Five Years In
The State of the Substack and Why I Write
Lit City Blues is officially turning five!
When I started this Substack all the way back in 2021, I was looking for a better and more consistent way to promote my own writing out in the world. Uploading links to various social media sites wasn’t getting me much in the way of traction and didn’t allow for long excerpts or short fiction to be showcased effectively. Substack ticked a lot of those boxes for me and still does: this is the home for my writing now.
I still have an OG Blog I post on occasionally (stuff that I deem not good enough for Substack or random thoughts I want to scribble down somewhere) and weirdly, now that Tumblr is more of a thing than it was five years ago, I’ve sort of homed all the sci-fi/fantasy/nerd related stuff I dabble in over there and I get a pretty decent amount of interaction there as well Together with this Substack, they form the three legged stool that is the hub of all my writing.
As I head into year five, I find myself asking more and more questions about the weight of the idea of writing. Life changes; it’s always chaos to a certain degree, and lately I have felt the burden of the unwritten words I’ve got in my head. I feel like I have less and less time to write and, more importantly, write well. Book 4, which I keep teasing everyone with, seems further away than ever. I have 40K words in a pile, and I can’t figure out or find that groove to get going on it again. That’s the struggle right now.
I don’t know what the answer is yet, but I feel like I want to push myself to try different things. New topics, longer-form pieces, things like that. In 2023, I set a challenge for myself to write one new short story a month, and some of my favorite pieces have emerged from that challenge. I might set myself that challenge again, just to see if I can get the creative juices flowing again.
I’ve never been interested in growth metrics and have never wanted to do this for a specific number of people, but it’s amazing that I have fifty subscribers and as of this year, one paid subscriber! Thank you for joining me on this journey! I’m glad you’re here, and I hope you enjoy what you read as much as I enjoy writing it.
Since five years seems like a significant anniversary, I was curious and decided to look at some stats from the previous five years and pick some of my favorite posts from the past five years as well.
Enjoy!
Top Five Posts By Views:
'Peaky Blinders' --A Review
I’ve taken a couple of runs at this show over the years, but never really sat down and got into it until now. I’m not entirely sure why. Cillian Murphy (who stars as Tommy Shelby) elevates everything he appears in and it’s not like the rest of the cast is lacking in talent either. I wanted to say that the first season might have something to do with it—…
The thing I don’t get sometimes about these view statistics is that it’s amazing what will catch fire and what won’t. I mean, I was very, very late to the party on Peaky Blinders; I started it a couple of times and just couldn’t make my way all the way through it, so it’s not like this was a particularly timely review. But somehow, it is the most viewed post on my Substack with 1.03K views.
(I’m also taking Substack’s stats at face value— I haven’t dug into the methodology or how they actually work/don’t work; I’m just going with this, because… why not.)
State Mottos, Ranked
The Interweb Dictionary (I’m assuming Dictionary.com or some such website is where these are drawn from) defines motto this way:
This one is a little easier to understand, I think. People love lists. It’s why Buzzfeed was such an internet phenomenon and is still sort of kicking around out there, even if it no longer has the cultural zeitgeist it once had. This one clocked in with 481 views.
Who is John Corse?
If you, like me, have driven anywhere on Highway 6 in Johnson County, you’ve driven over the river. It’s a highway river bridge and a thoroughly unremarkable one. It’s kind of ratty-looking with rusted-out railings that are badly in need of a new coat of paint. But just before you cross, and just below the helpful green sign that says IOWA RIVER, there’…
My first real foray into a ‘local focus’ type of piece paid off and convinced me this was an area worth exploring. (I followed it up with a few more that racked up some good views and got me some subs, so if I get more ideas, I’ll run with them. (I’m really missing the old Ped Mall fountain for some reason, so maybe I’ll look into that.) Anyway, this one racked up 477 views, but also picked up 12 subscribers.
Kujira Ryukyu Whisky, A Tasting
I have never really tried any Japanese whiskies except in passing, so one of my goals with this whole exploration of the world of whiskey was to try a few and start to break down and understand what Japanese whiskey is all about. The Missus obliged my wish for Valentine’s Day, and I got this striking bottle of Kujira Ryukyu Whisky.
People like whiskey. People like to drink… I don’t know why this one popped above all the other whiskey reviews I’ve posted over the years, but it did. I’m pretty sure I might have some of this still kicking around in the liquor cabinet; I’ll have to check tonight and see. This one came in at #4 with 394 views.
