I Waited Too Long and Now Everyone Has a Substack and It's Not Cool Anymore

So it's been a while.

I really meant to do this Substack thing.

I had plans. I was going to be somebody.

Substack was going to be my medium. It was going to be the YouTube to my 2010s Green Brothers. The twitter to my Ellen DeGeneres Oscars selfie. The TikTok to whichever Charli D’Amelio sister was doing appropriated dance moves to a thirty second clip of a hysterical drag queen screaming Katy Perry lyrics as a Chipotle burned in the background, or something. Substack was a way to relive my glory days as a pithy blogger of the aughts, this time in a format that felt smarter and more easily monetizable and didn’t require me to code a cute interface or pick a song to automatically start playing when people typed in the url, forcing visitors to frantically fumble for the mute button on the monitor of the library computer they were using on their lunchbreak.

Instead, I started running a bookstore.

Which is where I’ve been for the last year, if you noticed (you probably didn’t) (it’s fine).

I had been fighting the urge to get a day job for a while when an opportunity arose to manage a bookstore I had been working at since 2022. I had been a full time-ish writer since 2018 though I never stopped bookselling, from one to five days a week depending on a variety of factors from COVID to my self-esteem. And the full time writing thing kind of worked! I mean, no, it didn’t, I hated it. And since moving to LA, it was a particular grind. There was a strike. The bottom fell out of the TV industry. I was burning through my savings. Book publishing became a tangled up ball of string where it felt like the most important things about your book was the sex scene and the how hard the girlies on tiktok would cry when they filmed their reaction videos, and the least important thing was story coherence. Most of my days were spent staring down my computer screen for ten to sixteen hours, spiraling into self-hatred, before trying to convince Queenie to go for a walk with me (which rarely worked, as Queenie hates walks, no matter how much I try to explain to her they are for my mental health, not hers).

All this to say, I wasn’t doing great.

And then an opportunity fell in my lap.

And opportunity to run a small business in a notoriously unprofitable industry, situated in a historically expensive area in one of the most expensive cities in the world largely powered by an industry in crisis.

And I did that for an amazing year.

Sorry, typo—a horrible, sleepless, stressful, terrible, wonderful, amazing, blur of a year. I won’t bore you with the details of running a small business, because it’s always the same. You love the job, you hate the business. You work all the time. There are no days off, every shift is overtime, you wake up at 2 am from stress dreams that tomorrow’s event was cancelled because Mayor Taylor Swift shot the bookstore into space and end up checking your email. You drink too much, shovel down Oreos you found on the breakroom floor and call it lunch, fall asleep fully dressed on the couch at 7 pm when you finally get home, cancel plans forget friends, and don’t write a word.

So cut to one year later and something changed.

And I’m back here. On my couch. Staring at a new book and reminding myself I chose this over fighting with Ingram about why our overnight shipment is five days late and trying to explain to customers that no, I can’t give them the cash value of a gift card just because they changed their mind.

So here we go. Substack again. It’s mostly going to be updates about writing things, which hopefully I’m actually going to have this year, after two long years since Winter Soldier. I’m excited to finally have things to share, and I’ll be sharing them here. Glad to have you around—thanks for sticking it out through the silence.

Also I’ll probably write about books, because after ten years of bookselling, this big book brain needs to be exercised somehow, otherwise what’s the point? It’s like keeping a Botticelli in the basement.