If Groundhog Day isn’t a great day to start over, I don’t know what is.

A groundhog asks whether it woke up in 2009 because I'm blogging again.
How does something so cute and furry get internet poisoning?

If you’re getting this, you can reasonably conclude that I left That Controversial Platform. Basically… I went old school. I’m “blogging” again, but you’re still getting my posts in your email through the magic of automation. Substack, for all intents and purposes, is a blogging platform with a sophisticated RSS feed for optional paid posts. So I thought, “Hey, why don’t I just use something that emails blog posts like an automated RSS feed?” And here we are.

Is this a step backward? I don’t know, and I don’t really care. Honestly, I want to stop talking about it and get back to the Very Important Dung Posting I do best.

Everything we do on the internet is ephemeral. Whatever service you use to communicate online will eventually go the way of MySpace. Even Facebook will be irrelevant one day. By choosing to write on my own website, I’m acknowledging that all of this work will disappear the second I stop paying my web host. And I’m okay with that. I’ve been writing on the web since 1995, and none of my writing before 2006 is saved anywhere, even in my own files. I had a catastrophic data loss that year, in which I lost everything I’d written in the previous decade. (Well, I lost everything that wasn’t printed out on paper.) I lost short stories, novel attempts, scripts, and reams of poetry. Just poof! Gone.

I have redundant backups now (you’d better believe it), but after the initial grief, I realized I didn’t value most of what I’d lost. I wish I had been able to save my scripts, but most of the writing that disappeared was awful. I was just practicing. It was okay to accept that all that writing was gone because it had served its purpose. I feel the same way about leaving Substack behind. It was a valuable experience, and I wrote a few posts I’m proud of, but I’d rather not hang out at a Nazi bar.

I walked away from TinyLetter to go to Substack in the first place. Nothing online is permanent. I mean, nothing is permanent, full stop — but especially material on the internet. My newsletters are just practice; they’re part of my literal writing practice. As a long-form fiction writer, I have no realistic way to “show my work.” Nobody wants to see my word salad early drafts. Basically, I write fiction that you cannot see until it’s edited and ready to be read. That doesn’t happen overnight. Sometimes, it takes years. Many first novels take a decade! Until I have a novel ready for public consumption, that work will remain an invisible part of my online writing life.

But I also enjoy writing the material I was posting on Bombastic Frippery, and not just as a way to “build author platform” or whatever it’s called in marketing these days. I genuinely enjoy writing about sustainable fashion issues and random media. I like having a home for my ”what I did on my imaginary, elder-god-riddled summer vacation” and “whoops, I accidentally purchased a demonic cleaning product” pieces. I didn’t want to disappear altogether.

So, this is my stopgap solution. For now, posting on my own website will work just fine.

Thank you for reading and making the transition to this new setup. (No hard feelings if you don’t want to continue reading my work away from Substack. You can always unsubscribe. Thanks for reading in the past, though!)

Anyway, Happy Groundhog Day! Let’s start over. (“That first step is a doozy!”)

Thanks,
Sarah L. Crowder
(The Artist Formerly Known As Bombastic Frippery)

2 responses to “If Groundhog Day isn’t a great day to start over, I don’t know what is.”

  1. Tanz Avatar
    Tanz

    You did it!
    Congrats👏🏼
    & Having your own website 🔥

    1. SLC Avatar

      Thank you, Tanz! Living the 2009 dream! 😉

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