Mailbag Grab Grab

What follows are specific questions that I have received in my inbox in the last three or four months, or composites of questions I regularly receive.

What don’t you do a podcast?

I absolutely would do a podcast, for money, if everything was already set up. Meaning, I’m not opposed to doing a podcast regularly if I’m getting paid. But

• I’m not convinced that just adding a podcast to this preexisting newsletter would drive enough new subscriptions to make it worthwhile

• It would feel lame to do a whole new Substack for a podcast and, again, it would likely not drive enough subscriptions to justify the time and effort

• Working with audio editing software and such is just exactly what I’m worst at, fiddly technical software stuff that will end up with me giving up, so if I was doing this independently I’d have to pay some kid and there you go, I’m paying out of pocket upfront

• As I’ve told a half-dozen people who have asked me to start a podcast over the years, while I’m sure that I could work with a cohost to build an audience (and thus revenue) over time, I just feel too damn old to do the whole “like share subscribe!” thing for years while it gradually becomes profitable; the fact that I now have no social media at all only exacerbates this reality

The reality is that, while people frequently compliment my many podcast appearances, I’m a writer; this is the skillset I’ve built over many years, this is what I’m personally proud of and invested in, this is the craft that I really care about, and this is where my comparative advantage lies. I don’t know how successful I’d be in the incredibly crowded marketplace of podcasting. That said, if a podcasting company emailed me and said “Hey, want to do a podcast? We’ll pay you X and handle the technical stuff and getting the sponsors, you just do the podcast and the ad reads and promote it on your newsletter,” I’d definitely say yes because I’d like the money. But I find that a veryunlikely turn of events.

Are you having a boy or a girl?

lol

We are having a boy! In April, God willing.

What’s up with [book project]?

My first novel, titled The Mind Reels, is nearing the production phase, meaning that all of the pre-production editing work is done, with only the page-proof edits to come. We’re still working on the cover. I expect that galleys will be produced in a few months and the book will start to get into the hands of influential literary world types soon. Publication date is October of 2025. I’m very excited and pretty nervous, given that fiction is not my usual jam. I am in the principle composition phase of my (currently untitled) third trade nonfiction book, for Simon & Schuster, which is also about mental illness. (There was no plan to have both a fiction and a nonfiction book on that topic at the same time; that was just how things broke in the complicated game of getting books sold.) That book is gonna be a long big-think omnibus book about insanity, psychiatric medicine, and mental health culture in the 21st century, which pulls together all of my many thoughts and complaints about how mental illness is treated, conceptualized, and discussed in modern society. I’d like to think of it as in the spirit of Siddhartha Mukherjee’s books, if I can pull that off, something that builds a world around the reader. That’s coming sometime in 2026. Finally, Harvard University Press has in hand the manuscript of my book titled Writing Itself, which is an academic book about the teaching of college writing and how the field most associated with it went so wrong. I believe that it’s heading to the peer review process, but I understand academic book publishing much less so I’m not sure. Publication date TBD. You can rest assured that I’ll keep you all up to date here.

By the way, my second book is now in paperback. If you never got a copy - and given that sales were tepid, though not terrible, many of you never did - now would be a good time? I feel like it was pretty damn prescient about the election earlier this month and the current turn in American politics in general. If I’m gonna keep writing books, I’m gonna have to move some copies.

Why didn’t you respond to my email?

I read every last one, and I am influenced by everything that I read in some way, though often in ways contrary to what the emailer wanted. So it wasn’t a waste of your time. However, you should understand that even as an only moderately-successful newsletter writer without a particularly large audience, I receive on the order of 50-100 emails a week that are in some sense substantive, argumentative, or which otherwise prompt real mental engagement. (That is, in contrast with questions just about logistics or subscriptions or similar.) It’s a lot. And, for one thing, the more of those I find time to answer, the more guilty I feel about the ones I don’t; I always think “Isn’t it unfair that I’m giving this emailer my time and not that other one?” More abstractly, I feel a strange sense of guilt and anxiety when being confronted with someone else’s attention, in an email context, in a way that’s not true when writing an essay or reading comments. But honestly, it’s just a matter of time and triage. I write a lot, and I’m trying to bank a lot of work right now before the baby comes. I do apologize for not getting back to you; rest assured that I feel guilty about it.

Can I change your mind about X?/have you considered Y?/debate me about huge philosophical/political question Z!

No, yes, and no. And it’s not personal, but - again, there’s only so much time in the day, and writing a 1500 word email about Marxist theory for an audience of one just isn’t an efficient use of my time. Which isn’t to say that I never answer such emails; sometimes I do. But whether I do or don’t is a product of circumstance, chance, and whim, so please don’t be offended if I don’t get back to you. I am doing my best.

You disparage AI, but you sometimes use AI-generated images for your newsletter art. Curious!

I don’t know that I disparage AI, exactly. I think that a) the hype machine about AI has produced one of the most wildly overheated media moments in my lifetime, which is really saying something, b) structurally both the AI companies and the media that covers them have enormous incentive to exaggerate both the current capabilities and future consequences of these technologies, and c) when you get down to the actually specific promises about what something like ChatGPT could potentially do, getting rid of the more absurd predictions, you’re left with interesting technologies that nonetheless are not going to change how we fundamentally live. They’re interesting, potentially (sigh) disruptive technologies, but they’re ordinary technologies, ones that leave us in the same mundane world we live in, and that’s not how they’re being talked about. Everybody seems desperate to believe that LLMs are going to break us out of the boredom of ordinary life and bring us into the Jetsons future, and they ain’t.

