Announcements and Updates
Enabling paid subscriptions! Also other things
Greetings SDL clan! I have a few things to announce, so I thought I'd announce them all in an announcements post dedicated to announcing announcements. I also have a few updates to update you on, so I decided to update you about them in an updates post covering some updates. This is both of those posts.
There are more people around here than there used to be, largely thanks to Substack’s wonderful Recommendations feature - shout out to
in particular on this front! I don’t know why there’s such a specifically big overlap between people who like to keep up to date on the nuances of British law and people who like whatever this is, but I’m not complaining. I heartily recommend myself by the way; the territory’s been enduring major upheavals every two minutes or so for the past decade, and Marcus has a way of cutting through the weeds and focusing your attention on what’s important.Right. I’ve decided to change the way I do things around here in a couple of ways, so first I’m gonna kick off with the big news, then introduce new readers to some of my past essays, tease some of the things I want to write about over the coming weeks and months, and generally bring you up to speed on all things Small Dark Light. Here goes.
THE PRESENT: INTRODUCING PAID SUBSCRIPTIONS, AND A CONSISTENT PUBLISHING RATE TO GO WITH THEM
I've been wanting to introduce a paid option to the blog for a good while now, but haven't yet for the simple reason that I haven't been publishing often enough to justify asking for people's money. But more and more as the months have gone by, my gut has been strongly telling me to start asking and start posting often enough to justify asking.
So over the past few weeks I’ve gotten into a rhythm of publishing more, with the intention of turning on paid subscriptions after demonstrating people would be getting value for their money. I’m now taking that plunge, prompted by a pay-it-forward initiative started by fellow Substacker
that of kindly got me involved in. Long story short, I’ve ended up taking out a paid subscription to a writer I’d never encountered before, another writer has pledged a future subscription to me despite never encountering me before, and I’m taking that as a nudge to finally do this thing. Thank you so much, all of you.Now, about that publishing rate.
In the early days of the blog I posted a lot more regularly than I have been for most of the past two and a half years, but back then I didn’t have a day job and the world was locked down. The long gaps in my output since then have been due to spells of bad health, the demands of my various day jobs and studies, or frequently both. But my health and energy are improving all the time in that 2-steps-forward-1-step-back way that these things go, and I’ve definitely hit a high watermark in the past year or so. That’s enabled me to take on the rigours of genuine full-time work - a combination of teaching in various centres, gigging, composing and freelance copyediting - while maintaining some kind of social life, which would have been impossible in 2021-22.
Which isn’t to say it’s not highly demanding. So, even though I never stopped thinking about it, the blog lay dormant from late 2023 through the first part of this year, and I’ve only been able to write such long, detailed posts recently because I’m on my summer teaching break. It’s been highly fulfilling to get back into a writing rhythm again - this stuff’s very important to me. But what do I do once term starts up again?
Against these concerns I set the words of one of my favourite Substackers,
: ‘I know what makes people grow more reliably than anything else. It is: taking on a difficult project with some amount of public accountability.’ Blogging may not be as difficult as working a 14-hour shift in the A&E, but for this blogger combining it with paid work and physical movement and Gestalt therapy and a social life isn’t exactly easy either. I feel moved to do it anyway. And sometimes, telling people you’re going to do it is what makes you able to do it.It should help that I’ve recently given up a couple of my regular paid activities to give myself more space for passion projects like this, and generally looking after my body and mind. I know this will come as a shock to my readership of hedge fund investors and rabid materialists, but it turns out some things are more important than money.
The upshot is, I hereby commit to posting a lot more frequently than I have been over the last couple of years. The aim is a post a week, though realistically that may sometimes be a week and a half or even two weeks if I’m working on something a little more long and complex, the day job gets particularly busy (as every teacher knows, it isn’t the teaching that gets you, it’s the admin, planning, preparing, marking, submitting, etc etc), or pushing something through to publication would threaten my health.
I have no desire to paywall posts at this stage, so for now a paid subscription won't get you any benefits you don't already have; it'd merely be a way to support the publication. If I find I can keep up the new post rate without too much trouble, down the line I may introduce paid-subscriber-only posts that lean a little more experimental - stream-of-consciousness poems, wacky stories, freeform dialogues, etc. These are fun for me to write, come very quickly, and by definition are the kind of thing that people who are heavily attuned to my aesthetic - i.e. paid subscribers - are the most likely to go for. But that's all very tentative for now; let’s just see how things go.
I've decided to donate half of my subscriber revenue to the Samaritans, a mental health charity focusing on suicide prevention. One of my primary goals in setting up the blog in 2020 was to help people who are struggling, and I'd like what I do with any future proceeds from it to reflect this in some way. Way down the line, if paid subscriptions pick up enough that it starts looking like I can cut back on my other assorted labours to devote more time to this, I may look at rowing back the Samaritans’ percentage, but we’ll cross that bridge when we come to it. Rest assured I won’t make any moves like that without giving you all fair warning.
