So I’ve been doing this thing for one year. Specifically I’ve been doing this thing consistently for one year1. When I started the newsletter this time last year, it was with no great expectations: it was not my first, second, or even third attempt at maintaining a blog of sorts. I think we might be on the fifth at this point, and that’s not counting the couple of times I’ve tried to collaborate with someone, neither of which worked out2.
My past attempts usually petered out due to a combination of poor time management, losing creative steam, and convincing myself that the slightest bit of self-promotion was tacky and imposing. I’m still not good at time management, and the concept of self-promotion will always give me hives, but I think what makes this one work a little better is the low stakes involved. I’m just doing it for funsies, and to entertain. I do have some vague idea of using the newsletter to workshop pieces for a future book on mental illness in pop culture that I’ve been meaning to write for years (refer back to time management issues exacerbated by unmedicated ADHD), but mostly it’s just a place for writing about aspects of pop culture that fascinate and amuse me. I’m not looking to get a book deal out of it (though if you know someone that might have one just laying around, let me know!!!!).
As with the podcast I co-host, one of the interesting things about writing for an online audience is that you don’t have the slightest idea what will land with readers and what won’t. My most successful piece so far here (in that it had the most eyeballs on it), was about Town & Country, the alleged Warren Beatty-Diane Keaton screwball comedy for which everyone involved should have been brought up on charges3. I have no idea why. I didn’t get a lot of comments on it, but a lot of people sure read it. On the other hand, my review of last year’s Don’t Worry Darling is one of my least-read pieces. Now, maybe it was because after all the incredibly stupid “she made him her special salad” scandal surrounding it people were tired of hearing about Don’t Worry Darling. There’s no way of telling, unless I end each piece with an audience scorecard, like I’m screening a sneak preview of another goddamn Saw movie.
But at the same time not knowing exactly what readers want is freeing. As long as it fits within the vague concept of “pop culture” I can write about whatever I want. While Substack insists on sending me an email after every article breaking down how many times it was read, I don’t really pay that much attention to the numbers. So if I want to write about some movie literally no one but me has thought about in more than a decade, I can do that. If I want to write about Six Weeks, the ghoulish melodrama about a dying tween whose primary goal before she shuffles off this mortal coil is getting her mother laid, I can do that too. Who cares?
When I say “who cares,” I don’t mean that in a passive-aggressive “I actually care very much” way. I mean it in a “in a hundred years we’ll all be dead” way. It really doesn’t matter. There’s no need to wrack my brain trying to figure out how to tailor this thing so that it’s the most appealing to the widest audience. Pop culture has become so fractured into little individual subcultures (many of them strange and frightening) that there is no such thing as a wide audience for this kind of writing anymore. That is my advice to all of you considering writing about movies, or television, or pop culture, or whatever interests you: write whatever the fuck you want. You want to do a newsletter in which you watch and review every episode of The Love Boat? Do it! Want to do a deep dive into the grotesque comic strip 9 Chickweed Lane? Shit, I wish someone would, that guy’s a pervert!
Do it. Have fun. This is fun, and the fact that actual live, human beings are reading it is just the cherry on the sundae. I wish that the previously mentioned poor time management skills would allow me to do more, but we’ll see what happens going forward. A couple of you living saints have pledged actual cash if I decide to start doing paid tiers, which is mind-boggling to me. I’m not there yet. Maybe I will be, who can say. Maybe this place won’t even be around in another year or so, or it’ll be bought out by another fucking Nazi, who can say. But I’m just going to keep doing what I’m doing for as long as I can do it, and not worry too much about it.
Hey, thank you so much for reading, subscribing, commenting, sharing. I’ve been writing for a long time, and have spent much of that talking myself out of doing more with it. Having a dedicated readership means more than you can possibly understand, and I’m so grateful to you.
We’ll return to the usual stupid bullshit later this week.
Just ignore the fact that I took last week off.
Like school projects, “collaborate” ultimately meant “oh you do it, I don’t have time.”
This was part of a goal I had of watching all of Diane Keaton’s mostly terrible 21st century movies, but it was so bad that I haven’t been able to return to it.