It’s been eight months since I started “Lamp Post in the Marsh.” I’d like to thank everyone who’s subscribed to my page and hasn’t (yet) pulled up the tent pegs and decamped. Over the last three months, I’ve lost more subscribers than I’ve gained. This doesn’t surprise me. The way I write and the themes I explore are not mainstream. It’s one of the many reasons why I don’t paywall my work: I simply refuse to bend my knee to the (hyper)sensitivities of the so-called “modern reader,” and I can’t imagine the stress of catering to such a pouty creature’s demands on a month-by-month basis as the scheduled payment draws nigh.
The most common complaint I get about the way I express myself—and it’s something my elderly mother has objected to since I was a freckle-faced sprat—is that I swear a lot. However, I don’t swear in my writing nearly as much as I do in real life, which is why I’m rarely invited to speak at public functions. Decades ago, when I was a semi-devout Catholic, I asked my “shriver” if repeating a dirty word in the box, which I was confessing to having said in a moment of passion, would result in a doubling of the penance imposed. “For example,” I explained, “if I were to tell you now that yesterday I uttered the word. . . ”—“Go on,” he said, “if you dare.”
The reason I write the way that I do is that I’ve spent much of my life being told not to write the way that I do. So any praise or recognition my writings may have garnered in the past were “nice and all,” but inherently bittersweet and unsatisfying because I felt I’d been muzzled, brought to heel, tamed. I wasn’t speaking in my own voice. When I was growing up my teachers urged a rigorous adherence to classical models; and their eyes would mist over when a pupil recited an original composition that sounded in my ears as if it had been written by someone shitting Pentelic marble.
I’m very grateful when anyone reads anything I write. And when people provide me with feedback on my writing (e.g. factual slip-ups, typos, grammatical blunders), I find it humbling; because it means that, despite all the commitments and obligations competing for their time and attention, they somehow managed to find a spare moment to go through something I wrote and formalize a thoughtful and constructive response. Anyone who’s ever TA’d or graded student essays knows how time-consuming this kind of criticism can be if it’s done right.
I contrast this with the way many of today’s educators and self-proclaimed littérateurs go about dispensing advice to budding writers. They issue hysterical diktats, demanding words like “fat” (when used to describe a person) be excised from the books of both the living and the dead. They publish mind-bogglingly illiterate firmans, calling for “trigger-warnings” to be added to Jane Austen novels and for “suspect books” to be banned, cancelled, or even outlawed. (“How we miss you, 1930s Berlin!”) They want everything that has ever been written and everything that has ever been said to comply with a rambling list of incoherent guidelines, rules, and contradictory standards that they themselves can’t even seem to define. They stroke their embossed nameplates and fall back on arguments from authority, because they haven’t an original thought between them. “It’s my way or the highway,” they seem to say. But their way has no roadmap. I’m too old to join another cult. “I am a statue immovable and an anvil not easy to be beaten into plates.”
I love the many and varied ways that Substack can be used. For me, it is a workshop. I think of my posts as the individual hand-crafted pieces of a violin that have been lacquered and hung up to dry, pending assembly and combination into a greater whole. I’ve been revising older posts and correcting errors and infelicities as these crop up. And there are many. The AI-generated images that I use (unsparingly) are solely for conceptualization and storyboarding purposes. But I also think that they make my page look less like a 1990s Usenet forum. If I ever get around to overcoming my constitutional laziness and publishing my writings in a more traditional book format, the AI images will be scotched and I’ll hire a real artist (probably one with frizzy hair and hoop earrings), whom I will shower with ducats and ask to produce for me a cover that is racy, titillating, and hopefully scandalous. By subscribing to “Lamp Post in the Marsh” you’re getting a free tour of the workshop with no obligation to buy, since I’m not selling anything. But the workshop itself is still under construction, so be advised: hard hats, though not required, are recommended—especially if you’re easily offended.
You're kina all over the place in this one 😂 but I one hundo support writing how ever you fucking want to
Oh Daniel, we're so the same! I write what I write for me. I don't give a rat's ass if I offend you because I used the word "retard". I mean, "Sensitivity Readers? WTF! I don't know if you read the essay I wrote about the accident I had at work, but if ever anyone was going to be triggered by something, it might be me. I just read through it. If you think you're going to be triggered by something I wrote, I say, turn the page. If someone writes something offensive, and here I quote my wife: "Grow a pair!" I've had a few readers who've unsubscribed, but so what? It's the ones that are still reading me that matter. As for the Paywall, the only reason I have it is because some of my close friends bought subscriptions on the first day. I didn't know what to do for them. So I decided I'd write books--serials--just for them. My stories will always be free. And if ever you want to collaborate, let me know.