Reflecting Back on 2.2 Years Writing on Substack

From 50 to 2,115 Subscribers

Photo by Nicolas Messifet on Unsplash

*My Top 5 Most Popular Posts

1. Democrats Did This to Themselves (It was Democrats’ Race to Lose)

2. What is the Point of Substack? Money? Art? Quality? Community? (A Substack Writer’s Thoughts on the Game)

3. On Writing What Scares You (Being Brave as a Writer)

4. Writers Versus The World (How Writers are Different from Everyone Else)

5. Why I Deleted the Substack App (Writing for the Sake of Writing)

….

*Two quick notes:

1. My memoir, Two Years in New York: Before, During and After COVID is out now; please buy and review. (Limited-time free promo on Amazon now.)

2. Scheduled for early Monday morning, I have a guest post about masculinity by Stephen Bradford Long. He will be posting a piece of mine on the same topic. Stay tuned for his essay, which is damn good.

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I started my Substack—Sincere American Writing—on August 21^st, 2022. (You can read that first polemical post here.) At the time I was newly living in Santa Barbara, a physical paradise, fresh from the gritty tyranny of New York City, where I’d lived from 2019 to 2021.

The reason—initially—for the move across the country (from Manhattan to Santa Barbara) had been to spend the summer in California. I hadn’t left New York in 18 months, and much of those months had been Covid time. I’d been living in a rough section of East Harlem when the Pandemic descended upon us (read my memoir about that here), had by June, 2020 broken my lease and moved to East 70^th between 1^st and York (much better) and had decided to visit my family and friends for the summer, between Westlake near LA, Santa Barbara and the Bay Area, where I’d lived for a decade prior to leaving for New York.

But as many of you know, my father during that trip was diagnosed with terminal skin cancer (Melanoma), and so I chucked all my plans, broke my lease in NYC, had some friends across the country ship all my stuff and clean my tiny apartment out, and moved to Santa Barbara where I spent 23 excruciating, terrifying, hard and yet beautiful and sentimental (and necessary) months caring for my father as he slowly withered to skin and bone. He died on June 2^nd, 2023. RIP, Dad.

It was in the summer—late August—of 2022, walking around my San Roque Santa Barbara neighborhood in the glorious, harsh sunshine, listening on my ear phones (not Air Pods, mind you; I hadn’t started using those yet; I was still living in ancient times) to what was quickly becoming, post-initial-wave-of-Covid, my favorite media literacy/political commentary podcast, a podcast everyone should listen to, The 5^th Column. (Three experienced, witty alternative journalists who at the time worked for places like Reason Magazine, Vice and Free Think.)

Anyway on that particular episode the 5^th boys happened to have a recorded discussion with a man named Hamish McKenzie, cofounder of a little platform that was gaining popularity online (as a much needed alternative to the free-speech-restricting, woke-mob-controlling, activist-class-running traditional biased and increasingly illiberal media) called, as it were, Substack. This was on August 21^st, 2022.

Substack, Hamish explained—The 5^th Column guys had recently moved their pod from another platform to Substack—was a new platform exclusively for writers and readers. No ads. No data-mining or selling. No secret algorithm. No social media. You own your content, your site, and all your subscribers.

It felt like a revolution.

All my life, since I’d been a boy writing poetry, trying to be understood, reading classic literature from my mother’s library and wanting to write like that too, there’s been within me the desperate call of The Writer. I wanted to write books. Novels. Short stories. I wanted to be published. To be famous. To be recognized. (All serious, ambitious writers go through this naïve phase.) I’d started writing more seriously at the age of 23, around 2006, when living awkwardly in San Diego, a town very much opposite my nature and organic rebellious sense of rage. (I lasted two years there.) In 2008—age 25—then living in San Francisco, I started writing my first novel, an autobiographical novel about my wild punk rock high school years. (Buy that here on all formats.)

But it wasn’t until I hit a spiritual bottom and got sober, in September, 2010, at the age of 27, that I really started taking writing seriously.

Freshly sober I’d moved to Portland, Oregon. There I attended AA meetings, drank far, far too much coffee and wrote my ass off, often until three, four in the morning, in a desperate mad fever of silent authorial amazement. All the booze had drained my creative energy; but now that had all changed. I wrote like Kerouac on a three-day bender putting down On the Road in first draft on that scroll.

