I was faintly disturbed to discover last week that Neal Stephenson has a Substack. And has had it since 2024! Launched a few months before the novel POLOSTAN, it looks like
This is Neal Stephenson on email from, what, fifteen, twenty years ago?
Normally, my only interaction with readers is to go to a Fedex drop box every couple of years and throw in the manuscript of a completed novel. It seems reasonable enough to ask for a little bit more than that! After all, the time commitment is very small: a few minutes tapping out an e-mail message, or a day trip to a conference to speak.
For some authors, this works, but in my case, it doesn’t. There is little to nothing that I can offer readers above and beyond what appears in my published writings. It follows that I should devote all my efforts to writing more material for publication, rather than spending a few minutes here, a day there, answering e-mails or going to conferences.
Writing novels is hard, and requires vast, unbroken slabs of time. Four quiet hours is a resource that I can put to good use. Two slabs of time, each two hours long, might add up to the same four hours, but are not nearly as productive as an unbroken four. If I know that I am going to be interrupted, I can’t concentrate, and if I suspect that I might be interrupted, I can’t do anything at all. Likewise, several consecutive days with four-hour time-slabs in them give me a stretch of time in which I can write a decent book chapter, but the same number of hours spread out across a few weeks, with interruptions in between them, are nearly useless.
And from a dozen years back, on social media:
using social media has now become part of a novelist’s job. It’s one thing if you stay off social media altogether and cultivate an identity as a Luddite or recluse. But if you have a public Facebook page, Google+ identity, and Twitter feed, as I do, and you don’t actively use them to talk about and promote your work, it strikes people as being a little weird–it sends a mixed message.
The best solution I can come up with is this. I’m going to keep the social media presences I mentioned, and maybe sign up for more of them as they come along. With the help of some friends I’m rigging up a way to do automated cross-posting among those platforms. I realize that some people find this off-putting, but it’s the best way for me to make this work. Some of the posts are going to come directly from me, others from my publisher or from people I trust to post content that my social media followers will find interesting. And except in very rare cases I’m not going to read the comments. Because I am a sociomediapath.
That just feels like a really weird switch. That’s like Jonathan Franzen streaming on Twitch.
Yes, obviously I’ve added it to my RSS. It’s Neal Stephenson.
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