6/27/2024

The big day comes tomorrow.

There are legitimate reasons not to lead with a post that directly addresses my ideas, but I think the most important reason is: I’m terrified. I believe in this, and it will be up to everyone on their own to decide what they think. That makes this a scary moment. Also, there’s the fact that I’m having to be a salesman, which usually I hate and will not do. I’d rather you have no opinion of me than a bad opinion, and the moment you become the salesman, you become somebody’s enemy.

I’ve managed to be pretty bold, though, I think, and that comes down to the fact that I believe in this idea.

The first day I got back, I worked on the new accounts and wrote my first article related to the system. Again, the real reason for not waiting is emotional, but the logical reason is that demonstrating the system in action is going to take time. I’m not charging you anything to watch me work the process live, so why not? But that’s the justification. The real reason is that an emotionally desperate to talk about it, and I suppose I’m hoping for validation. We’ll see if that happens.

I’m looking for real reaction, though, no matter how scary this is.

I’ve been back 2.5 days. I’ve written the first four articles, with the fourth being the one that outlines the core principle. Meanwhile, I’m not really sleeping much. My body still thinks it’s on the other side of the world.

After I get through this phase, I’ll need to start planning my projects. I have my novel WIP, my fantasy series, short stories, and now articles for four publications to write. I’ll work out a posting schedule where only one Substack a day is posting, and along with all that, I’ll be reworking the presentation of the publications. That’s a lot of About Page copy to work on and outgoing emails to consider. The posting from the publications can wait until that’s in order and I have one solid first article in place. In some cases, I have a first article posted, but I know they need work. I want to go back and get that first one to a place where it represents the ideas behind the system. Even if few people read those first articles, getting them right will help me with all the articles that follow.

About tomorrow, my expectations are that some of you will love the idea, but it won’t be for everyone. I also expect some blow back, presumably mostly from those on the outside. What I’m suggesting is fairly arrogant after all, that we’ve come to Substack stuck in a mindset that keeps us all struggling in vain, but “low and behold” I alone have the solution. That’s a rough sell. Still, that’s what an epiphany is all about, and it’s what we must believe when we’re attempting to innovate.

I don’t think I’ll send this one out in an email. I just want to get this off my chest, and it will be on the site if you come looking. Overwhelming your inbox isn’t my intention.

Speaking of the About Page, I need to write one here, and I need to again answer the question of who I am in relation to all this. I answer that question one way in tomorrow’s article, but the story I want to tell today is different.

I’m fifty-five years old, and outside of a time when I felt called to set it aside while I studied to be a pastor, I’ve always written. It began sometime in elementary school, but I had a deadly weakness: I didn’t understand story. Nor did I understand that I didn’t understand story. I was a writer, not a storyteller.

The first steps to overcoming that came in my twenties when I studied structure, which was (thankfully) a much more primitive field in the nineties. I feel like it’s spiraled out of control since then. In my thirties I ran a fiction critique forum, a group of peers reading and critiquing one another’s work, and I had some success with publishing short stories. Novels were still tripping me up. I made websites and wrote some blogs, and I was about to publish a novel with a house some friends from the critique site had formed when I realized I still had a problem: I didn’t believe in the book. I pulled it, and walked away from publishing.

I kept writing though, and when I came up with the idea for Detective 26, AD, I thought maybe I would try publishing again. It took three years to complete a final draft of that novel and then another two years for Steampunk Cleopatra. I hired an editor for both and self-published the two within a couple of months of each other.

I’ve written a good deal of martial since then, but my editor got sick. Instead of hiring someone else, I waited while she went through brain surgery and recovery. She got better, but life got in the way. We never really picked up our working relationship again, and I needed a plan for what to do with all this material. I went back to my author website with Mailerlite, only to discover they had restructured. Because I’d not been reachable during that time, I’d lost everything. I needed to start over.

In researching my options, I found Substack. I haven’t been here long, but I’ve written somewhere over a hundred posts. It’s hard to say how many because the irrelevant ones have since been deleted. I don’t come to this as someone whose been with Substack forever. I’m a new kid on the block, like most of you, and I’ve just so happen to have had an idea… about which you’ll hear the basics tomorrow.

For the last fifteen years, my online addiction was Twitter. At my peak, I had 30k followers, but it was never a very good vehicle for selling fiction. The time of my biggest interactions was back when I had about 10k followers, and I would have tweets with 1k likes fairly regularly… for a couple of month, anyway. When a tweet took off, I would reply with a link to my books, and Twitter would be Twitter, which usually means toxic. I love the atmosphere at Substack so much more.

Recently, though, I have seen a change: more frustration. There are cracks in the positive foundation.

If you’re big and successful, you don’t need what I have to say. My method requires work, and if you’re succeeding with what you’re doing, you probably don’t need that extra effort. If you’re like me, though, then you’ve been waiting for this epiphany for years. You’ve asked yourself that same question repeatedly, how can I reach readers that aren’t just a big clump of other writers? For years, I didn’t have an answer. Not one that worked for me. I’m too old for TikTok, and believe me, I tried. Goodreads wasn’t the answer for me. I felt lost and hoped that Substack would be the magical solution I needed.

Now, I think it can be, with a change of approach.

We’ll see if you agree.

Until then, I’m Thaddeus Thomas.