Back and forth, back and forth
It snowed today, April 11, 2025
It snowed this morning. It melted fast, but there was enough to remind us of the winter just past in all its brutal, icebound beauty. By Monday, it’ll be spring again. That’s April in New England, y’all.
I’ve also been offered a job. Should all go well in the interim between now and then, I will begin on April 28. It’s an editing gig with a weird schedule, which is, unfortunately for my bizarre brain, right up my alley.
The editing isn’t hard news-related either, and I look forward to that.
And then there’s Substack.
Ugh.
Hey, I don’t like many of this platform's decisions. Some people get pulled into the spotlight and don’t deserve it. At the same time, there are still plenty of writers I like and even consider friends who use Substack daily, and they aren’t that different from me in politics or outlook. I guess the thinking is that this is truly a growing publishing platform, and the chances of gathering readers who support and love your work are greater than other choices.
I don’t know. I returned to good old-fashioned Blogger (Blogspot) out of sheer pique. Still, that venerable platform is badly hamstrung by an armada of phishing, spamming, scammy sites, meaning it’s damn hard to get anyone to take your work seriously as a writer unless you are one of those truly established types who has held onto his or her ancient blog out of sheer cussedness. (My wife has stewarded a WordPress education blog for about 20 years straight; she’s a real stalwart.)
I do take my work seriously, and I’ve felt real frustration at stalling. So I’m doing my best to stop that.
Grief
Also, grieving your entire family, save one sister, takes its toll, I have found. For me, some of the depression has manifested in a lack of motivation to work on any writing. I don’t know if that’s even changing, but I have grown old enough to know that sometimes you must force things a bit to get them moving. It’s like the way some older model car batteries might rev to life if you put the vehicle in neutral and let it roll.
So, I hope to start sending out Substack updates here and from my other newsletters.
Perhaps the key is to do it and not think about it too much after I’m done, for a while. So, if the content isn’t as polished as I usually present, give me a little grace on that for a while.
That’s enough of an update for now. Time to hit the gym for my sanity’s sake.