Sundman figures it out! is 1 year old

A short look back and a shorter look ahead.

Loomings

I published my first post, Figuring it out, on January 17, 2023. It begins like this:

There’s a scene about 1/3 of the way through The Bourne Identity in which Marie, a woman of about 30 with no job, no money, no permanent abode and a beat-up, tiny old car decides to cast her lot with ‘Jason Bourne,’ a mysterious guy she’s known for about one day, who has no memory, a half-dozen passports from different countries in different names and a giant pile of cash, and whom she has already seen fight off a heavily armed and clearly expertly-trained would-be assassin while armed only with a ballpoint pen.

Jason and Marie figuring it out

They’re in Paris. Jason is behind the wheel of Marie’s beat-up car, parked on a cobbled city street. Jason and Marie met yesterday in Zurich, after Bourne outfought, outran and outsmarted an entire security detail of Marines at the U.S embassy and she agreed to help him get away, driving him here in exchange for twenty thousand dollars. It’s now dawning on her that she has gotten herself mixed up in something very big and extremely dangerous.

Jason and Marie seem to have caught the attention of a man in a police car, and now a gendarme is approaching. Bourne starts the car. He’s trying to convince Marie to get out of the car and turn herself in to the police before she gets in any deeper. She takes a swig from the flask of liquor that she’s just purchased. She doesn’t move to get out of the car. Another police car arrives. Now several gendarmes are approaching. ‘Last chance, Marie,” Jason says. She doesn’t budge. ‘Listen,’ he says. ‘I don’t know who I am. I don’t know what’s going on. People are trying to kill me. I’ve got to figure it out.’ The police are coming ever faster, running towards them.

‘Well,’ Marie says, looking steadily at him, ‘figure it out.’ She fastens her seat belt.

I went on to say how I had sometimes felt like Jason Bourne, not in the sense of being an amnesiac highly skilled assassin with a pantload of money, a handful of passports in various names and a bunch of other trained assassins trying to kill me, but, “in the sense of being threatened by incomprehensible forces from all directions, being in real danger, being aware that other people are counting on me to figure out what is going on and get us to safety — and all the while not really knowing if I am who I thought I was.”

I then described a few such situations that I had experienced, and added, “I expect you’ve had your share of troubles too, dear reader.”

The rest of that first post talked about where Sundman figures it out! might go in the coming year, and my hopes and plans for my novelistic career.

Figuring it out was mailed to the 853 subscribers whose addresses I had moved over from my dormant Technopotheosis newsletter. As of January 22, 2024, there are 1,671 subscribers to Sundman figures it out!; it has taken me one year to double the number of subscribers. Of those 1,671 subscribers, 69 have paid subscriptions. You are reading my 47th substack post. Forty-three of the preceding 46 have been essays and 3 have been posts of the ‘housekeeping’ variety.

My second post, The dark side of the hut, 50 years later, tells of a truly extraordinary experience I had in the most remote place I’ve ever been — a small, impermanent village near the Sahara desert — during a time of famine, pestilence and drought.

It is the most-read of any of my essays, with more than three times the number of views as my typical post.

In my third post, Easy Was — subtitled Apologia pro substack sua — I elaborated a bit more on what I was hoping to achieve with this thing, and the technique I was attempting to employ to do that. For whatever reason I included of this really cool photograph of a derelict laundromat that I discovered on Twitter.

I really put my heart into my fourth essay, “One Crowded Hour” on the road to Telluride, which was about my dream-like memory of a quasi-magical 2007 road trip from Colorado Springs to Telluride with my brother Paul, his wife Jennifer and their two young children when Paul was dying of ALS and Jennifer was in life-and-death battle with Leukemia. It remains my least-read story.

Subsequent essays concerned how I stumbled into a career in the computer/software industry and spent 15 or so years ping-ponging between Massachusetts & San Francisco/Silicon Valley; my country-boy/city-kid youth — growing up on a small farm, and then going to high school in New York City; Catholicism; sex; literature; home repair; adventures in my 23 years as a self-publishing novelist; New Age metaphysical woo-woo; how I accidentally became a cyber/biopunk novelist; theories of time and memory; the murder of my best boyhood friend, various jobs including truck driving, construction, demolition, and crawling on my belly like a reptile under Carly Simon’s house, getting knifed, and so on. The the epic prolegomenon A Scared Firefighter Up In the Bucket (part one, part two, part three) started out ostensibly being about the only time I ever got scared during my ten year firefighting career but kind of mutated into a bunch of digressions on the philosophy of mind, the history of AI chatbots, recollections of a dinner party featuring Douglas Hofstadter and Daniel Dennett, and the wonders of the seasonal garden my wife creates anew each year on our back porch — a bucolic bower that has occasioned both perfect serenity and sheer existential terror.

My most recent post, Technopotheosis reconsidered, included a mini-essay on the nature of essays and invited readers to comment & give me advice on where to steer this barge.

