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- [DIGEST] Let's monkey around a bit...
[DIGEST] Let's monkey around a bit...
Does that sound dumb? I can't tell.
Happy July! Can you believe the year is half over? I know just writing that sent me into a bit of an existential crisis. Ahhh!
It’s bananas, but animal pictures can help, right? I hope so, because here are some cute pictures of animals from my safari.
These all come from Tarengire National Park, the first stop on our safari after departing from Arusha. It is renowned for their elephants, but we saw so many amazing things there I didn’t even include elephants this week. Next week, though, will be elephant heavy.
If you want to share how you are doing this week, then there are two ways to interact with this post.
1 - If you don’t want to say anything, or bristle at identifying yourself, then you can reply with this nifty poll.
2 - If you’re feeling very brave, then reply below and tell us how you are doing right now on a scale from 1-5.
I inched up a little this week to a 2.5. I’ve been on Malarone for malaria prevention and I just got off of it Wednesday. It’s been wreaking havoc on my migraines and my insomnia, but I feel considerable better than I did this time last week, so that’s a plus.
This week, I released an article I’ve been working on for a long time all about burnout, how to set boundaries, and how to build a sustainable career that works for you.
A new chapter of Magic dropped this week, and we’re nearing the epic conclusion to part 1 of this story.
There was a bellman waiting in the elevator, but I took the stairs up to my apartment. I noticed something was wrong the minute I exited the stairwell. My door was hanging wide open, and the lock was busted. The edges were frayed and snapped, and the middle of the door had a dent in it where it had been smashed with something heavy.
Everything inside had been turned over and torn apart. I had nice taste in furniture. Some might have even called it elegant if I’d ever let anyone ever see it. I was quite particular that everything had its place. Sometime in the last day, somebody had ransacked the place. The couch had been gutted with a knife, and so had the bed. More importantly, they had somehow found my pocket dimension and snapped my wand in half, leaving it on the ground as a message that I was powerless against them. I’ll show them powerless.
New chapters are free, but paid subscribers can access the archives. You also get access to a bunch of free books and stories from my back catalog.
On Wednesday, I’ll be releasing an article about something people have been asking me a lot about the Author Ecosystem - the process of evolving beyond your base ecosystem into something bigger. Here’s a little snippet.
Evolving is the process of taking a healthy ecosystem and adding elements of the other ecosystems to help fuel growth. It should only be attempted once you have a stable ecosystem that is rocking and rolling predictably. One of the biggest causes of authors having an unhealthy ecosystem is that they try to evolve too soon.
I’m going to say it again because I know writers are stubborn. Evolution should only be attempted once your ecosystem is healthy and stable. Your ecosystem absolutely must be able to run predictably without much variation because you need that stable income to fuel your growth, and you need the brain space available to start taking on new tasks that are outside of your comfort zone.
Almost all authors that fail at doing this end up evolving too quickly and destroying their ecosystem. This happened to me, as well, and I had to spend years rebuilding my processes after they collapsed. It wasn’t until my ecosystem was stable and predictable that these strategies started to work for me.
This was such a dank and dense week of amazing Substack posts that I could barely keep up. Here are some of my favorites.
wants to lean without all the drama clean, praises Lewis Capaldi for cutting a concert short to preserve their mental health, and divests from beauty culture’s expectations about dating.
and chart the growth of Roblox nation, explains why going fast and breaking things is a really bad way to build a sub, and loses 2,000 Instagram followers and feels fine.
goes on an unplanned silent retreat, searches for their own idea of quality, and eats their free breakfast with a side of existential guilt.
teaches us why rotting in bed is all the rage, is seduced by a helium horse, reveals Gandhi’s sacred diaries, and wants to know if the human brain is wired for altruism or something more sinister.
and succeed in discussing queer failure, thanks a neighbor for a little thing they did, and can have fun even during an Apocalaypse.
gives a list of lessons they learned from making their fiction writers of Substack list, espouses on the history of paperback books, and isn’t good with Goodreads having no incentive to be good, but he’s very good with the rise of the novella.
breaks down how to read a literary contract, lays out how to market a book in 2023, and delivers a case study on how they became a 2023 featured Substack publication.
is absurdly uncomfortable with their life, loves a wine that critics don’t understand, and refuses to find the magic in the everyday.
If you like this post and want to check out the archives, you can do that with a 7-day free trial, or simply go straight to being a paid subscriber. I’m recovering this weekend, and hope you get a chance to do the same.
You also get access to one of my most popular comics with your membership. In Katrina Hates the Dead, a woman gets sick of living during the Apocalypse so she sets out to Hell to kill the Devil.