It’s 2:30 am. We’re scheduled to go live in roughly 7 hours.
And I’m panicking. Substack is way more complicated than I thought?
I think I’ve got it mostly there tho.
I keep looking at SEO and tags-options and wondering if I should even bother with them? I like the idea of having Tags, but I also can’t figure out how the hell you use them. Maybe posts have to be live for it to work? If anyone knows, let me know!
Come to think of it, I’m not even sure how comments on Substack work, other than I think I enabled them, but since my first readers will inevitably be people I know, hopefully somebody with some familiarity will message me to get me across the finish line on that one if it’s not working.
This is the part of online publishing that I kinda hate. I’m in my 40s and figuring out how to do a new site is not as easy as it once was. On some level I just wish it worked like Livejournal used to, way back. At least I’m familiar enough with running a Discord that when I launch one for subscribers here in the next few weeks, I’ll be able to just knock that right out.
Since mostly-quitting Twitter in late 2022 I’ve been trying to pivot about 75% of my non-Discord social media into creative projects, and the result is this blog, a podcast in development-hell, and bits of slow practice trying to pickup the guqin.
I’ve been working for the past six to eight months on streamlining my processes so I can actually output with some regularity, and for a while at least I should be able to manage a minimum of one post a week. Potentially expect more.
The last year may have been a 6th House Profection-year grind, but between all the creativity, and a continually developing magic-and-MJ spirituality, it’s maybe been the mentally-healthiest I’ve been since becoming a parent 8 years ago!
I’m really interested to hear what people think, especially once some people start reading who I don’t know! I’ve got another six to nine chapters in various states of progress, including at least two that come after ones that are here. Plus there’s more character-introductions and related narrative-arcs coming down the pipe with those.
I look forward to engaging with people about these stories too.
Big-S Story is really important to me on metaphysical and epistemelogical level, but it’s 3am now and those are even more completely beyond articulation at the moment than they usually are, so we’ll wait to start in on that until my next “Mad Musings”.
More soon.
~Diluvia
The comment system works! :)
If I were you, I wouldn't worry about SEO at the moment. AFAIK, Substack isn't that great for SEO and it's kinda hard to SEO-ify creative writing/fiction. What you could do is put Kelsie Skye (and/or whatever name you use on Twitter) somewhere so that when people search for you, they find this Substack.
The tags can help you to organize things if you want but that's something you can look into later. For instance, you could separate your post into 2 categories: one for announcements and communicating with your audience (like this post) and another for the creative writing itself. But again, that's something you can look into later, if you want.
If you haven't done so already, you could also set the leaderboard categories: https://support.substack.com/hc/en-us/articles/360042221312-How-can-I-choose-a-leaderboard-category-for-my-Substack-publication
You have posts and you have subscriptions set up so I think you have the most important things covered already! Congrats!
Would you be willing to share.. the process of how you've streamlined your processes? 😜 Mine are with crafting far more than writing, but creative productivity is a struggle for many, definitely me included, and I'd be interested to see and share experiences, and maybe others would as well? 🙂🙃