Impressions

1. I spent a LOT of time writing these essays. More than you’d guess. In fact you’d be appalled. I’m getting better at it, but I really need to get faster, faster. I’ve been a professional writer of one kind or another pretty much since 1980. I really should be better at it. Sundman figures it out! has taken significant time away from my other Famous Author(TM) endeavors — such as writing and publishing novels.

2. I had completely unrealistic expectations about how fast my subscriber base would grow. I had hoped to have between 5k and 10K subscribers before launching my forthcoming novel Mountain of Devils. In the words of Cher (in Clueless):
   As if.

3. I’ve been disappointed that so many subscribers skipped over posts like “One Crowded Hour” and Sundman’s Awful Mistake (part one, part two, part three). But what did I expect? Neither the titles, nor the subtitles, nor the first paragraphs of most of my essays give any indication of what they’re about about or why you want to read them. This is something else I need to get better at.

4. Most of my new subscribers came from book giveaways or from mentions on sites like Janefriedman.com or Boing Boing. Depressingly few new readers came from readers sharing my posts with your friends or helping me spread the word. Only a tiny number of new subscribers have come via Substack. I really figured that word of mouth would play a much bigger role than it has in spreading the word.

5. I also thought that more people upon discovering this thing would go back and explore earlier essays. A few of you have — I love you Sundman figures it out! completists! — but not many.

6. Despite these frustrations and detours, in general I’m happy with the essays and I believe that this thing will eventually play a key role in introducing my work to a much wider audience.

Intermezzo

In my most recent essay, Technopotheosis reconsidered, I included a description of the discursive, all-over-the-place style of the autobiographical essays of Michel de Montaigne, which I claimed was the ideal I was striving to emulate in my own all-over-the-place, squirrel-brain disquisitions. I contrasted the Montaigne essay style with a more on-point, succinct, topical ‘newslettery’ style towards which some of my readers, including my friend Mark Gibbs, were pushing me, and invited readers to comment on whether I should steer future essays in a more ‘Gibbsian” direction or stick with my typical Montaigne/squirrel-brain approach.

Technopotheosis reconsidered elicited more comments than any of my other posts, with all but two commenters encouraging me to stick with my squirrel-brain style.

My good friend Ande, both in his public comment and in his more emphatic private notes, was quite firmly in agreement with Mr. Gibbs.

While I and most commenters saw between Camp Gibbs and Camp Montaigne a sharp dichotomy, Madame Ximon’s insightful comment offered a synthesis:

Montaigne/squirrel-brain is my instinctive vote. Pithy has its place, but does it actually reside anywhere in your brain, or will you need to become someone you're not in order to consistently truncate your thoughts in that manner? Also, if the point is to sell books, mere bullet points won't do that. Only emotional engagement will.

Now, from a copywriting standpoint, grabbing people by the feels in as few words as possible is the goal, but with it comes the danger of devolving into mere manipulation, rather than actual connection. And I promise you that the younger generations upon whom the continued relevance of your work and the aforementioned book sales will likely depend will smell a rat if you choose manipulation over connection.

That said, "analyzing, and predicting the dark, dank, shiny, terrifying, unpredictable unknown that is our future" is a potent means of cultivating emotional engagement. So, Gibbs ain't entirely wrong. Which suggests that the key is for you to do that in the least exhausting way possible, for both yourself and your readers. And I suspect that requires some editing, but also some squirrels. ;)

Looking ahead

One year into this project I think I need to put a little more thought into to what I’m actually trying to accomplish. Am I (A) trying to grow the audience for my books so I can actually make some money, or (B) writing an autobiography, Montaigne-style, in the form of squirrel-brain essays? And if (B), then why, exactly, am I spending so much time doing that?

When you put it that way, clearly the answer must be (A): I am trying to grow the audience for my books so that I can actually make some money. I am trying to grow my audience at a much faster clip than 800 new subscribers/year.

OK, so how does one do that? Some marketing experts, so-called, advise that newsletters should be sharp, focused, directed. Pithy.

But Mme Ximon asks whether a ‘pithy’ style of newsletter writing ‘actually resides anywhere in [my] brain,’ and I think the answer to that question is No, it does not. She goes on to say, quite correctly, that “only emotional engagement” will help me achieve my goal of finding more readers with who are likely to read, enjoy, and purchase my books — and recommend them to their friends. She therefore suggests that the ‘key’ for me would be to take Mark Gibb’s suggestion to focus on “analyzing, and predicting the dark, dank, shiny, terrifying, unpredictable unknown that is our future" and write essays “in the least exhausting way possible, for both [my]self and [my] readers.”

And so, good friends, that is what I shall endeavor to do.

Exactly how am I going to do that? I don’t rightly know. I’m going to put that question in the cogitator for a few days and then check to see if any answers have materialized.

As always, your comments and suggestions are most welcome.

Fred willing, a year from now I’ll do another one of these retrospective essays to say how well I’ve done.

Cheerio!