Eight months after moving to Portland I was back in the Bay Area; Oakland. There I joined a writing workshop on 44^th and Telegraph at an old poet’s house who’d known the Beat writers back in the 1950s. I went back to school (S.F. State) for Creative Writing to finally (after 11 years and seven colleges) get my Bachelor’s degree. I started attending writers’ conferences, beginning with The San Francisco Writers Conference. I wrote constantly, stories, essays and novels. I pumped out one novel after another. I revised them, worked on them, edited, etc. I started interning for a literary agent. I started a blog about my writing and agency experience.

By 2013 I had several short stories published in literary magazines and journals. I even got paid a little. I’d written three novels and was working on a fourth. I’d finished (I thought then) my autobiographical novel, then called The Cannonball Complex. (Later retitled and published as The Crew.) Anyway: I began to submit my novels to literary agents. One by one the form rejections came in. All totally impersonal, clearly pumped out as basic form letters going out to many new writers en masse. Looking back on this time I realize I was not yet strong enough as a writer, my voice had not been carved out yet, my prose was raw and unsteady, even if the basic talent was evident, and I basically didn’t know what I was doing.

As the years passed I became a better writer. In 2016—now living in a house just north of Berkeley—after having hired a former Random House editor to help with my autobiographical novel, I started, at last, to get requests for more pages of my novel, and personal, sometimes lengthy, emails from agents in New York City and elsewhere.

I was thrilled—how could I not be?—but sadly nothing came of it. Several books received dozens of agent requests to read the full manuscript…but in the end there were no takers. By 2017 it had also become clear to me—through the long emails back and forth between myself and some agents who’d read my novel—that white straight men (in the Trump Era, especially) were on the way “out,” and progressive young white women and non-white minority writers were The New Craze.

In other words: I didn’t stand a popsicle’s chance in hell.

Unless, of course, I already had a huge, guaranteed audience or had legitimate industry connections. I had neither.

In 2018 my ex and I ended our relationship after 4.5 years. She moved out of the house. I saved up for a year and moved to New York City. Over the years I’d had some 30 short stories published in various magazines and literary journals, I’d written hundreds of short stories, and about 13 (at that time) novels, none of which were published.

In New York my writing thrived. Something about the insanity, the madness of Manhattan inspired my creativity—somewhat ironically—like never before. I joined a writing group and we met twice a month each time at a different writer’s apartment. In this way I got to know Brooklyn, Queens, and other neighborhoods in Manhattan. It was fun. They grew to like me, if also be weary of my strong contrarian opinions, un-politically-correct comments and gritty, intense stories and style.

And then Covid. My father. Santa Barbara.

So there I was, listening that day to The 5^th Column, to Hamish, founder of Substack and all at once it struck me that I belonged on Substack. I walked home, finishing the conversation with Hamish. Again, this was August 21^st, 2022. I was 39 years old. I was literally three days away from having a first date with a beautiful woman who would become my wife.

My first writing on Substack was, looking back, too angry, too vitriolic, too polemical and too political. I was reacting, at first to the 2020 excesses of the BLM riots, the rising Woke illiberalism, the traditional media bias (for a long time I’d been a New Yorker and New York Times reader and I’d had to unsubscribe from both), the culture wars of my generation, the capture of the book industry, elite media culture becoming Woke, anti-white, anti-male, etc. I hated the direction all of it was going, so I bashed it.

Initially, as a result, and slightly embarrassedly, my stack was called Michael Mohr’s Non-Woke Writing. Looking back this sounds very silly. But that’s where my head was at that moment. My first post was very political. I added—without their permission, not exactly recommended—something like 75 people as subscribers, a mix of former book editing clients (I’d been doing book editing for money since 2013), friends, family, writing acquaintances, etc. About 50 stayed on. At first I did free-only posts. I posted several times a week. I had no single agenda or direction but whatever it was I felt needed to be political and reactionary.

But, over time, as the months blurred by, I began to feel less resentful about the “Woke explosion” and changed the name of my stack to the much better, Sincere American Writing. I also began to realize that sticking solely to politics and cultural reactionism felt stifling. I’d witnessed this with another of my favorite podcasts, Sam Harris’s Waking Up. He’d talked a lot in the early days of his pod (2013 to say 2018) about wokeness, identity politics, polarization, etc. But he’d worried (correctly) about potential audience capture and about falling into the bear-pit of being a single-issue thinker. And so, he broadened the scope, discussing everything from neuroscience to physics to literature to psychology to evolution and many other topics.

I realized I had to branch out, too. So I did. I started posting fiction, short stories, bits of novels, and also essays on topics other than politics. It became a sort of petri-dish all many varied colors, ideas and genres.

