My first blog was on Diaryland, 20 years ago. I started it because I was mad at Dana, my wife.
We bonded over reading and writing—still big elements in who we are as a couple. But then I moved in with her and one day had to borrow her laptop for some reason. As I was writing I copied some text to paste in a document. I discovered my control plus C didn’t take, and what was left on the clipboard was something she’d copied—text from a blog of her own, one I didn’t know she had.
It wasn’t some huge breach of trust issue like another guy or anything—she’d simply been really pissed at me (probably with good reason) and blogged about it under a pseudonym. Likely to vent and avoid a fight. If you are a writer of any kind, I dare you to tell me you’ve never done the same.
Still, I was 33 and still new-ish to the internet in general, and really we were new-ish to each other and both of us perhaps a little too fresh out of unsatisfying marriages to other people. I was hurt, as anyone would be.
So I responded like the bitter and hypersensitive little boy I am inside and started my own blog, nyah-nyah. I don’t remember the sequence of events, but I’m pretty sure I even bitched about her in an early post. However, we soon decided to have a rule between us: We’d deal with our bullshit with each other or with a therapist or trustworthy friend. Not online.
I think we’ve both adhered to that pretty well.
I was quickly hooked on blogging, though. It was the writing medium I’d always wanted, a medium that fed what I would later find was my oh-so-ADHD-fueled need to do something that rendered immediate feedback and results. I’d always been a writer but never had faith I’d go professional because learning the pre-internet process of becoming a pro, I concluded I couldn’t deal. I didn’t have the patience.
Blogging was a perfect fit for the way my brain works. And within 5 years of launching my resentment blog I was earning money as a writer. Today I’m the staff Deputy Digital Editor for a men’s magazine. If you could travel through time and tell me 21 years ago that this would happen one day the younger me would conclude you were high or insane and call the cops.
My wife Dana gets credit as my blogging mentor in very positive ways, as well. In fact, the early true crime writing I did that gained attention and led to solid work owed a lot to learning digital research skills from her. I reminded her of this the other day and she said, “bitch, where’s my money?” or words to that effect. Then I gently reminded her the 2016 Toyota we bought brand new four years ago was partially purchased with proceeds from my books.
In the process of going in five years from just another of maybe a few hundred thousand bloggers on a site with a rather adolescent-sounding name to a professional writer, I developed some ideas that I think actually got in my way.
One was I grew very hesitant to write about my life. I bored myself. If you follow me on Twitter you know I’m not all that hesitant to get personal, but for a time my feeling was that whatever strange subjects I was into or obsessed with—you name it—produced much more interesting reading.
And that may still be true.
But I also felt that personal writing like this was extremely self-indulgent. And even worse? Because I entered the business as a true crime writer, I eventually grew intensely aware that I both had a core readership and that they weren’t necessarily interested in me writing about anything else.
So my efforts to blog about anything that’s just a singular, personal interest or about family stories or whatever have been damn unsatisfying for a long time. I’ve started a lot of sites with good intentions—just like this here old Substack—only to eventually abandon them, or port old entries from one site into the new one then stop bothering.
The Stuff Substack (“Stuff” is the only nickname any friends ever made stick to me for any length of time and also a good name for a catchall site) is, in my mind, kind of a reboot, or a return to something that’s probably old school.
A site and newsletter for whatever I think is worth writing about but can’t figure out who might buy the writing. And I come up with stuff all the time that interests me intensely but never end up more than tweeting too much about it.
Two other things contributed to me launching the Stuff Substack: One is I got the URL I wanted, which felt like serendipity. I follow a ton of writers and many have Substacks, so I got the impression this service was turning into a Thing. As a result I was shocked when my short and easy-to-remember last name was available still—the last time that happened with a site that was taking off but I didn’t know it was Instagram. And that felt like a squandered opportunity; I ultimately deleted the @huff Instagram because it became a premium address and people were trying to hack it to take it over or leaving shitty comments on the few photos I had there. The other reason I launched this newsletter/blog was I found myself doing a lot of tweet threads, where I’d previously avoided that, finding them tedious.
So it seemed like I was trying to tell myself something.
I can’t rule out adding paid features here, but it’s free for now. This post is a good example of why: It’s just me illuminating something subjective and personal at length, and if I got that from a newsletter I was paying for I’d be annoyed.
That said, when I do something that is initially broadly-focused, subjective, very personal, I inevitably end up narrowing down the field of subjects I think is worth writing about. My impulse to research and report, to really dig deep just takes over.
Even though I initially created this space with a true crime newsletter in mind, making it less specific doesn’t mean I’m going to avoid that, either. My scary Google alerts are plenty of evidence I’m still very interested in the subject.
The point to this Substack for me is to not avoid anything if my instincts say it’s worth writing about. It’s to get comfortable with sometimes being uncomfortable in print. I haven’t done that in a very long time.
It’s also an opportunity for me to have a space where I don’t bother with a lot of the annoying “best practices” I have to use in my work. Little rules like there must always be an image, or I need to think in SEO with every paragraph. There are times I don’t want to follow those rules. Times when I don’t want to give a fuck if my post title is search-engine friendly. I won’t break those rules in my professional life, but something in me needs to break them sometimes to feel free as a writer.
There it is, my fuller introduction and a thumbnail sketch of my history as a writer. I will in the future be more concise—adding editor as a job title has made me a big fan of precision and brevity—but I’m not making any rules as to what I’ll talk about.
I need to be uncomfortable sometimes. So I’ll just do it here.