Final announcement:
recently interviewed me for her Substack about my recent Road-to-Damascus experience with yoga. I’ll link to the article on Notes when it’s up, hopefully this coming week. Speaking of social media, if you like the idea of occasional dad jokes, shitposts and random music opinions cropping up in your X feed - interspersed with the occasional insight that rocks the Internet's very foundations, redefines the history of thought and single-handedly shapes the Gestalt - you can follow me here. I do not commit to tweeting regularly.THE PAST: SOME OF MY PREVIOUS POSTS
Psychology, living well, motivation: Doing the Next Best Thing (my first post, four years ago now), What Causes Anxiety and Depression?, Death to Meta-Feelings and The Third Arrow (both on reacting to our reactions), Steppenwolf: You Are What You Do (on choosing an identity for yourself), The Lightness at the End of the Tunnel (on taking a lighter approach to life), The “Backwards Law”: Stop Trying to Get What You Want!, Beyond Arrogance and Self-Doubt, Narcissism and Validity, What Makes Us Happy?, Beyond Fulfilment, More Interesting Problems to Have, What Causes Tension?, You Have Something to Say
Spiritual posts: The Day I Pretended to Be Grass, Is It True That Whatever You Believe is “True for You”?, Further Up and Further In (possibly my favourite post I’ve done), What Does “We’re All One” Actually Mean?, I Choose Love, What Does Choosing Love Do for Me?, From Belief to Faith
Philosophical posts: Do FACTS and LOGIC Really DESTROY Anything?, FACTS and LOGIC and Lived Experience: The Middle Way, The Domains That Shape Our Lives, The World’s What You Say It Is and Making Reality Realer: The Drala Principle (both on how language shapes reality), The Banshees of Inisherin and the Tragic Worldview
Politics and culture: Doing Politics Together: The Public Sphere (putting that humanities degree to work, baby), and my “hippy” series: Millennials Are Hippies Who Hate Hippies, Why I Like the Hippy Attitude and Hippies Were Better at Feeling Than We Are
Aesthetics and the arts: Your Music Taste Says a Lot About You, Artists Are Children, Love the Art, Hate the Artist?, The Double-Edged Sword of Comedy
My ongoing “Culture Club” series: posts on Peter Cook and Dudley Moore, Evelyn Waugh, The Beatles and Stevie Wonder
Serious short stories: The Strangeness (horror); Aaron and Sofia parts 1 and 2 (romance); The Fifth Throne vols. 1 and 2 (fantasy/allegory - unfinished)
Very not-serious short stories: March of the Elephants; Two People, Both Talking vols. 1, 2, 3 and 4
THE FUTURE: WHAT I HAVE ON THE BOIL
As you can see, it’s been an eclectic ride! And I’m going to keep things that way.
On the “self-improvement” front, I’m planning posts about how the way you do everything is at least as important as what you do with your life; the sneaky ways in which our shadow and superego reinforce each other; how forgiveness works by dissolving two sides of an internal argument that sets up tension in your system; how envy is based on fictions that literally make no sense when you examine them closely; how absolutely everything we do is either motivated by love or fear; and how enlightenment and extreme non-enlightenment look eerily similar, with most of us having to pass through terrain that looks nothing like either before we get from one to the other (think the infamous IQ bell curve meme).
On the “personal” front, I’d like to share a little more about my writing and editing process soon, in the hopes of helping fellow overthinkers (should we call ourselves “overwhelmers”?). Maybe describe how some of my shadow work is going too - big updates on that score, and some of them are pretty far out there. I’m also working up to a post about my various physical symptoms and the psychological triggers they might correspond to, under the assumption that my mental and physical terrain map each other pretty closely.
On the “philosophy” front, I’m working on an essay about Nietzsche, who seems to be all the rage among bloggers lately: I’ve always been interested in his distinction between master and slave morality, so now seems like as good a time as any to dig in to my thoughts on it a bit. Speaking of morality, I’m also writing about the main branches of ethics in Western philosophy - consequentialism, deontologism, and virtue ethics - and how they each apply to different domains of life, rather than any one being inherently truer than the others. In the back of my mind I’m also working up a juicy post about the nature of symbols, and why and how it is that we represent abstract concepts with visual metaphors in our dreams, myths and similes.
On the - eh, will we call it “theology”? - front, some day in the distant future I’d like to do a post about how it’s an accident of history that the scientific-materialist worldview and religious-spiritual one seem to taste so different to each other. The two flavours are much closer to each other than many people in either camp realise, and it’s perfectly possible for both sides to feel they have a lot in common without either giving an inch of ground. The problem’s mainly a linguistic one.1
On the “arts” front, I’d really like to do a piece on UK battle rap. I’m in the middle of yet another phase and it’s just so damn entertaining. Maybe a post on Bowie too, why not.
And on the “analysis of other random stuff” front, in the very long term I’d like to write in detail about my thoughts on autism (which many people in my family have) and OCD (which I have myself). For now even thinking about either essay makes me tired, but I hope that the more I flex the writing muscle by publishing consistently on other subjects, the less daunting both topics will eventually seem. For now, suffice it to say that I have a lot of thoughts. I also haven’t written about politics for a while, and would enjoy doing a couple of posts on the psychological and philosophical differences between left and right and what they mean.
All the above is just the tip of the iceberg: like so many others I write much more than I publish, and think much more than I write. (My “blog ideas” Google Doc is 20.5 pages long.) Even if this was my full-time job I wonder if I could keep up with the amount of things I want to write about…oh well, as the saying goes: ‘How do you eat an elephant? Start a petition to get your local takeaway to serve one, find out after 20 years of tireless campaigning that elephants are an endangered species and you’re 100% never going to get anywhere, wait patiently for the lab-grown substitute to be developed and wonder what you’ve done with your life.’
And that’s it for the announcements! Have a good week, and I said I’d see you soon, so see you soon!
While you’re waiting for this, why not subscribe to Superb Owl?
I am so honoured to be your first paid subscriber! I am delighted with the turn of events that led to that. I am sorry I have not replied to your message before, for some reason, I cannot find where you wrote to me and I regret not replying straight away.
It hugged my heart to read that half of the revenues will go to the Samaritans, it's a cause dear to my heart and one of the reasons I write.
And I love how you organised your writing for us to dive with more ease! Delightful.
Thanks for the shout out and all the best with those exciting changes!!