The 11th Hour

A frantic, last minute screed because Substack be sending me emails

Hey, doods.

I'm not one of those newsletter writers who have this magical, endless creative well of topics and ideas to draw from. I've always been curious about how other writers run their newsletters, probably in the hope of discovering that baseline workflow that everybody but me seems to know about and operate from. It kinda shocked me when I read that a few other writers that I admire maintain a collection of 20-odd drafts or so, all in varying stages of development, and then choose one to polish off for that week’s essay.

I don't work like that. I give myself two weeks to come up with something and my stupid-weird brain has a knack for tossing some errant thought my way literal days before my self-imposed publishing deadline, which ends up becoming that week's newsletter. It’s the creative equivalent of living paycheck to paycheck, and although it creates a somewhat stressful, menacing writing environment, it does offer up some lovely self-induced spontaneity and adds a breezy, super-casual flavor to my words that kinda just works for me. Can’t think too hard about what you’re writing if you have that unwavering, unsympathetic deadline staring you dead in the face, amirite?

Seat of my pants. That's how we fly these friendly skies.

But now and then my melon returns a big fat 404 Not Found error for the entire two weeks and leaves me scrambling until the very last minute for some rando topic to write about. That’s when I find myself flipping through the mental Rolodex of mundane everyday stuff to find something worthy of latching onto that I can reasonably bullshit my way through riff off of for about 800 words or so, providing a desperately needed reprieve until that ominous deadline once again begins looming overhead in a couple of weeks.

That’s this issue of MidThoughts. What follows is a glorified morning pages session, the day before my publication deadline. No edits. No revisions. Just pure brain pudding spilled out onto the digital page. Hey, it might not look pretty, but at least it’s Content…

I want to start by lobbing a serious question out to you all. How many of you out there peddling your content on The Substacks have a regular ol’ 9-5 job? I’m asking for a friend. When I made a commitment to take a more active role in self-promotion on my newsletter at the turn of the new year I did this while staring my own reality cold in the eyes. While trying to realize just a small fraction of my inner creativity through this newsletter, I’m also tugging around this massive burden of a 9-5 management job that has its thirsty fangs permanently sunk deep into the back of my neck.

And this is not a complaint. The pay is good enough to allow me to live comfortably as a single father with a newly-christened adult child while living in a modest apartment in a quiet suburb of Los Angeles. I travel once or twice a year, am able to eat out a couple times a week, and am left with enough extra income to pursue my real interests like writing and photography. And until I somehow crack the code and leverage this little side project of mine into a full-fledged business enterprise, or reach my breaking point with work and the dwindling tolerance I have with my fellow Americans and decide to just say fuck it and flee the country, I’m gonna amble along with this current status quo.

The thing is though, the responsibilities and demands of the 9-5 often put a serious damper on the residual time and energy I have left to spend on making this stuff. That’s why I go from extreme highs, where I’m riding a wave of high creative energy and manage to put something out there with polish that I’m proud of that manages to crack 100 views in a day, to low-ebb weeks like this, where I’m literally churning out these lazy screeds at the 11th hour just as Substack hurls these chilling reminders into my mailbox, ratcheting up my anxiety by warning me that I have “2 days left to hit my publishing goal.”

As someone who reads at least as often as I am writing here, it’s easy to get lost in the idea that all of these newsletters that I enjoy reading are written by full-time writers who aren’t caught in the muddy trenches of having to deal with bothersome, silly distractions like Careers, or Putting Food on the Table, or anything like that. These people spend a few hours writing one or two mornings a week and then the rest of the time it’s just endless racquetball at the sports club with the occasional dinner date with their art colony bros thrown in to break up the boredom.

But that can’t be the case. It can’t be. The beauty of a platform like this is that it offers an open invite to even wretched, wart-nosed commoners like myself who just have a passion for words and ideas to step up to the plate and give it a shot. Substack is digital publishing for the everyman. Writers of the world, unite! Seize the means of production! We’re all supposed to be equals here, right?

…right?

So let me ask a favor of any of you who managed to make it this far. If you’re publishing content here (or anywhere else for that matter), please drop a comment below and tell me what your “real” day job is, and how you manage to marry that with your creative passions and a steady publishing schedule. And if there’s some secret sauce to this whole thing that I’ve missed all these months, feel free to drop that down below as well. 😉

And ahhhh shit, I did it again, didn’t I? Didn’t I say just two issues ago that I wasn’t going to write anything else about Substack or the writing process? And here I am again kicking the can around by myself, swinging from the chandelier at my own private pity party.

OK, well let me present a little peace offering and try to make it up for you with this rad-ass shit from Breakin’ 2: Electric Boogaloo:

Crisis averted! See you in a couple of weeks!