With all the noise of Substack and Twitter wars, and Substack asking me, an unpaid user of the platform, for money, I have began thinking of migrating this newsletter to a new platform. I’ll let you all know and make the process easy enough when the time comes.
(Fellow Substackers out there looking to leave this increasingly troublesome site, Beehiiv might be a good destination).
In the meantime, I want to re-purpose this newsletter, a bit. It’s been three months since I re-visioned my memoir/medical investigation book into a novel. I have two chapters to show for it. That’s barely a breeze. I need a gale force. I want to have a rough draft of the novel before the summer is over. So, I need to get tapping.
I am going to use this newsletter to document that journey. I am going to write every week, track my word counts, and my struggles and triumphs in this newsletter. So, if you want a behind-the-scenes reading of how I create a novel, this is worth your time.
But there are other reasons to read, too:
I will often share something I come across in research or in the experience of writing. For readers who like medical essays, you are in luck. Much of my research will dive into medical, science, and bodily themes. There’s also going to be early aughts punk and indie music in this, South America, Garth Brooks, Wyoming sheep, and oil rigs, too. I’ll have mini essays on these subject for the weeks to come. Best writing in this corner of the internet.
I’ll also share a writing tip/resource or aid that I picked up from the internet each week. So, any other writers or people who need to use words for a living, this will also be a good resource for you.
And lastly, I’ll share my talking points. Whether a book, or some other piece of media, I’ll share one engaging point about that piece of media, and write what I would talk about if I could talk about it.
This week’s word count is 1084. It got made through three early mornings. After coffee brewed, I set a timer for 30 minutes and just wrote in my notebook. I had one scene in mind and started there. I kept building and building. After the timer went off, I put it down, stretched, and went to my regular job in the back room office. I typed up the writing this weekend. Now I have a rough draft chapter. I am going to try this process again this coming week and see what I get.
Tip for growing an email list for businesses and media outlets. In a recent newsletter, Indie Hackers sent out helpful ideas for how to grow your email lists. Click here. It’s totally written in marketing language, so if you speak marketing and email karate moves, then this is the set of tips for you.
My talking points on a recent read: Birnam Wood loops and twists the readers with a nest of ideologies inside a compelling plot and woozily motivated characters. In the novel, I felt like it covered:
Hyper capitalism's ruthless out growth and foam-mouthed pursuit of isolation.
A guerrilla gardening collective with socialist (and mild anarchist) proclivities.
The wild hunger for fame and relevance while shaking the golden gates of power systems.
And the showy display of being propped up by the government (and powerful business partners) through saving an endangered parakeet.
This book has eco-conscious twenty-somethings, uncertain romance, the limits and evolutional patterns of friendship, a Peter Thiel-like billionaire, poisoned land from an accident, surveillance drones, and, I'd argue, horror. All of that stuffed in the pursuit of ambition.
If I had one thing to talk about with others who read this book, I would talk about the ambition of growth. Does this story argue against growth? For environmentalists and climate activists, one argument is to stop growth. Stop the expansion and use of resources that are trapping us in our own planetary prison. You could say the same for the characters in this book. Expansion, scale, growth will build a prison, a trap. This book might be for those who are on the side of planet earth. But it also adds caution: even those with the intention of saving the planet and re-tooling our systems: ambition can still be a heavy mountain to avoid climbing.
Who is right in this novel? Who is wrong? Does the sacred (what the characters worship) bring on their own destruction? Worshiping success — the valleys and mountains we pursue — can microwave the opportunities and pivots right in front of us. That's the case for these characters, at least. I’d love to talk about that: the danger of ambition. How do we live with ambition? It builds things, gets things done, but this book seems to argue that there is a danger lurking within it, too.
One character, in particular, I wanted to shake out of his pursuit of a journalist scoop and go back to the women he kissed and connected with the night before he plunged into the fictional Korowai National Park. Rather than roiling in a new found relationship, he pursued his ambition and what he held sacred — fame and journalistic (partially imagined) uncovering of corruptness. I spent a lot of time wondering what would have happened if he went back to the woman who kissed him. What if he let go of his ambition? Or redirected it?
The fictional New Zealand town Throndike, Korowai Pass, and Korowai National Park, where the bulk of this novel takes place, prove that the forest of where our ambition throbs, does indeed move and take us over. Unlike Macbeth's wishes (from where the title of this novel is borrowed from), the forest will move and consume those who hunger to be a king or queen or ruler of their idealogical corner.
ENDIT.