but at least you have control of when you can sleep and you don’t have to worry about missing the car unless some asshole steals it.
But anyway, that environment wasn’t conducive to writing. So that was my big deviation from my usual pattern. I still need to write something for tomorrow but I’m lacking inspiration at the moment and may wind up just writing some fluff. I doubt anyone will mind. I don’t have that many followers anyway.
But here is my take on Pride that I posted yesterday.
I’m not against the idea of Pride per se. I get why it became a thing, but it has been turned into something darker and more ridiculous. People who would disagree with me or laugh that off tend to fall into two camps:
1. Those who only superficially participate in Pride for the attention and emotional validation, do not really pay attention to what’s going on, and feel they will be either inauthentic or a “bad ally” — depending on their sexual orientation — if they start to notice and question things;
and
2. Those who know exactly what I’m talking about and endorse it but don’t want a lynch mob coming after them. I wish I could promise that their mocking me or targeting me or whatever will 100% prevent said posse forming, but given how many parents are pissed off now, I wouldn’t take any bets. I only hope they go after the blue-haired straights who are actually hurting kids instead of the lesbian women and gay men who also don’t want those kids hurt but unfortunately are now force-teamed with ghouls, quacks, and perverts.
I don’t want to belabor the point here. Just go read the essay. There’s the link. I just posted it. Go.
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Considering I haven’t even broken the 100-subscriber threshold yet, I have five paid subscribers. I suspect they have all seen me around Facebook — I know for a fact at least one of them is Facebook friends with me — and so it comes off a bit “Mom buying all my World’s Finest candy bars so I can win the boombox,” but it’s still nothing to sneeze at. One of the annual subscribers even saved me from losing my phone service earlier this year. (Thank you SO MUCH.)
I will say this: if any more people subscribe, the monthly sub does me a lot more good in the long run than the annual sub does. If I can get the monthly income up to about $200 to $300 a month, that’s me sorted on bills and baseline necessities. For the upper number, I would need 75 paying monthly subscribers because I see $4 and some change out of that $5 a month per subscriber. I can’t see that happening any time soon, but I wanted to math it up for you just so you can see for yourselves. The lower number is more doable, obviously: just fifty paying monthly subscribers. I think it’s doable, anyway, though it will take time.
So even if you can’t spare five bucks a month — and I won’t tell you what your own financial situation is — if you like what I write, sharing me around would help a lot. I get reposted inside the Substack platform, but that never goes very far.
You share the same ten memes every month. I’ve seen you. If you could stretch just that little bit farther, it’d be great, and it would cost you nothing but a few seconds’ time.
Hell, share it friends-only if you have to. I’ll understand.
Okay. I have to get back to figuring out what to post tomorrow. Toodle-oo.