The aim of Myth, Man, Machine (MMM) is to provide a space for multidirectional interaction between between myself and whichever section of the world of writers and readers, delivered by some combination of algorithms and free will, finds its way to me.
Of the nodes through which people can interact with the online world, Substack seems to allow for the most nuanced transmission of thought. So MMM will ideally be a thoughtful place where people can reach me, and through which I can reach people who are interested in similar things (or who are interested in very different things but would still like to discuss an area of overlap or contradiction). My hope is that people who find writing of mine elsewhere, or find me in real life, or have some other reason to Google me, will come across MMM and be able to get a better sense of who I am and my interests.
It is a place where I will be able to talk about professional updates, where I can provide links to work I’ve published or work I have read and really dug. But I’m not doing this to “grow an audience” in any really committed sense; it’s clear that, as worthy of a goal as that is for an aspiring writer, it involves thinking like a marketer instead of like a writer. That would take energy and focus I will need to spend on being a first-time parent and on my stories, novel, and traditionally published nonfiction. I don’t anticipate ever charging for MMM, and if I do, it will have become something far bigger and more involved.
Accordingly, MMM will be a little less intentional, a little more intuitive, a little raw. It will strive to contain far more questions than purported answers, to start conversations rather than attempt to end them.1 I do have some strong opinions, and they may occasionally leak in, but I am going to try and reserve those for pieces that I will give far greater per-word attention to. Ideally, this Substack will be a place for me to get rather experimental from time to time with my nonfiction, where I need not exert the kind of discipline required for academic writing (and I do mean kind, not amount). Perhaps it can be something of a lab or testing ground for eventual narrative (non)fiction forms.
I also hope MMM helps me become a better reader. For me, the act of writing about what I’ve read seems to call forth, almost magically, new developments in thought. Whether I am debating the value of an op-ed with a friend, writing a critical essay about a novel, or incorporating research into my fiction, having written about something I’ve read almost always enhances my understanding of it. So I hope to do some close readings of especially exciting or insightful stories and essays, maybe even a novel. First up, I think I will write about at least one story from Italo Calvino’s Cosmicomics, which is the kind of book whose magic I absorb in wonderment before I can really form any coherent thoughts on it even though during the absorption process I am aware of a deep intellectual richness underlying the text.
My default reaction to the Notes part of Substack is skepticism, and my reticence to dive into Notes is only increased when I see “ReStacks” that say things like, “This is the most important thing you will read today. Maybe in your life,” etc., but the existence of annoyances in a community does not make the community bad, and Substack is clearly an online community based around writing…so this is a long way of saying that, when I say something in Notes, and another person finds it interesting or enraging, and they click on my profile to see what I am interested in and enraged by, I want them to see something that answers their questions. And then maybe they’ll see I write fiction and nonfiction, and try to find that.
It really doesn’t feel all that natural to bring myself deeper into any kind of digital world, but the reality is that most business is done digitally, and now that I’ve started to get a few acceptances for stories, the chance that I might be one of the very lucky few who are able to have a writing career in the twenty-first century seems just a little better. Meeting readers and writers via Substack and developing a following seem to be ways to help that happen. So while there is some reluctance to increase my involvement in the digital realm, even on a place like Substack, the platform definitely has something to offer writers. Through Myth, Man, Machine, I may be able to offer something to readers as well.
In my own writing practice, I have noticed that there are only two paths I can take to producing a passionate argument: 1) I can take shortcuts, make broad claims, and gesture towards, rather than explicitly state, what I mean to say, or 2) I can build and refine an argument over weeks/months of research and reading and many different revisions until I have produced something that is strong in both the sense that I feel passionate (strongly) about it and that it is sound. I want to avoid writing the former, and the publishing schedule of a Substack is incongruous with the latter.
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