Is Substack keeping you awake at night?

Jul 20, 2024

Dear Readers, Writers and Creative Friends,

A warm welcome to new subscribers and followers! I generally post writing/creativity tips and motivational articles, mixed in with eps from two of my current writing projects: a cancer journal, Letters to Leftie Bestie (My Left Breast) and a satirical flash fiction novella: The Everyday Musings of Louisa Greene. You can also find all eps of my travel memoir, Looking for Duras, a Mekong Journey, (where I go searching for traces of the French writer, Marguerite Duras in Vietnam and Cambodia) here.

Today I’m posting about Substack.

Lately I’ve developed a bad habit. It’s called sleep reading.

Meaning I’m awake, reading, when I should be asleep. And its all Substack’s fault.

It’s 2 am and I get up for a wee. I know it’s 2 am ‘cos I check my phone when I get back to bed.

Mistake #1 was to turn the phone on.

Mistake #2 after clocking the time, was to let my eye fall on the number 4 blinking on the Substack app. (I’m exaggerating, it wasn’t blinking, but it may as well have been).

Mistake #3 was not heeding my instinct to ignore, and giving my pointer finger free reign.

And there they are again, all the extraordinary Substack minds lining up to to lure me into a twilight wakefulness.

There’s my ole favorites like

Kate Hill

Kate McKean

Robin Cangie (she/her)

Sarah Fay | Writers at Work

Veronica Llorca-Smith

and many, many more.

And my latest discoveries like

and all the others I subscribed to in the middle of the night that I can’t locate now because I am sooo tired. (Roll your cursor over their names to see what fab things they are into!)

And they are all recommending others who are recommending others who are recommending others and on it goes and I’m caught up in a jet stream of great writers, great minds, great thinkers who I’m thinking must all be lovely people, just the kind of people I’d like to have for friends, not like at a party where the cool crowd are over there and you never pluck up the courage to go say hello. No, here on SS you can say hello, you can go up and gush all over them, in fact people on SS love it when you gush, like, follow and comment, even better, subscribe, even better, offer paid support! ‘Pressing my buttons’ has a whole new meaning on Substack!

Even the big Substack stars who have many thousands of subscribers (some even have millions ) want your attention— you’d think they would be blasé, you’d think they’d be over it by now, but they love it, they can’t get enough, and I’m thinking they must be just like you and me, craving acknowedgement, engagement, so grateful to be heard, grateful to be seen by intelligent people because everyone on SS seems to be intelligent, creative, talented which is a total turn on for a sapiosexual like me. (Sapiosexual: a person who is attracted to highly intelligent people. As if you couldn’t tell ‘cos I’ve used ‘i’ the word 4 times now ) but don’t worry, I won’t stalk you, wait, I will stalk you, but only on SS, I won’t cross the line I promise, and if I run into you at a book event I’ll be all awkward and shy (as usual) and won’t even come over to say hi because I‘ll know you must be as tired as I am from SS keeping you up all night, for how the hell can you have enough time in a day to be writing such brilliance while replying to every comment and thinking up clever new ideas to get new subscribers to follow you into oblivion.

I mean, how do you have time to live a life, if you are always on Substack?!

What about your kids, your partners, your lovers, your pets, your day to day responsibilities? What about real life ? Is Substack real life? Or is it a second reality like the online video game Second Life. Remember twenty years ago when it first came out? You could live a total fantasy life as an avatar, in a mansion of your own design, buy and sell property that didn’t really exist, have fast cars, lovers and pets, anything you want. Players got addicted, ended up in rehab, marriages broke up, fortunes were made and lost — and apparently it’s still going strong.

Is Substack something like that? Is this delightful walled garden just a fantasy reality?

I hope not, I hope it’s real. But I wonder if there is a 12 step program yet called Substackers Anonymous. I might need to join.

My name is Jan and I am a substackoholic. It’s been 3 hours since my last post and even in the middle of the night, I can’t stop looking at my phone to see if anyone has liked it yet. I’m so tired, so tired, I can’t sleep, it’s affecting my health, my relationships, my…

Ping!

Oh, look there’s a ‘like’, there’s a comment, they said something nice ( does a little dance). Somehow I’m not so tired anymore. Life is great! I heart Substack!

(Note to reader: can you come up with a better ending than this? Feels like bit of a fizz. But I need to get this out in the stratosphere so I can get some goddamned sleep!)

I’d love to hear how you organise your time and life around your Substack committments. Do you get as excited as I do by what you see and read here in the middle of the night, or any other time of day?

Writer's Journey

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