[THREAD] How are you, really?

We're moving this thread to Saturdays so we can unleash our burdens on the weekend for a change.

May 13, 2023

Kesha’s new album drops next week, and listening to her entire catalog has been about all that’s gotten me through the last few days. How about you?

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.

Last week was not a good week overall. Roughly 3/4 of people who responded to the survey said they were a 3 or below, which is a big backslide from the previous weeks. I hope you had a better time of it this week.

Right now, I’ve slipped back to a 1.5, down from a 2.5 last week. I finally got through a month of conventions, appearances, and fulfillment…and my body gave out on me. I’ve been trying not to work out or do anything stressful until I recover, but I’ve still been waking up feeling super exhausted all week.

I did manage to get an article up this week. Have you had a chance to read it yet? It’s quite long, but I think pretty good, too.

I thought these posts about going paid on Substack without selling your soul and neutral thinking were going behind the paywall last week, but it looks like you might have a little bit longer to read them. Of course, you can access all my previous posts by either getting a free trial or becoming a paid subscriber. You also get access to a bunch of free books and stories from my back catalog.

Next Wednesday, I’ll be launching a 6,000+ word article about my deep appreciation for Kesha’s music and a new archetype system we’re launching to help people stop hating doing marketing and follow their bliss.

Here is a preview of the Kesha love-fest:

I have been listening to Kesha’s music since she was making trashy club songs and I was a trash panda getting wasted in bars every weekend. It was the theme of my early adulthood.

She transformed her career into deeper, more soulful music at a time when all my bar friends moved away and I started to contemplate my life more deeply. While the legal case surrounding her lawsuit broke my heart, her fight to control her career, her IP, and her life resonated deeply with me as a creator trying to understand the pitfalls of massive success.

After not being able to release an album for years, the records that finally came out were some of the best I’ve ever heard in my life. I have big feelings about whether you must be sad to create great art. However, there is no doubt that accessing that trauma allowed Kesha to create transformative music on a deeper level than in her early career. Of course, she could have made this music from the beginning if she wasn’t being micromanaged and sexually abused by her producer, though.

With her new album set to release Friday, I’ve been listening to the first two songs off it, Fine Line and Eat the Acid, on literal repeat.

And a bit about the archetype system:

After working with thousands of authors to help turn their love of writing and publishing into a sustainable career, we have observed five clear and unique publishing ecosystems (or archetypes) that closely align with author success. We believe that identifying your ideal author ecosystem and focusing on marketing actions that work with your natural tendencies is the surest path to thrive as an author.

We’ve mapped these archetypes onto the five ecosystem biomes on Earth (desert, grassland, tundra, forest, and aquatic) to provide a clear, easily visualized metaphor for each type and linked them to successful publishing strategies that work best for each one. We’ve also identified healthy and unhealthy habits for each type and have developed guidance to create a healthy ecosystem and foster a sustainable author career using strategies that align with your natural strengths.

It’s going to be a wide-ranging article that discusses building community, groupthink, personalized medicine, and biomes, but it manages to make a strong point, too.

Here are some of my favorite Substacks from the week that you might like to read this weekend.

I know that’s a lot, but I read literally hundreds of Substack articles a week, and every week it gets harder to cull them to a manageable amount. Heck, I don’t even know what a healthy amount is to begin with, clearly.

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 the audio drama and novel of my YA horror LGBTQIA+ love story The Void Calls Us Home by becoming a paid subscriber. Rebecca never thought she was suicidal. However, that didn’t stop her from jerking her car off the side of the road last night.