Trying to make any money as an independent writer is tough these days. Especially if you have scruples. And I do.
I don’t want people who read my stuff to be baraged by pop-up ads, videos that start playing automatically, privacy scraping cookies, or sponsored posts. I don’t want anything to come between me and my readers – not just graphically, but ethically. If I am holding a Yeti mug in a picture, I want you to know that it is because I chose that picture, not because I have a sponsorship deal with Yeti.
And I paid my bills for a few years in the early days of the web by writing marketing copy – I never want to have to do that again. I don’t want to write “teaser copy” to get people to click things they would not normally want to click. I don’t want to chase clicks, be sensational, or make you angry in order to increase my traffic or to curry favor with advertisers.
So, I have a Membership Program. It’s ~ 200 folks who give somewhere between $5 and $25 a month to support my various writing projects, such as this blog and my weekly newsletter.
What do they get out of it? Well, it’s sort of like NPR – there are perks, of course, but the major benefit is that they get to make sure there is more of my writing in the world.
But there are perks – and today, I’m adding a big one.
Beginning this weekend, Saturday the 17th of August, people who support my writing as part of my membership team will receive an original, unpublished essay in their inbox every Saturday morning. It will be around 800 to 1,000 words, give or take, and while the subject matter is flexible, there won’t be surprises – if you like my writing, you will enjoy this. I’m not going to suddenly take up writing romance or erotica or anything. Not that there’s anything wrong with romance or erotica. It’s just not what I want to write about.
It does not matter what membership tier you are, either, Whether you are a $5 a month member or a $25 a month member, you get the same perks, including the weekly essay in your inbox. I am a big believer in the idea that we support the things that matter to us based on our capacity, so I’m intentionally not going to differentiate access because of the amount of money you send me. No matter your membership tier you get access to this.
You can learn more about becoming as member, what perks there are, and so on by going to this page.
It’s 5:30 AM, and the sky is still dark outside, but not as dark as it was 15 minutes ago when I woke up. As I write this, it’s Friday, but it really doesn’t matter, as most days, the same thing happens. The birds are singing the song of their people, letting their friends know they made it through the night. The kettle is almost ready, and the coffee grinder just finished. My kingdom for a quiet coffee grinder.
After making a cup of coffee in my Melitta (best $6 purchase, ever), in my Fiesta bistro mug (this one is Poppy colored, but the Meadow Green one is my favorite), I walk, cup in hand, to the room at the end of the hall that once was the bedroom of six different foster children, but is now my office.
I have a hard time writing in silence – my ADHD won’t let me – but I also have a hard time writing when the music has strong lyrics – my ADHD won’t let me – so I end up mostly writing to instrumental jazz, classical or, rarely, techno. My audio setup is a bit of a hybrid of an old school stereo tuner (a cheap bookcase-sized Sharp) paired with my phone on bluetooth, via which today I am streaming this playlist from Amazon music.
Now it’s 5:45, I’ve been up for 30 minutes. Daylight is breaking through, and the birds are much louder, and the music is playing and the chair is adjusted. I shut the door to the office (we have cats who will want to get on my keyboard otherwise), open Google Docs, open a new doc, and begin to write for the next hour.
Hopefully.
I don’t mean that I write hopefully, although I generally do. I mean that hopefully, something to write about will occur to me. Some days, it’s like a firehose, just pouring out of you, the words are. On those days, it’s hard to keep up with the flow, especially if you are a three finger and a thumb typist, like I am.
On other days, nothing goes right. Nothing is interesting to you. You have nothing you want to say. You are bored with the world, and with the people in it, and have nothing to say to them, and wish you had not committed to yourself that you would hold this time sacred, this first hour of work each day. On those days, the words do not come.
There are a variety of ways writers deal with this. Some people have word-count commitments. They apply their ass to the chair and stay there until they have 500 words, or 2,000 words, or whatever their daily goal is. I think this makes sense, assuming you have control over your time and are working on a specific project.
I’m more of a time-based writer. This is the amount of time I have to write, and so I write, or try to, during this time, and how many words I get is just how many words I get that day. Some days, I might get 1200 words during that hour. Most days it’s 700 or thereabouts. Some days, when it’s particularly bad, it’s 50 words.
There are times I wish I was a word – count writer, with the ability to just sit there, ass in the chair, staring at an empty page until the words come. But alas, the writing I do only supplies a portion of my income, and the mortgage must be paid, and the cat kibble purchased, and the living earned, so if I am to have words on the page today, they must show up before 7AM, or else they will just have to wait until tomorrow morning, unless time gets stolen from other obligations. It’s like having homework you are behind on, everyday, for the rest of your life.
