Hello Substack. Welcome to my personal blog, newsletter etc...

New to substack and have no idea what to write about.

I am new to substack but not new to blogging. Unfortunately every blogging platform I tried was already dead by the time I tried it out. Fortunately it seems that substack is still alive which is what made me want to post something, even though I have already said my bit and haven’t got much left to say now.

I think I have already done my blogging time. It’s over, so why am I here? Well I guess the urge to blog never quite goes away.

What are my interests? I would have said anime but it’s been almost a year since I last watched an anime episode and besides that I don’t see much of a point in writing about other people’s creations. Call me self-centred but I’d rather create a story of my own rather than be a cheerleader or a hater for another creator, in either case I’d be living a secondary existence if I did that.

It’s a strange thing that by turning into a socio-cultural commentator you have the freedom to make your own voice heard directly by an audience, but you also lose anything of your own contribute because you will be mostly providing commentary on other people’s work. What I mean is, have you ever read a critic you liked and wondered, isn’t it such a waste that he’s wasting his time complaining about what other people have created rather than creating his own story?

Well, in a way even the artist himself is wasting his life creating a fictional story for an audience (or his own amusement) rather than actually living his own life story. Many a artist have become distant from others as they are absorbed into their craft…

Well, in the end it’s all value judgements. I can’t tell you what’s the right path cause there isn’t any, there are tradeoffs and things which can’t be directly compared in value on an objective scale. I mean I wouldn’t say that an artist or a critic has wasted his life but you could say that.

Most of my blog posts are contradictory thoughts like that, so is it even worth sharing something that’s not conclusive? I am tired of hot takes too, I have my own views but anyone can have an opinion. It’s not worth much.

I am wondering whether I should publish my novels here on substack but most of the writers here are non-fiction writers who are probably more interested in reading commentary about the media they consume rather than the media itself!

Ah how vexing!

I guess I could write about my own life but who cares about it and besides it isn’t even anybody’s business. Oh substack users, please give me some ideas about what to write about. Just avoid current events, which are worthless and fleeting. Seriously when will you get tired of impotently reacting to every little thing like “what did Elon Musk or this micro web celebrity” tweet about. And avoid philosophical theory crafting which always sounds so grandiose, until you realise it’s just a word game, a hobby, not backed by any action. It’s not that I mind hobbies, but it’s the pretence at importance that I can’t stand.

See these days, everything I write turns into a screed about why writing is worthless, which is why I haven’t written much in a while. I guess there’s also the question of how much of what you have written you regret or can stand to read again or has any value to you after a certain period of time. Have you ever had the urge to delete everything and start anew? I have had it when looking at my blogs and thinking, well it’s just so many words, it’s too disordered and repetitive to be anything else.

I am wondering if the people who profit somehow by writing these inane things, ever wonder if what they have written has some kind of value or is just a confidence trick played on their audience, or is the money enough to convince them otherwise?

It doesn’t help that there’s just so much writing out there already. I could write a review for an anime but then there’s already tens if not hundreds of comments and reviews about it online already. What possibly can I hope to add that wasn’t already said except maybe make something up under the aegis of “analysis” and call it my own?

Then, ‘What should I write about?,’ easily turns into “Should I write about anything?”

What I mean is, everyone is scouring the internet to find ever more obscure things and document them, then you can be one among many digital archaeologists archiving things just for its own sake, because it is something obscure rather than because it is something good. Nevertheless nothing good will emerge if you don’t wade through everything that is not so. Well, then can’t we just create something new and let the past be?

Right now what I want to know the most is how to write a good story, and I am afraid that any amount of reviewing will not get me there. No, the only thing which can get me there is by writing and trying out different strategies. Perhaps that’s what I should write about, about writing novels, even if I don’t know much about writing novels.

I will scour the internet for novel writing strategies, try them out and share my results. That’s an idea for a newsletter. I guess we’ll see how that pans out.