A Thank You To My Readers
And a humble request
When I returned from Mars to awaken in the Valley of Headless Men and begin this crusade against the insipid spirits of ugliness and boredom that have entranced this blue orb with their enervating webs of ennui, I never expected that my shitposts would resonate with people to the degree that they have. My working assumption was that I’d find myself shouting into the void.
And yet, as described in that post, it took about three months to grow the subscriber list to 1000 people. This is in no small part because of Substack’s recommend feature, and I owe a debt of gratitude to everyone who’s recommended Postcards From Barsoom to their readers. I especially want to give a shout out toChris Bray, who recommended me early on and thereby provided a big boost which I haven’t even come close to paying back. If you aren’t already subscribed to Chris I don’t even know what to tell you, except that you’re missing out on one of the wittiest prose stylists on this platform if not on the internet. He’s a whale for a reason. Chris is also a military historian and a political journalist, whose insights into the minds (which is to do some violence to the term minds) of those vicious, vapid creatures we call politicians and bureaucrats are both incisive and savage.
Still more unexpected and delightful has been the quality of the people that populate the comments section. The high-level discussions that take place there are a regular joy for their insight and verbal creativity. Many of you have become my good friends and brothers in arms in this struggle for the future’s minds. Some commenters, such as Mark Bisone and Tilting at Windmills: Humor Writing by Daniel D have since started their own excellent Substacks which are both very much worth subscribing to. I like to think that I had some small part in inspiring them, and I hope many more of you will follow their examples in the future and start writing in earnest. Any one of us is just a lone voice trying to drown out the hurricane; enough of us together and we become the hurricane.
Last September, I threw out a howl of frustration at having to abandon a perfectly comfortable life and most of my material possessions. In response to that, many people took to the comments to ask why I hadn’t turned on payments, presumably because they wanted to give me money. I could have at the time but I didn’t want to do so on such a depressing note. It felt vaguely pathetic.
As it turned out, not turning on payments was probably a good call. Shortly after I wrote Lay Down and Let It Rot, I got bushwhacked by the ‘rona (ironically, immediately after a two-week quarantine period), which left me stumbling about in a brainfugg for a couple weeks. I tried writing a couple of posts, both of which I hated, tried writing a couple more which I abandoned in disgust, and then I disappeared for a few months.
A lot of you wondered what happened to me over that period. Kidnapped by the Canadian secret police and spirited away to a concentration camp on Baffin Island? Hit by a tractor trailer driven by untrained subcontinental truckers? Teleported back to my adopted homeworld?
Nothing so cinematic, alas.
At first it was simply that I got lost in a novel I decided to write. The elevator pitch is that it’s the story of a hyperhuman cyborg who must journey into an apocalyptic wyrd storm, and the wicked witch who falls in love with him. Over the month of October I entered a divine frenzy and sequestered myself as I banged out about 100,000 words worth of plot outline and first and second drafts, getting several chapters into the project before the manic phase (This is the best idea I’ve ever had!) inevitably gave way to the depressive phase (This is shit, it’s all shit, what was I thinking?) I’m pretty sure every writer has this relationship with the stories they try to compose. At any rate, I’ve back-burnered that project for the last couple of months, but fully intend to return to it – possibly to serialize here, possibly sitting on it until it’s ready to publish. Stay tuned.
After disappearing into my own imagination for a month I lost someone very dear to me. I won’t go into details, save to say that it wasn’t unexpected, and in the end, I got to see her one last time.
Over the last few difficult monthsRolo SlavskiyandJay Rollinshave both been absolute bros. I also owe Rollo a bunch of subs, so if some of you subscribe to the Slavland Chronicles it would help me mog him. He’s got a book, by the way, and Not A Prison But a Fortress looks pretty interesting:
In between their heroic efforts to keep me sane, Rolo and Jay have also been mercilessly pestering me. Turn on payments, you lazy idiot. What are you even doing? Do you want to be poor? People want to give you money. Why won’t you let people give you money? That kind of thing. It was awful.
So yesterday a couple things happened.
First, I woke up to find that some of my readers had pledged healthy sums as inducements to start accepting healthy sums from others. I won’t name names because no one likes the blame game, but you know who you are, and you know what you’ve done.
The second thing was that Postcards From Barsoom passed the nice round number of 2500 subscribers.
In light of that, I’ve decided to stop being unnecessarily difficult and make it possible for you to give me money.
Some of you are probably wondering what this will mean going forward. That’s a great question, because I’m not entirely sure myself. Maybe you hadn’t noticed, but I’m flying this X-wing more or less by the seat of my pants. In contrast to most blogs on this site Postcards From Barsoom doesn’t even have a theme, really, beyond ‘Stuff that weird fucker John Carter feels like writing about as he’s scratching his nutsack in the shower’. Although to be honest, that’s quite intentional. Personally, I get bored reading about the same thing all the time, and I get even more bored trying to write about the same thing every damn day. That’s one reason, beyond all the DIE nonsense and mRNA mandates and all the rest, that academia has started to pall for me: the way the relentless logic of academic research channels the brains it commandeers into narrow little capillaries of high-throughput knowledge production that no one cares about, including most of the researchers themselves if they’re being perfectly honest, just feels so goddamn limiting. In any case, I’m betting that if I get bored endlessly circling the same tired topics, so do you.
All of which is to say that I’m reluctant to force myself into some sort of plan.
I hate plans.
At this point I don’t know if I’ll start putting stuff behind a paywall or not. On the one hand, I don’t really want to do that, because while I like being able to afford whiskey, I also want to maximize my reach.
On the other hand, I also want to provide some sort of value-added for those readers who buy me a whiskey in exchange for my schizoid ramblings. I’m still working this out: maybe I’ll post chapters of creative writing projects behind the paywall; maybe I’ll do a regular weekly link roundup giving my commentary on what I considered the most interesting or insightful recent articles; maybe I’ll start a subversive clandestine legion of epistemological adepts on Slack; maybe I’ll do a podcast. Maybe I’ll do all of those. We’ll see.
One thing I want to make absolutely clear, however, is that I won’t be limiting the comments to paying subscribers only. I selfishly enjoy the comments far too much to do that. The comments section is also a platform for writers to promote their work to readers. Hell, that’s how I got my first readers. And I want our thing here to grow. That doesn’t happen by slamming the doors shut, so those doors will stay wide open (except on the rare posts that go behind the paywall, if and when I choose to do that).
So, once again, thank you to everyone who’s helped this blog grow, both the absolute bros who have recommended and promoted it, to the commenters who keep the discussion lively, entertaining, and educational, and to the many subscribers whose attention makes this all worthwhile.
With all that said, Postcards From Barsoom is now open for actual business.
Remember that you can get Telegrams From Barsoom, and you can also follow my low-effort shitposts on Twitter @martianjohn1
Just now became a paid subscriber, and would have gladly done it earlier had it been possible. You certainly deserve to receive compensation for your work and I'm certainly glad to pay for the privilege of reading your erudite, interesting and often novel opinions and ideas on an eclectic variety of subjects.
And I echo your appreciation for your comment section - bright, deep, insightful commentary and even occasional pushback in response to your essays, articles and vignettes. I'm too modest to include myself in this august group, but there's no doubt about the fact that my understanding of people, culture and the world is usefully broadened from the association. Thank you!
I subscribe to quite a few stacks and yours is my favorite by far. You are remarkably talented, thank you!