Because the time available to write is limited, and the words must show up then if they are to show up at all, you take pains to be careful with your words – or at least, it does for me. Sometimes, my limited writing time is spent staring at the screen, not because I do not have the words, but because I am forming the next sentence in my head, repeating it over and over, listening to the rhythm and the meter, because writing is for me just transcribing the words I already hear in my head. On the better days, it’s much faster, like transcribing the words you hear as they are being said.
But it also means the words seem more valuable, more scarce, more precious than they would otherwise. It makes revision particularly offensive – striking out a paragraph that you spent 30 of your precious sixty minutes on is viscerally painful.
I turned 52 this year. Every time I mention this, folks older than 52 love to tell me how young I am. I realize 52 is not old, per se. Although, I was reading an Agatha Christie novel not long ago and a character described someone as an elderly man in his early sixties, and I put the book down, as I was not ready for that sort of violence.
However, I turned 52 this year. Somewhere around my mid-forties, something shifted. Instead of the future seeming wide open, my dreams began to be accompanied with a Use-By date. Instead of thinking, “I would like to go hiking in the Alps one day,” it became, “I would like to go hiking in the Alps while I am still healthy enough to do it.” Instead of enjoying the first day of Summer, it became, “I might, if I am lucky, get to do this thirty more times.”
Time began to move quicker. I notice this especially in my writing, where words are already valuable because of the lack of writing time. If I get an hour a day to write, and I live to be 82, that’s only about 10,000 hours of writing left.
The biggest problem with a new office? Desk Placement.
Last week, in my Member’s Only newsletter, I wrote about moving into a new office. I described it thus:
It’s Monday morning, and I’m sitting in my new office. Or maybe it’s my new study. My new den?
This is where I always get hung up – on the naming of things. Some writers even have studios, like they are painters or podcasters.
In any event, I am sitting in the new room where, going forward and likely for the rest of my life, I shall do my writing.
It’s a bedroom on the northeast corner in our house – some 11 and a half feet by 13 feet (3.5 x 4 meters) – with a double closet and three windows letting in lots of light, but none of it too aggressively.
Long-time readers will remember that a bit more than a year ago I had moved into a storeroom off the carport. It was fine, if cramped, but was always suboptimal. So, when our housemate moved out, I took over his room and turned it into my office. Or study. Den?
Anyway, it’s the room where I write.
It’s such a larger room than I had – almost twice the size, and laid out much better, squares being better suited to the human body than narrow rectangles. After I moved all the previous resident’s stuff out, I put a folding chair in the doorway of the room and just sat, waiting for the room to tell me what it wanted to be.
This is, honestly, my favorite part of any project. In the beginning, everything is possible. Built-in wall of shelves? No problem. A massive desk and credenza? Sure thing. Before such minor inconveniences such as budget and time factor in, I just let my mind roam with all the possibilities.
But quickly, the main limitation became desk placement.
The two general defaults I have seen are either putting the desk in the middle of the room, or putting it facing the wall. Neither made me excited.
Putting it in the center of the room would be OK if I were Wendell Berry, dutifully typing out stories of Port William on an old manual Underwood, or Shelby Foote writing about the drama of the Civil War with a dip pen, but alas, I am me, writing on a modern computer, complete with a loud mechanical keyboard and a large computer monitor. And all of that needs to be plugged in, and whatever aesthetic value is gained from having your desk in the middle of the room is negated by having cords running from the wall. And yes, one can have outlets moved to the middle of the floor, but I’m still renovating my kitchen, so this office project needed to happen both quickly and cheaply.
I have never really liked having a desk that faces a wall. I dislike having my back to the room, and especially to the door. I am told by webpages that purport to extol the virtues of Feng Shui that having your back to the door is unlucky, and while I know nothing of Feng Shui, I have no problem believing it.
In addition, I find myself on a decent number of Zoom calls these days, and need a backdrop that doesn’t suck, to use a professional term. So facing the wall is out.
I am not the first writer to struggle with desk placement.
The last thing I want to tell you in this part is about my desk. For years I dreamed of having the sort of massive oak slab that would dominate a room–no more child’s desk in a trailer laundry-closet, no more cramped kneehole in a rented house. In 1981 I got the one I wanted and placed it in the middle of a spacious, skylighted study… For six years I sat behind that desk either drunk or wrecked out of my mind, like a ship’s captain in charge of a voyage to nowhere.
