How Substack stacks up, so far.

We’re six weeks in, and I’d describe this experiment in serial publishing as lively and quite fun. I’ve heard from old and new friends who tell me they’re enjoying the weekly reads. The list of subscribers, paid and unpaid, grows. Substack floods me with analytics, prompts, and email tips advising me how to further widen my reader base, most of which I ignore. The payment service Stripe transfers money from those of you kind enough to have become paying subscribers.

   There are occasional quirks in formatting the chapters I haven’t sorted out and simply trust readers to read through.

   Each Sunday morning I post in my pajamas (less, actually, because it’s the hot season here in Mexico), and for all I know you read it in yours.

   For those of you who are following THE COAST, I think I can say without giving much away that there were three key incitements to the novel. The first was a year-long series of email exchanges with an old acquaintance, a prominent artist, who revealed that he had worked as a US government spy and special op his entire adult life, beginning in college where they had first recruited him. The model for Russell was a woman photographer I was close to in youth who died young and shared many characteristics of her fictional counterpart. The novel’s structure was suggested by Thomas Bernhart’s indelible novel THE LOSER, in which the narrator, on the way to the funeral of his friend, a suicide, tells the story of their youth, their friendship, and what happened. 

Tomorrow, a new installment of THE COAST.