As my subscriber list began to grow I turned on the paid option. At first I didn’t paywall, then I did. I lost some subscribers, but I gained others. Some readers began to start paying to read me. I felt exhilarated. I was making, somehow, on what some people designated a “glorified blog” (which designation I disagree with) more money than I’d ever made before from my writing. Not only that: I had a direct connection and line of communication with my readers. This, I told myself, was the future of writing and publishing. Trad media was already suffering, losing readers, buyers and interest. It took too long for a book to come out traditionally. Advances grew smaller, sometimes non-existent. Authors usually had to now pay for their own book tours. It took a year for your book to come out.

And so people were self-publishing and joining platforms like Medium, Substack, Tumblr, Wordpress, etc. People were going directly to the source: Readers. Get the middlemen out of the way, the biased old-school arbiters of [supposed] “quality.”

It was exciting and terrifying all at once. For the first time in my life I was making regular income each month (not a lot but enough to make an impact), and, probably most crucial, I was writing what I wanted to, with no captured, biased editorial oversight, and when I wanted to, for whom I wanted to. In other words, and this is music to a writer’s ears: I had complete control. Living in the Bay Area and writing non-P.C., gritty fiction I’d always been self-conscious and worried about collective judgment. All my life I’d felt like an “outsider.” (Most writers do.) I’d never fit in with any writer “community.” I’d always been a weirdo-freak who did my own thing. (Most serious artists do.) But now I had a direct link to subscribers.

Over the past 2.2 years—since August, 2022—so much has happened. My father died. I got married. I left Santa Barbara for Lompoc, an hour north, where Britney had been born and raised. We decided to move to Spain. I sold my house in the Bay Area and we bought a multi-unit in Portland, Oregon. We then moved to Portland, where we still are now. We’re still working on Spain.

And during all this time I wrote my ass off both on and off Substack. At this point I’ve published 416 posts. Posts: About my father’s illness and death. About my own writing process. About book editing. Politics. Philosophy. Book reviews. Essays on classic literature. Fiction. Novels. Memoir. You name it. There have been positive and negative experiences on Substack for me. I still feel conflicted about Substack “Notes,” (And I am off the app.) because, though I feel drawn to it almost against my will, it does smack too much to me as “social media” which, generally, I find Substack *not* to be. Over the years I’ve gone back and forth with social media but right now I am OFF all platforms minus Linked-In (which I check maybe every six months, if that) and Substack. That’s it. I can’t imagine how miserable and

anxious people are who are constantly balancing many different platforms at once. No thanks.

Anyway, I still think Substack is the best platform out there for writers, and the best platform personally for me. Complete freedom, directness and control are crucial and not easily given up. I do sometimes worry about the AI-ification of Substack, but I worry about that with all platforms, not just this one. Tech seems to necessarily always improve itself, non-stop, which is good, in theory, but I also wonder if it simultaneously gets in the way.

All we need is the basic platform Substack offered in 2022. Posts, free and/or paid, direct to readers. Period. Let the writing do the rest of the work. But since then there’ve been all kinds of new features, buttons, links, the iPhone Substack app, AI assistance, etc. Not that those things are inherently in themselves “bad,” but I do worry sometimes that the platform might get too far out ahead of the main purpose, which is (or was) writing. Because though they’re ostensibly a platform “for writers” they’re also a tech company and they need profit, investment, and development.

What have I learned over these 2.2 years going from 50 free subscribers, all people I know, to 2,115 subscribers, almost 100 of which are paying? Well, many things. I’ve made a lot of mistakes. I’ve written some bad essays. I’ve published some less than admirable work. But I’ve also published some of my best writing—see this controversial essay about the famous memoir, I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings—have grown my subscriber list substantially, have connected with fellow writers on the platform, have formed groups, done guest posts, have written about topics I never thought I would, have harnessed my own power as a writer and thinker, have chiseled my literary voice to a razor-sharp tack, and have learned how to navigate paid and unpaid posts, gaining and losing subscribers, dealing with controversial issues (politics included).

In short: I have found my literary home. That vague, elusive thing I’ve been seeking since I was a boy; I found it here on Substack. Some may call the platform silly, like a blog, for unserious writers, etc etc. I think that’s objectively not true given the immense talent and the number of famous authors on Substack. But more than any of that: It’s a grand digital dialogue, cutting out the middlemen, much more honest, authentic and democratic, between all of us calling ourselves writers. On Substack you’ll find the talented and the terrible, the good and the bad, the biased and the open-minded, all political sides, crazy and sane, democratic and the opposite, political radicals, centrists, conservatives, etc.

It's all here. This is the reason we write, to locate different perspectives, views, ideas, opinions, genres, styles, voices, etc. Traditional media started failing us in this purpose.

So we found our new place.