A year or two after I sobered up, I got rid of that monstrosity and put in a living-room suite where it had been… I got another desk–it’s handmade, beautiful, and half the size of the T. Rex desk. I put it at the far west end of the office, in a corner under the eave…I’m sitting under it now, a fifty-three-year-old man with bad eyes, a gimp leg, and no hangover. I’m doing what I know how to do, and as well as I know how to do it. I came through all the stuff I told you about (and plenty more that I didn’t), and now I’m going to tell you as much as I can about the job…
It starts with this: put your desk in the corner, and every time you sit down there to write, remind yourself why it isn’t in the middle of the room. Life isn’t a support-system for art. It’s the other way around.
My desk isn’t handmade, and it isn’t beautiful – perhaps one day it will be, but remember, this needed to be fast and cheap – but I put on the Northern wall in front of a window, but perpendicular to it, so my back is to a wall, but some five feet from it, so I have room for a small credenza for storage. I’m also some six feet away from another wall, on which I have hung many photographs and long shelves, which contain a number of talismans and my working library.
To my right is a large north-facing window that looks out over the neighbor’s backyard. Cafe curtains ordered off Amazon block my view of his deck, but allow me to see the pine trees and the clouds, reminding me that I am part of the world, and not retreating from it. I hung a shelf just above the cafe curtains, on which half a dozen potted plants sit, serving as a sort of living portcullis between me and the world outside.
To my left as I sit is an open space large enough for me to stretch out on the floor and stare at the ceiling, as I do sometimes when my brain is just in too much tumult, and beyond that the door to the hallway. I leave that door open unless I am on a call, because I like seeing my wife walk by as she goes to check the mail, or that our two cats will sometimes walk in and sniff around to see what has changed in their absence. This too, is part of my world, and I am not retreating from it, either.
So, here I sit, between shelter and the wild, back safely protected from the unexpected, looked upon by generations of people who loved me and believed me capable of great things, and facing the hundreds of books that shaped me into being.
There is always the hope that adding another layer will make it cleaner, easier, smoother. That if only you did this other thing, it would all magically work. We want there to be a shortcut. There has to be a shortcut.
There is no shortcut.
The urge to complicate things is almost endless.
There is always the hope that adding another layer will make it cleaner, easier, smoother. That if only you did this other thing, it would all magically work. We want there to be a shortcut. There has to be a shortcut.
Sadly, I have not found this to be true. I wish it were true, dear reader. But sadly, as my father used to remind me often, if wishes were horses, then beggars would ride. Or, as my less poetic but much more pragmatic neighbor would later say: Wish in one hand and shit in the other, and see which one fills up the fastest.
I need a hack – a trick – a secret technique or program or app that, if added to my routine, will simplify my life.
But the hard reality is that adding things almost never simplifies them. Adding only increases the complexity.
These days I’m trying to reduce the complexities in my life. One website instead of three. Two email accounts instead of a separate email account for each project. Two checking accounts – one business, one personal – instead of various subaccounts and complicated transfer regimens. A few social media outlets – One primary, another secondary, and a third to experiment with – is plenty, and maybe even two too many.
As I grow older, I find myself craving simplicity. Maybe it’s that I am more aware of the finite number of hours remaining, the limited number of mornings left for me to sit in front of the computer and actually do the work. The siren call of a YouTuber – let’s call them “Bookpreneur” – and their tempting video “7 Things You Should Buy to Make Writing Easier” – complete with affiliate links in the description! – goes unviewed, and I know that all the killer apps in the world won’t help you write if you don’t put your ass in the chair, and your fingers on the keyboard.
A lot of complication is ultimately just an avoidance activity. It’s more fun to shop for gym shoes than it is to go to the gym, more fun to search for and set up productivity apps than it is to be productive, and more fun to shop for notebooks than it is to write in them.
Sometimes, you do everything right, and it still doesn’t work.
You get 7.5 hours of sleep.
You eat a high protein breakfast.
You drink your large cup of coffee.
And you sit at the desk, turn on the classical music channel on the stereo, fire up Microsoft Word, and you begin to write.
Well, that’s not quite true. You have prepared to begin to write. But there is the blank page. The blinking cursor.
But the problem is that not only is the page blank, so is your mind.
Well, maybe that’s not quite true. Your mind is never quite blank. As your therapist is fond of saying, it’s not that you have a deficiency of attention as much as you have a surplus of it. Your brain is overflowing with ideas, with stories, with plans, with things you want to try and to test out and it is all just swirling in there. How do you pick just one of them to focus on for the next two hours to write an 800-word essay?
Some days it’s easy. You have an idea or a story that has been in your mind for days or, sometimes, weeks. You can’t shake it. You just turn it over and over, looking at it this way and that way, so that when you do sit down in front of the blinking cursor, it really writes itself. You are just the medium, and you understand, briefly, why the authors of scripture thought they were inspired by God. It’s as if you are just the hands that type it, while the ideas come from elsewhere. Those are the best days.
