Well, here we are.
I’m excited to say that I’ll be doing my writing on Substack from now on, excluding a freelancing project or two and my nascent second book proposal. I’m excited for the opportunity and I’m very grateful to Substack for approaching me with this idea.
This blog will not be substantially different from my previous blogging endeavors. You can check the About page for a little more about what to expect here. In brief - left politics, media criticism, book reviews, complaining about superhero movies and their fans, and more. I am committing to four posts a week, three for everyone and one just for subscribers, but will likely post something more casual for subscribers most weeks as well. (At the advice of Substack, for the first two weeks everything will be free.) Speaking of which, please do subscribe so that I can do this professionally moving forward. It’s $5/month or $50/year.
Some will no doubt refer to my previous decision to step away from writing for money when I was still sorting out my life after my manic episode in 2017. The reason for writing professionally again is pretty simple: I was unemployed and out of options. I lost my CUNY job last June. I knew that was happening in January of 2020 so I started looking for new jobs then. In the year and change since I have applied for dozens and dozens of jobs, in all kinds of fields, at all types of pay levels, in many different geographical locations, and gotten nowhere. Just absolutely nowhere. I have been surviving on unemployment checks and the last bit of my book money. And then Substack came to me with a generous financial offer and I couldn’t pass it up. I do want to be upfront in saying that taking this opportunity was primarily a financial decision.
But that doesn’t mean I’m less than 100% enthusiastic about this project. On the contrary, I haven’t been this excited to write in a long time. I’m really feeling energized and have lots of ideas for cool stuff to do, for series of posts to develop. Coming in the first couple months is a series on what it means to be an atheist in 2021, a long look at the American socialist left as we approach the tenth anniversary of Occupy, and why the Star Wars films may represent one of the most bizarre stories ever told in popular media. I will also eventually be porting over all of the posts from fredrikdeboer.com so that everything is in one place, and will add sidebar content like my email, an RSS link, and more. There’s lots of cool stuff coming. So I hope you’ll read and, if you’re able, support this blog financially. Cheers.