another reason not to want to publish on substack

 

Maybe laboring in obscurity is the way to go.

https://matthewgasda.substack.com/p/writers-diary-2a2

In a way, I think that idea of writing to make money terrifies me.  I realize that folks gotta eat, but I can’t say that writing to make money has any appeal to me.  Granted, if someone were to send me some nickels, I most certainly wouldn’t turn up my nose, but it wouldn’t be the reason I would write.

Let me give you some background concerning where this is coming from.  In the mid ‘00’s my two sons were the age where Harry Potter was huge.  Harry Potter was a brilliant book to bring kids into the act of reading.  They were enthralled (their mother was appalled, she being of the whacked out christian flavor) and they read the books and wanted to go to the movies and live the Potter life.  I indulged them.

But as the number of books mounted and the story evolved and my sons became teenagers in sync with the books, I stopped reading because dealing with two teenagers was annoying enough. Having a book accurately depicting the hormonal imbalances and angst of teenagers was not a place I wanted to visit.  So I stopped reading at book four and let them deal on their own.

Fast forward about twenty years and I figure, what the hell, I might as well finish the last three books.  I am on the last book now and overall I think that the first three were great and then tapered off progressively.

I am glad Rowling made her money and she deserved all the credit.  The books were a great bit of storytelling.  Everyone loves sniping at them, but truthfully, all I get from the sniping is a taste of sour grapes.  

She tells a good story.  Isn’t that enough just by itself?

I am writing because I enjoy sitting down with my coffee in the morning and reading the world's weirdness and then pecking away at this diary.  If it suits me, I spend time thinking about the stories that I want to tell and trying to create vignettes that tie together into a bigger story.  

Now I am hoping to create a novel using all these disjointed written pieces into a bigger piece.  When (if) I manage, I will try to get someone to buy it because I can alway use a better quality of whiskey.  But that isn’t the goal.  I have enough and I am content.  If I start thinking that my writing is worth something, then I stand a good chance of being discontent.