How to Find a Writing Home

Or: How not to be a Literary Hobo

I’ve been places and seen some stuff. I’ve been writing online since around 2006 on blogspot, and some crazy marketing site where I provided a ton of content for someone else, and they shut it down. So I moved to WordPress in 2010, and learned it in depth. I mean, I devoured it. And I loved building websites, learning coding, design and all the other nerdery.

But the thing was I kept letting websites, URLs(which I had a lot of very valuable ones, lamentably), and my content of all things, lapse and *poof* - vanish. That was a TON of content.

And I was starting to write for other people, not myself. It wasn’ t THAT big of a deal if I let work go into the dumpster if it was just me writing. But when I started writing down lessons for my little daughter, that was different. And although I still have the drafts around, I let them languish, too. It’s been a rough past few years, which is another post.

But Substack hopefully will solve that. I was posting on Medium for a long time, which I loved and still love the writing experience. It’s like driving a Ferarri. Proving input was luxurious. But Jack Dorsey, the head nut there screwed up the output. And Substack came around. I was also on Ghost, which I liked but it was a lot of maintenance, and Wix and those types of platforms are too basic. I like to mod and control everything like in WP, if I’m going to go to that length.

Substack is growing, as do most publications with any integrity(sometimes not), over time. But I like the way I don’t have to spend the amount of time maintaining technical details, and tending to problems all the time. You should have been there in 2010. It was another time. I was running the whole circus it felt like. I learned tons, but I was all over the place with coding, fonts, security, updates, etc…

I Like how I can throw up a thought or a post when the mood strikes. That’s how I think and write. After a while here I’ll build up a pile of drafts just as I always did on WP. And try to hone and rework the better stuff. It all takes time.

But what I appreciate the most is the content being pretty well protected. I even was writing(and still do) on GitBook, which is an offshoot of GitHub, which I’m a HUGE fan of. I had to learn GitHub back when it was much more difficult too, believe me. Entire thick manuals on how to do simple things. Crazy.

So I have writings here and there like an artist has paper stashed away like a rat. I have those too. But I want them available for my daughter. So, for now, 15 years later, Substack it is!