Newsletter: Hello World!
A new Substack lurches from the grave
Hi everyone!
I’m still in the process of setting up my account on Substack. I’ve been looking for a digital home where I feel welcome, with a mature community who appreciate words. I left Twitter some time ago, and suspect I’ll be closing my Facebook account in the near future as well. The latter process may well accelerate after a nasty experience over the last few days with a Facebook scammer. You have to be so careful. In this case they wasted my time and tried to get access to my bank account.
Spoiler alert: not only did they fail, but if they’d somehow accessed it, they wouldn’t have found anything worth stealing. I’m an author!
Ba-dumsht.
The About page explains what I hope to do with this account, what I’ll post, and when. Maybe I’m being too ambitious. We’ll see. I blogged for over a decade on other platforms, and miss that element of writing and getting feedback. This may be an opportunity to relive those fun days.
My plan is to write some posts, giving examples of what I hope to achieve. Once a bit of content is up here, I’ll start advertising it, and maybe transfer my main newsletter from Gumroad to Substack. I’m still feeling my way around the interface and options, so please bear with me while I acclimatise.
This would be one of my standard newsletter updates, available to everyone, which mixes some of my personal news with writing updates. I usually post when I have a new release. Today I’m making an exception.
So, personal news. Recently I became a councillor on Loreburn Community Council. I represent my local neighbourhood, and am also focussing on environmental issues. The role is voluntary, so doesn't help to pay the bills. Speaking of which ...
I also got a job! As some of my fans know, I had a good career as a professional librarian but gradually left it behind to focus on writing. However, it's hard to make a living this way. Very hard. Unless you are a big name author then too few people know about your work in order to generate the sales and word of mouth buzz that are needed to earn even a minimum wage living. So I applied for a job and had my first interview in twenty years, and was offered the post. The role is just part time, but fits my interests and timetable: film projectionist at a local arts centre cinema and museum! I haven't started yet but am really looking forward to it. I'm a big fan of good storytelling regardless of medium, so it will be fun to be involved with the magic of cinema.
Since this is an example post, I haven’t actually got a new release at the moment. My most recent book was Finding Solace, of which I am very proud. It was epic to write, and hopefully epic to read! But I am working hard on my first non-fiction title, From Idea To Item. The concept has grown from a short booklet to a much more substantial tome as I think of more things I want to say! It began as a session I taught, then became a Kickstarter, and I have completed a draft but am still adding content to make it more comprehensive. The draft is about 62,000 words. (For those who don’t know me: I teach creative writing locally, and also mentor new authors and occasionally edit other people’s fiction, which is why it made sense to put some of my experience into a book, including the questions I get asked most often! I’ve also run one of the juries for the Bram Stoker Awards, so have a good eye for what constitutes quality storytelling.) This is the current chapter listing:
Thanks for reading! Feel free to say hi. :-)