Independent writing abounds

Yesterday, I spent some time swapping out (replacing) all the missing thumbnails on some Substack posts. You have a few options when setting the thumbnail during the process of creating a Substack post. One of them is to pick an image that was pre-loaded, and that option does appear to sometimes fail out later when that underlying content is replaced. In my case, I accidentally caused the thumbnails to disappear from 50+ posts that were generated over the last couple of years. Right now, the best solution to this problem is to simply upload an image to each post instead of clicking on anything preloaded. This prevents the situation and is easy enough to achieve. I’m also trying not to use my default stock images anymore for the posts. I’m just generating thumbnails with the title text embedded in the image, which is easy enough and does not take a lot of time to load. That is the plan, and I’m going to try to stick with it going forward to prevent the missing thumbnails situation. Alternatively, I’ll just upload the site default image each time to the post.

All right, the simple act of typing is in full swing during this July 4th morning writing adventure. I’m listening to some Sleep Token and just enjoying the start to the day. Sometimes just getting into the grove of writing is enough to get the process on the right track. You always need a little bit of time, energy, and motivation to kickstart the rest of the adventure. We reached the 25th post in this new daily series yesterday. I’m getting into a grove of trying to stay focused on a topic and being timely in my observations about things during a single writing session each day before some basic proofreading and then posting without spending a lot of time in review. That is the joyful part of daily writing. You work on the thing and then you release the thing to the world. In this case, instead of releasing it to the world of WordPress, I have now fully committed to the world of Substack. Big adventures await within this community, and it does seem that people are invested in the platform. Yesterday, I interacted with a few people in the hockey community at larger. I don’t even think they were Colorado Avalanche fans.

Today I’m pondering just how much independent writing abounds. We have a ton of platforms and methods for people to engage in very targeted writing efforts that are able to find an audience. Generally, I am concerned that the number of active readers is dropping below the more massive number of video consumers. If you were going to draw circles to represent the population of online video consumers vs. readers, then the two circles would overlap, but the online video circle would probably be 3-4 times the size of the smaller online reading circle. A lot of slop is getting generated and shared out from news organizations and other content farms that is just flooding the online landscape. That is why I think people who spend a ton of time reading are locking into platforms and other safe spaces where they think organic content is going to get surfaced and the reading experience will be good. That is one of the reasons that I am long Substack as a platform based on the growing ecosystem of organic writing and engagement.