Thursday! 3-27: Rising Like a Thing that Rises, But for Goodness! Not Like Cthulhu.

V3, I27

I’ve been thinking.

Yes, I know. Normally, when I say that, my friends make noises that sound suspiciously like ‘Yikes” and my wife peers at me over the tops of her glasses and says “mmmHMMM?” in a sort of suspicious tone that leads me believe she’s wondering whether this is the thought that finally cracks my disheveled brain¹.

Anyhow, I’ve been thinking about Thursday! and the various and sundry difficulties I’ve had writing it lately. There are a number of conflicts at work in my head I’ve not been able to resolve. In fact, the more I’ve tried to figure out how to make everything work out in a way that satisfies me, the farther I get from actual satisfaction². Let me lay everything out for you.

• I want Thursday! to have a wide audience.

• However, it won’t do to have hundreds or even thousands of subscribers if only a treasured few actually read Thursday! regularly.

Not a problem, right? Don’t sweat how many subscribers I have but do sweat the quality of what I put out so that all of you lovely people read every issue, or as close to that as is reasonable. And that’s fine, if not for how the platform itself — indeed, just about any public platform — works. Here, then, are the complications.

• Substack is growing rapidly and the sort of writing I’ve done to this point is becoming more and more common. Thursday! is becoming a small fish in a large pond.

• Substack isn’t terribly interested in promoting the minnows when there are giant trophy bass cruising about on which it can brag³. Newsletters like mine might get churned to the surface by whatever algorithm Substack uses⁴, but that’s all gamble for very little direct reward.

• Even if Thursday! gets churned to the top of a lot of “For You” recommendation lists, the new subscribers who come along won’t be there because of a real connection. The likelihood of a new “random” person falling a bit in love with Thursday! like I want and most of you have is awfully small. Really, it’s a gamble and I’m not fond of that gamble at all.

This puts me in a tough spot. I know what I want for Thursday!, for me, and for you. I also know the regular mechanisms of Substack aren’t optimized to give me what I want. So what, then?

Add to this one more complication. I’ve been writing Thursday for 2 1/2 years, faithfully every week. I’ve covered just about every inspirational and instructive topic I feel comfortable covering. I won’t go outside my own experience or accomplishment because that’s how you get a crappy newsletter full of crappy advice. In some cases, I’ve gone over something two or three times, which…well, it doesn’t make me feel great. I give it my best, but…?

Here, then, is the real question. What can I do here that’s cool, different, interesting and also real? Well, that’s where the “Yikes” stuff comes in, because there’s one one thing I can do that’ll be all those things for you and for me⁵.

Stories and poems⁶.

So here’s the deal. Thursday! is going to be different starting next week. Expect fewer long essays on creativity and more actual displays of creativity. I’m going to turn Thursday! into something I’m not sure I’ve seen in a place like Substack before: a fiction and poetry e-zine. I hesitate to call it “literary” because most of what I write is pulpy creepy or fantastic stuff, which tends to make literary publishers break out in hives, but I think I’ll be on a similar road as the literary crew. Every other week, I’ll give you a nice little plate full of my stories and poetry in large enough helpings to satisfy you but not so much that each one will feel like a full meal.

For the first few issues, I’ll draw from stories I’ve already written on my website (which may or may not stick around in its current form. I’m rethinking all of it). They won’t be copy and paste jobs, though. You won’t get cold leftovers. Not from me. The poems will probably be new, though there are a few older ones I like quite a lot and want to share with you.

In the “off” weeks, I’ll give you something less fictional and more like the old Thursday!, though a bit shorter. You can expect the usual musings on life and art but also some teasers about what’s coming up or tidbits about how some of the stories came to be.

Look. I’ll be honest. I don’t know if you’ll like what I’m going to do. It’s possible you won’t. If that’s the case, it’s okay if you unsubscribe. Our lives are entirely too busy for e-mail clutter and Thursday! shouldn’t be just another thing sent to the trash right away. This is going to be weird and different, hopefully cool, but maybe not.

But maybe so.

So. Let me know your expectations or hopes or what-have-you in the comments. They’re still on and I read them. Oh, yes I do! Tell me I’m a mad genius or a deranged idiot or a desperate grasper. Heck, all of them could be true, right? Let’s see what next week brings.

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Fancy more stories and poetry? Read all you want at JimmieWrites.

Buy my picture book of poems about werewolves and atomic monsters!

Read “The Paper Swans of Ellendell” in Postcards from Mars!

ONE LAST THING! See the buttons down there? Click them and join in the shenanigans and tomfoolery. If you only want a little, click the heart. But if you click the comment button, you might find yourself adding real value to this crazy little community we’re building here, and wouldn’t that be grand?

1. Nope. That one happened a long time ago. She doesn’t know. Well, I guess she does now, if she reads the footnotes. No one reads the footnotes, though, do they? Booger. Booger booger. Ha! I said “booger” and no one noticed because who really reads the footnotes?

2. As the prophets foretold, I can’t get no. No no no. A-hey hey hey.

3. And make money, which is the real issue. Of course, Substack isn’t wrong to want to make money. It can’t exist if it doesn’t. Still, the economy of size does not favor me and never will.

4. And let’s not kid ourselves. Substack looks and acts different from, say, Twitter or Facebook, but it still uses some sort of algorithm to “recommend” newsletters. The lists you see aren’t directly made by human hands. Unfortunately, no one does that kind of work anymore.

5. Like it or not, Thursday! has to work for me, too. If it becomes a chore, you’ll know it and it won’t be cool or interesting. It’ll be labor, like watching me dig the same old ditch as everyone else. Ew.

6. Yes, I know those are two things, but I’m treating them as a single group of things. Cool? Cool.