Other days you agreed to write a particular thing – an article for a newspaper, or a review of a friend’s book, or something. And because this is for someone else, there is a deadline. You try to put it off, hoping clarity will come, hoping that it will rise through the swirl of ideas in your brain to the surface. Sometimes it does, but not on these days. No, on these days it is the day before it is due and you simply must write something, and so you apply ass to chair and you begin typing, and sometimes what you write is amazing, and sometimes it’s serviceable and sometimes legible is all you can hope for. But regardless, you did the thing, and after all, fed is best.
My life changed forever in late 2003 when I set up an account on Blogger and decided to share my thoughts in public. Writing in the public sphere – literally thinking out loud in front of the entire world – changed how I think. It turned my private musings into a conversation with the world.
I’ve now been writing publicly for more than 20 years. It’s so strange when I come across people who knew me before those days, who only knew the Hugh that was informed by people he had met in real life and the one-sided conversations he had with people who wrote on paper. It’s like they knew a beta version of me.
I have written publicly in many places – Facebook, Blogger, Tumblr, Twitter, and MySpace to name the main ones, as well as the sites I have owned, and the many sermons I have written that do not exist anywhere online, but that are still public conversations because I performed them live.
As I have closed sites and accounts, some of that stuff was orphaned. Whenever possible, I have archived it, so it still exists in a file on my hard drive, but not in public. It’s as if they are safe in a vault.
As I come across things I have written elsewhere, I’m going to open the vault and post them here – both to archive them publicly, but also to be able to enter into a conversation with them, to link to them in the future, and to be able to recognize the ways I have grown as a writer and a thinker.
It begins with the best of intentions. You see something – say, a hand-turned wooden bowl, and think how amazing it would be to be able to do that. Or maybe you want to make a coffee table for your living room, a toy truck for your kid, or a ukulele.
Anytime you start a new endeavor, there is a period when you are acquiring the tools – the saws, the chisels, the workbench. This can be a rabbit hole.
As an aside, it’s best to just buy the tools you need for the specific project you want to make, and then buy the tools you don’t have for the next project, and so on. Partly because good tools are expensive, but also because when you just start, you don’t know what you don’t know.
It’s been almost 20 years and I still haven’t used that 3/8-inch mortise chisel.
But the other rabbit hole is infrastructure. The almost irresistible urge to work on projects to make your shop better, rather than to work on the projects you wanted to build in the first place.
You want to make bowls from firewood, so you need a lathe and turning tools and, depending on your skill, a faceplate or a chuck. But then you will be tempted to build a stand for the lathe, and a place to hang your face shield, and a spotlight mount so you can see better, and then a rack to hold the firewood as it dries, and a case for your turning tools, and before you know it you have a year’s worth of projects behind you, but you still haven’t turned a single bowl yet.
This is not just a thing that happens in the workshop. It happens with my writing, too. I want to write, which means I need a computer and a word processor. But then I can tinker with my routine, and of course, I need a good chair to sit in, and a quiet place, so I need an office. In the office, I need to hang up the right art to inspire me, and find a good playlist, and then do I have good enough speakers to make the music sound right?
It’s often hard to know where the balance is, especially for people with brains like mine. I want to do a good job, and I only have so much time, and oh yes, I’m a chaos muppet with ADHD, so things that make it easier for me to focus (like a good chair and art and music) are things worth spending time on. But eventually, you have to write. It’s easy to slip into hyperfocus as you research the “best” text editor to write on, so you have minimal distractions, and three hours later you have written nothing but downloaded 3 free trials of writing software and looked at pictures of meerkats for the last 20 minutes after following an errant link.
All of that to say that right now, I’m spending a lot of time on infrastructure to support my writing. Outfitting the office. Installing speakers and trying out playlists. Building routines. Trying out schedules. Designing workflows.
And then there is the infrastructure to promote and publish my writing. Social media. Email service providers. Website design and hosting and email templates. WordPress updates and figuring out block editing (a WordPress feature from hell) and so on. It’s fun, and it’s necessary. But none of it is writing. It’s easy to work at this gig all day and still not have written an original thought down.
In my day job as a community organizer, we have a practice of writing a reflection each week to our supervisor. In it, we are encouraged to reflect on the week we had, and our plans for the upcoming week. To talk about what we are working on, what we are learning, and how we are thinking about our work.
It sounds sorta hokey, and I initially resisted it, but it works, in that it forces me to reflect and think strategically about what I’m doing. It moves me from inside the work to some point outside, to where I’m an observer of the ‘me’ that is doing the work.