Rounding out the top five, we have this:
Don't Overthink This, Massachusetts
New Rule: If you’re thinking of redesigning your state flag to freshen it up a little bit or move away from an old and dated design- don’t overthink it.
Out of curiosity, I dug around on this a little bit because I didn’t actually follow up to see where this went. As it turns out, about three weeks after this post, the process ground to a halt and seems to be stuck on ‘pause’ for now. I don’t think Massachusetts is going to overthink this, because it doesn’t seem like they’re going to do anything much at all— at least not right now. The post wound up with 394 views.
My Top Five Favorite Posts:
I took a different approach here. I don’t know if I have a hard-and-fast ranking for these, so I’d say they are in no particular order. But there’s nothing better as a writer than going back to read what you wrote in the past and still really liking it. A lot of the time, I find myself cringing a little bit, but not with these posts.
Where Nobody Knows Your Name
I wish I could tell you where this story came from, but I can’t, really. I just had a vague notion of ‘what will Presidents do if we ever live longer’ and that turned into ‘what if one of them just kind of fades away into obscurity and goes and runs a shitty bar somewhere else?’ and everything sort of flowed from there. Yes, I will admit the details of …
I love this story. I wrote it three years ago, and I just read it again as I was preparing this post, and I just love this story. It’s simple, it’s fun, it’s built around the notion that somehow, some way we will move beyond the present moment in our politics and deal with questions like, ‘What will we do if Presidents ever live longer?’ And ‘Could a President just fade into obscurity and go be a bartender somewhere?’
Bless This Mess
People didn’t really seem all that into America 250, to be honest. The President was making it all about himself, and that instantly politicized it. The Reflecting Pool turned green. No one wanted to play in his concert. The Great American State Fair seemed like a really good idea, but I thought it was
This is a recent post, but I think it’s an important one. I had never tried a long-form personal essay like this before, and this just felt right. And I think it works, really, really well. I’ve never been good at sort of non fiction/personal blogging pieces like this, so I was honestly quite surprised at how well this turned out— and I speak as a writer who is usually his own worst critic. This is new, so there’s a recency bias here, but I look at this and kind of tilt my head to one side and think, ‘You know, that’s not half-bad.’ Whether I think that in five more years, we’ll see. But for now, it makes the list…
The Unbearable Burdens of Being First
Unlike last month’s entry, I know exactly where this story came from. I stumbled across a post on r/midjourney over on Reddit, entitled The year is 2250 and 10% of humans now live on Mars- it was a cool enough gallery, but the 9th image, entitled ‘Homelessness’ really stuck in my brain a bit. Who was this guy? What was his story?
The YouTube collaboration that resulted from this is still one of the coolest things to ever happen to me. Plus, I just love this story. I can’t really say much more than that.
Dreams of Hope
The Missus and I snuck over to the UK for a week at the end of April and one of the things I always do when I’m over there is load up on books that you can’t normally get over here. One visit to Foyle’s and I’m now working my way through The Hollow Crown
I think this still holds up pretty well. It is low-key one of my favorite pieces from the past five years. I did play around in the same universe I set up here with another piece, called ‘One Last Throw’ that I might like a little bit better, but this one holds up well. It’s one of my OG favorites.
Welcome To Night Shift
This one took me a while to get right and it generally emerged from the phrase, “Glim Tadcaster, Galactic Dispatcher” that kept rolling around in my head. Four attempts later and I finally got a story- it wasn’t the story I expected to tell when I started trying to write this, but sometimes it do be like that, I guess. I hope you enjoy reading this as m…
This really did all spring from the phrase, ‘Gilm Tadcaster, Galactic Dispatcher,’ and I love what resulted. I think this one holds up even better than ‘Dreams of Hope’ does, and I played around in this universe with another story as well, ‘The Medal,’ that works out well and opens up the backstory of the universe quite nicely. I don’t know if I’ll have other pieces in these universes yet, but I’m certainly not opposed to the notion.
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If you’ve been here since the start, thank you! I know life is busy, people are struggling, and everything is in chaos, so if any of these posts have been a distraction or even a needed diversion in your day, I’m glad and once again, I can only say thank you!
If you’re new here, welcome! Hit the subscribe button and join the ride. The next five years should be fun!
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