I'm finally doing it

here goes nothing

After much hemming and a whole lot of hawing, I’ve decided to move from publishing this newsletter every Saturday at 8:08 am PT to whatever day I have something finished at 8:08 am PT. On the surface, this might not seem like a big deal. But to anyone who’s spent just over three years creating something week in and week out, you likely understand how tough this decision was. Let me explain.

When I started this thing, committing to a weekly cadence was important for me. It was a forcing function for getting my butt in my seat and my fingers on my keyboard each week. I had written online in the past, but very sporadically. I knew if I wanted to write to more than just my close family and friends, I’d have to crank out a lot of writing. No problem; I had lots of stories to tell and I was itching to level up as a writer.

My audience grew steadily, with some nice fortuitous bumps when I’d get mentioned in another post here and there. Substack’s recommendation feature helped. But I believe showing up with a (mostly) well-written piece consistently each week was the largest contributor to my audience growth.

As of this writing, there are 2,511 of you here. That’s a lot of people. Sure, I can point to other Substack writers who have been writing for about the same amount of time and have nearly double the amount of subscribers as me. But whatevs. It feels like there are enough of you to not feel the need to hop on the content treadmill each week.

Over the past few months, I’ve felt the urge to slow that treadmill down. I don’t want to stop it completely. Instead, I want to give myself some more time and space to write pieces where I can go deeper and level up my craft (and maybe get a bit of editing help before hitting the publish button).

As much as I wish I were one of those writers who could crank out thousands of words per day, I’m just not that guy. I once met a Substack writer who had posts scheduled like three months out and I almost did a spit-take onto my laptop. How is that even possible?!?!

I’m the type of writer who scrambles each week to finish up a piece late the night before my publishing day and then wakes up in the morning and makes some edits on his iPhone before it goes live.

And yet. Therein lies my worry about making the switch to forgo publishing at a specific day and time each week. Does that mean I won’t publish anything for months on end? It’s totally possible! I just don’t know. And while that’s a little scary to admit, what I do know is that I will be hosting at least two weekly writing sessions as part of my work with Foster, so it’s not like I won’t be writing at all. I swear I have many drafts already in progress. I’m not a deadbeat writer! (This is mostly included for the two people who generously paid for a subscription in the past couple of weeks. Thank you!!!)

I also have some other larger writing projects that have been stagnant for too long. I’ve found it difficult to keep them moving along when what I’m going to write for my weekly newsletter is usually taking up too much of my creative brain space. Not to mention all the other important priorities I have in my life like family, work, exercise, etc.

I know I didn’t have to write up this whole explanation about the switch—I could’ve made the change and, as I’ve learned, most of you probably wouldn’t have noticed anyway. But I wanted to let you know, and I can do whatever I want, so I did.

See you at 8:08 am PT on some day in the future!

In the meantime, I’m looking for some more advice column questions since it’s been too long since I’ve tackled one. You can ask me an anonymous question using this form or email me at lyle@substack.com.

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