Friday, March 17, 2023
Friday, March 17, 2023
The day I allowed Substack to dominate my morning.
3:45: Awake, thinking, for an hour. Good thinking, not anxious thinking; I was almost awake enough to get out of bed and put those thoughts into action, but I knew that if I got out of bed and started blog work and book revisions, I’d never get back into bed.
The rest of the day ought to proceed better than that, and so I (eventually) went back to sleep.
5:45: Awake, briefly.
6:45: Awake, for real this time.
7:00: Bowels.
7:15: More investigation into Ghost vs. Substack vs. WordPress. I didn’t end up actually solving the platform problem until I got off my phone and got the rest of my day started, btw.
7:45: Ablutions.
8:00: Yoga. This is when I solved the problem—because, for the first time, I asked myself what the problem really was.
It was not, necessarily, that I wanted to use open-source products and find the best open-source products for my writing and publishing goals.
It was, necessarily, that I wanted to connect with readers.
And Substack is the best place for that, right now.
I also got temporarily caught in a logical fallacy as presented by Ghost: we let you keep more of your subscription revenue than Substack does. GREAT JOB, GHOST. Now answer the question of which writers make more money from their respective platforms.
The fact that Ghost is not saying “oh, that’s us too, our writers also make way more money,” is telling.
That, and, like, everyone I read is on Substack.
8:30: Breakfast. I was sooooooo very tempted to have this breakfast in front of my laptop and get the Substacking started right away. But breakfast at a laptop is not a break; it’s just fast.
And anyway, having breakfast at the breakfast nook meant I got to say good morning to Larry.
9:00: Okay, here’s where the whole “Substack sign-up” process started, and already it is annoying, and I kept thinking to myself “This is how it works, though. You provide value to them, and they provide value to you.”
Then came the matter of typing up yesterday’s day, which took an hour. Today’s day will be faster, because I’ll have the draft open as it happens.
I AM SORRY FOR THE FIRST EMAIL THAT WENT OUT, BTW
I HAD NO IDEA IT WOULD HAVE THAT UGLY SUBSCRIBE BUTTON RIGHT IN THE MIDDLE OF MY FIRST FEW PARAGRAPHS
I HAVE FIGURED OUT HOW TO REMOVE THAT, IN SUBSEQUENT MAILINGS
10:30: Recorded piano practice, focusing on the first 22 measures of Chopin Nocturne in E minor, Op. posth. 72 No. 1. “If the fingering does the most efficient thing, then the piece itself is that much more efficient, and the meaning of it is that much less obscured.”
11:00: Inbox Zero. Set appointments for upcoming interviews, asked a question about the upcoming JoCo Cruise, checked to see which of my freelance articles had been published in the past 24 hours:
Yahoo! Finance (via Bankrate): Can you earn rewards on train travel?
Yahoo! Life (via Bankrate): How to get cash from a credit card at the ATM
I also want to call your attention to an earlier piece I did for Dwell, How to turn a junk room into a breakfast nook, simply because the illustrator drew our breakfast nook into the header image. Adorbs.
11:45: Began subscribing and connecting to other Substacks. Started with Ted Gioia's
, which I had been reading for a while thanks to Tyler Cowen's Marginal Revolution, and Matt Yglesias’s , which Cowen recommended yesterday. Total cost: $14, renewable monthly.I also added the RSS feeds for Marginal Revolution and Cory Doctorow’s Pluralistic to my Substack reader.
12:00: Lunch, while texting Mom about new Substack.
12:30: Correspondence chess. I ended up picking Qb6, which was a move I hadn’t considered yesterday.
1:00: Dishes.
1:15: Did a top-level revision pass on SHAKESPEARE IN THE PARK WITH MURDER before sending it off to my editor and beta readers. How did you do that in two-and-a-half hours? you might ask. I had a list, I might answer. I also have a list of the smaller tweaks I plan to make in the next two weeks, and will continue adding to this list as I get reader feedback.
Favorite revision so far: Changing “the nearest outhouse was ten feet away” to “the nearest outhouse was thirty feet away.”
(If the outhouse was only ten feet away, it would be inside the cabin.)
3:45: Discords.
4:00: Email my aunt.
4:15: Walk. Icy wind but enough sun to keep me motivated. Plus I was able to think about the book, and about the piece I want to write for all of you (it’ll be about robots).
5:30: Read
. My first news of the day. Hope it's good, all the banks stayed banks, etc. etc, etc.(Actually it turned out that people are doing exactly what Neal Stephenson suggested they would in Termination Shock. Deepfaking the news.)
(Also another bank is having problems.)
5:45: Beautifying.
6:00: Drive.
6:15: Dinner, with Larry, at Seoul 2 Soul. No photos of the meal, because that would be rude. We shared an appetizer and a plate of mahi-mahi (he had wine, I had sake) and spent $81.61.
7:00: Drive.
7:15: Art Lab with Larry. Practiced our perfect pitch study, discussed the Substack, read the last two chapters of SHAKESPEARE IN THE PARK WITH MURDER.
8:00: Glass Onion: A Knives Out Mystery. We had avoided it because we heard it wasn’t as good as the first one, but we found the first 45 minutes delightful. Loved “It's a dangerous thing to mistake speaking without thought for speaking the truth.” Also loved the commentary on the Mona Lisa. (Is it true that Da Vinci created a new type of brushstroke for the painting?) We’ll finish tomorrow, probably.
8:45: Intimacies.
9:15: Shutdown.
9:30: It is a dangerous thing, to take one’s laptop into one’s bedroom, but here I am with it. Today has been dominated by the dual tasks of 1) launching the Substack and 2) sending SITPWM off to Alan and the early readers. Now I am planning the work that needs to be done this weekend. I would have done this earlier today—I would have done an entire Weekly Review—but that will need to be rescheduled for this weekend as well.
10:30: After updating NicoleDieker.com to reflect the new Substack and looking for additional Substacks to follow (
, , ), I am ready to wind down and read the delightful weekly mailbag at :
I get halfway through before I decide that I only want to read this piece when I have enough mental capacity to give it my full attention.
Which means:
10:45: Ablutions.
11:00: Thinking.
11:30: Bedtime.