My writing is a part-time job, funded by my Members who want me to put my work out in the world, and want it to be done so free of charge to everyone. That’s why there are no ads on my newsletter or on this website, no paywalls, nothing like that. Just me, writing, and anyone in the world with an internet connection or email can read it.
And so, as I was writing my morning pages this morning, I found myself wondering: If I think of my writing as a part-time job, what would it be like to write reflections on it? And would anyone find that interesting?
This made me remember that about this time last year, I said that I wanted to start showing my work – I wanted to do more of this work in public, so people could have a model for how to start their own blog, how to write their own newsletter, how to make their own cool thing.
So I’m going to start writing weekly notes every Friday. Some weeks will be more involved that others. Some weeks may be a little nerdy, as I explain the hours I spent looking for the right plug-in for a website, and other weeks may be introspective as I talk about the philosophy behind what I’m trying to do. And some weeks I may be so busy you just get bullet points. And because I try to be kind to myself, I don’t commit to doing this every week, but most weeks – just like I walk most days.
At least, I think I am. I’ve applied my ass to the chair, I’m hitting the keys.
Yep. I’m writing. It’s been a while, and I was uncertain of the symptoms.
I’ve been sick – really sick and then low-grade sick – since Valentine’s Day. After two years and 11 months of dodging it, COVID caught up with our household. Fortunately, we both had relatively mild cases by COVID standards.
But sickness never comes at a convenient time, and so I was in the midst of moving my desk from the front room, where I posted up “temporarily” during the 20200 lockdowns, to a dedicated office I built for myself in a former storeroom in our carport. Right now I am functionally in both places, and thriving in neither. But yesterday I drew a line in the sand and said that today was the day I sat down in the chaos and started writing again.
And here it is, 6:30 AM, and I’m sitting at my desk, surrounded by various bits of debris, discarded cardboard boxes, and office implements that I am unsure where they will belong. I have soft, classical music playing on the small cheap stereo I rescued from the thrift store, and the window is open, and I hear the birds waking up outside. My chickens are playing in their coop, not 20 feet away, and they are fussing at each other as the sun comes up.
And I’m writing.
I have a timer on my desk, just under the monitor of my computer, that shows how much longer I have left to go on this session – right now it’s 24 minutes, the remaining time in red, and as I type the red diminishes with the passage of time. This is sort of an ADHD hack, a way of making something that is invisible to my brain, like time, visible, and thus real.
These are the sort of things I need to do if I’m going to be writing.
The office isn’t complete yet. It’s a narrow room, a former storeroom at the back of our carport that I began turning into dedicated office space over the winter. It’s a bit under six feet wide and 17 feet long, with six feet of the eastern wall devoted to windows that look over our back yard. It’s honestly one of the better views in our house, yet another sign that when this house was built it was built from a plan in a catalog and was divorced from the actual site. There is much I love about this house, but it’s lack of views and vistas is not one of them.
It is not a house built for writing.
As I said, it’s a narrow room, this new office of mine, and it has 10 foot tall ceilings, which emphasizes the narrowness all the more. A friend last night said it looked like a shipping container. The door to the room is in the middle of the long wall without windows, and my desk is to the right as you walk in the door. Immediately in front of you is a waist-high counter with cabinets underneath, where I have hidden my printer on a pullout shelf.
If you turn left as you enter, you face a blank wall and a space 5 and a half feet wide by 5 feet deep, which will eventually hold a bookcase along one wall and a chair for reading, because reading is an essential thing if you intend to be writing.
And I’m writing. In the debris, in an unfinished room, amidst the chaos, but I’m writing.
I have watched the conversations around AI and writing unfold over the last few weeks. The writing community seems to be freaking out.
Well, that’s not wholly true. Hacks are freaking out. People who phone it in are freaking out. People who don’t know, or care to learn, how to write in a way that connects with and centers people are freaking out. As they should be.
People who have staked their livelihoods and given their creative energies to writing listicles that exist only for the reason of generating page views, writing press releases for events and products that exist only to separate money from the gullible, and who write for search engines and other machines should not be surprised when a machine can replace them.
A bot can duplicate syntax and vocabulary, but it cannot think of a person they love and write with them in mind. A bot cannot write from its own experience of love and loss. A bot cannot feel anger and want to share it; a bot cannot want anything, really.
It may be that an infinite number of monkeys, typing on an infinite number of typewriters, will eventually produce a text that is an exact copy of Hamlet. But none of those monkeys will understand revenge or love or betrayal. And critically, none of those monkeys will understand what they wrote, will be moved by the writing, or will look forward to sharing it with their reader.