As for the hypocrisy question here - since I concede that these neural net-based systems have some useful applications, I don’t think it’s hypocritical to occasionally use an AI-generated image for my cover art, as I’ve done here. (AI image generation plus careful human selection of the best images often produces compelling visuals, a caveat that I think would have been useful here.) There is a labor question at hand, and I would prefer to pay a human illustrator for my images. The trouble is that, first, the illustrator I used to use stopped returning my emails, I suspect because someone convinced her I hold reactionary social views I don’t actually hold. More importantly, though, is that I have the same problem with illustrations that I had when I briefly employed a copy editor: it’s just such a bad fit with my process, which involves writing pieces at 4AM and publishing them at 8AM, the primacy of spontaneity in my work. I know some people think that this spontaneity results in my worst excesses, but it’s just an essential part of my process. And I’d have to give any illustrator at least a couple days to come up with art, which would require I know a couple days in advance what I’m going to publish, which just isn’t how I work. AI helps there. That said, I still do go looking on Getty Images first, where at least some actual human is presumably getting paid.

I think I found your Twitter/Instagram/online dating profile/Reddit account.

You did not. I do not have a secret Twitter account, no matter how desperately some weird obsessives insist that I do. I deleted the automated feed of this newsletter’s posts because as a non-Twitter Blue account that tweeted links, both crushed by Elon Musk’s algorithm, it was useless for its intended purpose. I have an Instagram account under my own name that I’m squatting on but I reserved it only because a publishing company asked me to for potential book publicity and it has no images. I promise I am not on online dating; it has happened a few times that scammers/spammers have used my pictures for a profile, which would be flattering except that they always use pictures from ten years ago when I was not on meds and thus not fat. I do make occasional Reddit burners to ask questions about home maintenance or video games or such, but that’s it. I also sometimes have unrealized ideas for trolling on Reddit; I had a plan to copy and paste posts verbatim from r/billsimmons to r/redscarepod and vice versa to see how they would react and if anyone would notice what I was doing, but my burners kept getting autobanned and it wasn’t worth the effort. I still have a Facebook account that’s been disabled for a year now, as I tell myself that someday I’ll go in and save all my pictures before deleting the account, but I’ll probably never get around to it. If someone is claiming to be me on WhatsApp or similar it’s a scam and you should block.

I don’t really consider GoodReads to be social media, but I have an account there and I love the network. I’m even almost charmed by the ancient interface.

Have you considered selling merch?

Not really. I don’t know what I would do and I would feel pretty silly. It would give my enemies something new to make fun of. But if you want to put my face on a t-shirt to wear around yourself, go for it.

Are you doing a book review contest again?

Not this year. I really appreciated the reviews that came out of the contest in past years, and I very much enjoy rewarding people who don’t write professionally with some attention and a little cash. But I was fundamentally dissatisfied with the process every time and I keep feeling that there’s some better way. I think I would want to put together a small (three-person, I think) panel of judges to rate the entries and come up with the winner and runners up. I still plan on doing something like that next year; I can only blame the wearying baby-making process of this year for not getting it together in 2024. I am working on it though.

Years ago Hamish McKenzie, who’s one of the Substack founders, told me that I had too much of a “Patreon effect” going on with my newsletter - that I was too invested in coming up with bonuses and extras for subscribers, rather than just producing valuable writing. I think he might have been right, in general, although I’m still consumed with guilt about people paying money for my work and I want to find more ways to make that money feel well-spent.

How about the subscriber writing roundups?

Not going anywhere! Bimonthly. I have finally finally finally gotten around to getting the posts scheduled automatically so I can’t forget. The next call for submissions will go out on December 11th. (The form won’t be live until then so please don’t try to submit now.)

Hey, your serialized novel disappeared!

That’s true. It got a pretty good response when I serialized The Red, the Brown, the Green the first time, but it was just living there inert on the website and I wasn’t happy with it. I’d like to revise and publish it, although probably not through a publisher, though who knows. It was a first attempt at fiction and a little rough, but I am quite fond of it and I think it could find an audience. I would want to fix a couple little elements of the plot, particularly the character Mac, who doesn’t pay off quite well enough in the original drafts. I think if I could get it together I could self-publish it as an ebook and make some money that way. The issues are, first, that as I said the illustrator (who produced absolutely lovely images for the book) hasn’t been in contact for years, and even if she was in contact, if I wanted to include the illustrations I would of course have to pay her, and that would be another complication. Second, I have investigated putting together an ebook and self-publishing it and like many things in the digital world it seems way more complicated and involved than it should be. I would also have to work it out with my agency about whether they would get a cut. That wouldn’t be a problem, and I’m guessing because they didn’t want to shop it initially (understandably) they wouldn’t be involved. It’s just another thing to think about.

All of that combines to form Another Thing I Will Probably Never Get Around To, but you never know.

Feel free to drop more questions of this nature (that is to say, questions that don’t require an essay for me to answer) in the comments, with the same caveats about there only being so many hours in the day.