99 Ways I Could be a Better SubStacker

I WISH I could remember where I read that great newsletter...

I would re-do these three panels, except I have a bunch of SubStacks to read…

1. I should only read newsletters when I have scads of time to respond.

2. If I can’t respond in the moment, I need to have some sort of tracking system where I can collect the link to the newsletter, what caught my eye, and what I’d like to say in response…

3. Except, if I had that much time, I could respond in the moment.

4. So, quite often when lying in bed at 3 am - (I know, I know, I shouldn’t be looking at my phone in the middle of the night), I take a peek to see what’s landed in my inbox and read and fall asleep and my phone falls out of bed and by morning I can’t remember what I was doing looking at my phone at 3 am…

5. Except it was good enough that all day I try to remember whose SubStack I was reading that made me stop and think and change the direction of my dreams.

6. Case in point. I recently read a couple of Substack writers who both referred to Raymond Queneau - Exercises in Style. I tracked down a copy online and started reading the 99 ways in which Queneau retells the same story, each time using a different style, voice, perspective… Super cool.

7. Immediately I began to think about how that would work for comics (redraw the same scene 99 times) only to find another reference to another book 99 Ways to Tell a Story: Exercises in Style by Matt Madden in which he does exactly that. I ordered the book from my library, it finally arrived and then… **

8. I was going to write a newsletter that thanked both SubStackers for their pieces and referenced those original newsletters - except now I have no idea where they went.

9. Maybe I should read fewer newsletters.

10. Except then, I’d never experience the delights upon which I routinely stumble during my reading.

    

11. SubStack reminds me of the early rabbit-hole days of the Internet. I used to lose days following links from one obscure page to another. [None of the places where I landed back around the turn of the century had content written by bots, btw.]

12. I love the roundup posts others contribute to this platform. If I were a better SubStacker, I would keep better track and add my findings to the mix.

13. If I were a better SubStacker I’d also find a way to index and organize my own writing so people could sort through and only read the stuff they are interested in. I mean, how many people are going to be interested in memoir through comics and climbing and the perils of being the oldest person in grad school and bad drawings of cats and all the other stuff that I wind up writing about?

14. If I were a better SubStacker, I’d find a niche and stay there.

15. I’d write more often (or less often) but consistently.

16. And, if I were a really good SubStacker I would continue this list for 83 more points so the content of my newsletter didn’t fail to match the expectations set by that title up there.

Sigh. What I will take a moment to say is a huge thank you to the creators of the platform, to the readers, to the subscribers, to those who comment and share and contribute to the marvelous ongoing conversations I’ve discovered since joining. I’m so glad I made the switch from my previous platforms and made my way here.

For those of you who have more experience (and who read more than three SubStacks), what tools and strategies do you use to keep track of stuff you want to find again? I have started to cut and paste links of favourite SubStacks in my Notes (which I can access whether on phone or laptop), but is there a better way?

In case you are wondering, here are a few favourites:

That’s part one of the list… there are many more.

But that’s where I will leave this for now because if you go and read all those SubStacks you may never find your way back here again...

**I LOVE the 99 styles of illustrating the same small moment in Madden’s life. He’s done such a great job I no longer feel any need to tackle such a project myself. **