My First Year On Substack

A few thoughts on my experience

February 23^rd 2025 marked the anniversary of my first post on Substack.

For the first time in my life I can actually say “I’m a writer” with a straight face and not feel like a total imposter.

Don’t get me wrong, I have been writing for many years, but the writing was in service of songwriting or scriptwriting or some other creative pursuit. I always thought of real writers as “people who write books or articles for a living”. I do not fall into that category, I wrote a lot of stuff over the years - poems, lyrics, screenplays, short stories and prose - but I never actually published anything that wasn’t in the form of a song or movie.

I kept most of my writing to myself, especially the more personal stuff like poems and short stories and deep inner thoughts that stumbled out of my keyboard late at night.

When I joined Substack and hit ‘publish’ on that first article I was embarking on relatively new and uncertain territory.

I set a goal of making at least one post per week for a full year to start my Substack journey and build the habit of writing and publishing regularly. Quite honestly, I was approaching it like a habit building exercise for writing, I had no idea how many new and interesting people I would connect with along the way.

Over the past year I have published 58 posts - articles, prose, short fiction and some poetry - somewhere in the neighbourhood of 40,000 words, almost enough for a short novel, not bad for a weekly writing exercise.

I have made all of my posts for the first year free to everybody, I did not want to put anything behind a paywall as I was starting out - I really just wanted to have people read and engage with my posts.

Although I did not have a paywall, I still had a few friends sign up for a paid subscription to show support and I thank them, especially my sister Marietta who signed up for a generous and much appreciated “founding member” subscription.

I have to say, it was nice to have anyone at all feel that my writing was worth paying for.

I have no intentions at this point of implementing a paywall any time soon, I am writing in a very off-the-cuff way, posting when and what I feel like, so I do not feel a paywall is warranted at this juncture, but I do appreciate the ones who have subbed to show support.

I sincerely did not know what to expect when I started here and I was pleasantly surprised at how quickly I started to make new friends and find other like-minded and talented writers on the platform.

I have to give a big thanks to Christopher Cook at The Freedom Scale because he was the first one to ever like and restack one of my posts and that was a huge confidence booster for me. Then Demi Pietchell over at The Starfire Codes started liking and sharing posts followed by others like Michael Newberry , Karafree , Melissa and John Mistretta at Thinking Man, The Bone Writer , Jacqueline Rendell at Post Post Modern Jim in Alaska and Charlotte Pendragon . I am very grateful to them and all of the others who have liked and shared my writing over the past year.

As for my experience in the first year on Substack I have to say that it was surprisingly positive.

Substack is very different from other social media platforms in my opinion and I hope it can stay that way.

Yes, we all want Substack to grow, but perhaps not at the expense of sacrificing all of the things that make it unique. It is a great platform for writers and readers to express themselves and engage with others in polite and deep discourse and I would be disappointed if it degenerated into the same kind of cesspool that other social media platforms have become - I believe most of us came here to get away from that.

That’s about it, if you are reading this and you are new to Substack, I welcome you and encourage you to publish often and engage with others, people are pretty cool on here for the most part. Whatever you are into, you will find a tribe to hang out with.

Please feel free to subscribe, interesting stuff does spill out of my head on occasion.