Reflections | snoitcelfeR

or, six months of thoughts

One hot January night, as the tymbal chorus of cicadas played out under a bejewelled Australian sky, a man sat at his desk and clicked a button.

Ok, so no, that’s not some new tale. That was me, that man, signing up to Substack. Waaay back. Six months ago¹. Wheeee. What a journey.

If you’ll indulge me for a few mere minutes of minutiae, I want to reflect on those six months. I’m also going to fill this with as many footnotes as I can, forthwith².

(I’ve put quite a few images in this post and so Substack says it is “too long for email”. My testing suggests it isn’t too long, but you might have to pop it open in a browser if it is. Or view it on the App.)

Tree with reflection. (It probably has a fancier name.) Part of Melbourne’s Lightscape exhibition currently on at the Royal Botanic Gardens in the city. Photo by me.

I started SLAKE because I wanted to write regularly, a means to push myself and my fingers, to be accountable for some internal goals. So I never expected anyone to read it. Well, not beyond Jo-so-fine, my beloved, whose inbox I crammed this into with a spatula whilst she wasn’t looking³.

But somehow, six months on, there’s now [insert fanciful number] of you dear readers, who’ve buoyed me from week to week as that entire half year has blown past. From the very bottom of my beating heart, thank you.

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Early journey | yenruoj ylraE

Not to gush or anything, but I’m going to gush. For just a moment.

The early, heady days of January were those of sipping forbidden whisky and discovering what Substack was. It was a time peppered by a few specific individuals, three in particular, whose names appeared as revered recommendations. But it’s not just what they were writing about—or the way that they wrote—that inspired me and brought warmth and interest, it’s that they also did a very specific thing:

They wrote back.

I’d read a post and leave a comment⁴ and suddenly there was a reply in my inbox. Ding! The gulf between newcomer and established Substackian reduced to a near-instantaneous reply.

That felt lovely.

It was a connection.

With each post I read, there came with it a bit of back and forth, some tête-à-tête buried in open comments⁵ and, Lo(lita)⁶ and behold, subsequent posts elicited the same.

And so it has continued and continues still.

Those three people, you might be wondering? The most noted notes from the wonderful

Jillian Hess

, the most eclectic of eclecticisms from the witty

Terry Freedman

, and the most penned penpal’ing from the marvellous

Hannah Meltzer

. Whether you realised it or not, you helped a newcomer feel very welcome.

Photo by Wilhelm Gunkel on Unsplash

As I began posting and the months rolled on, I’ve stumbled across various others, people that I like to think form some of the fictional and factual bedrock of Substack⁷. If you don’t know these, then here, a quick intro:

Nadia Gerassimenko

of When Hope Writes⁸. Nadia exudes infectious joy and writes across so many topics, but also shares and promotes others so graciously. She also wrote a post about sayings in Russian, one of my favourites being И ежу понятно⁹.

Alexander Ipfelkofer

of Tales From The Defrag. No joke, Alexander ensnared me via a clever ruse of a comment on some long forgotten Substack Reads post back in, oh I don’t know, let’s say April, and my brain has forever been defragmenting, block by blocky block. Fiction, flash fiction about ice cream, elaborate videos about futuristic cabs with sonorous Bavarian undertones. What more could you want?

Taegan MacLean

of One Word, a Featured Substack of 2023. Taegan has branched and evolved into nourishingly good short video documentaries about his monthly word of choice. (It predates his shift to video, but I’m forever drawn back to a specific post: PATH.)

Claudia Befu

of Story Voyager. Claudia was one of the first people to leave a comment on my novella¹⁰, Brae’s meteorite (Renn’s diary might have gone in the bin were it not for that comment, Claudia, so thank you) but she also drew me in with her dedication to worldbuilding in her climate fiction and the sheer feels elicited by her writing.

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Growth | htworG

OK so that’s enough gushing.

Each morning, as I inhale the scent of matcha, thinking of its final, sunlight-deprived moments and rich chlorophyll content whilst secretly longing for it to metamorphose into coffee, I click beneath the hood of SLAKE to stare at stats and succumb to the devilry of numbers. You can see below that after six months I approach the heady heights of hitting the grand milestone of … n subscribers!

Witness the perilous climb!

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Postings | sgnitsoP

So what is SLAKE?

Beats me.

When I started, I had ideas of writing about my dreams as a means to both catalogue and express them in a longer format. To experiment. I’ve done some of that, loved some of that, but dream-writing has happened less than I thought it would. Six months have charged by and writing each week became a way to focus my mind away from work, to destress, to lose myself for a little while. And part of that—a large part, I guess—was to simply run with it, to write and run and feel and post and see what happened. To care less, because this is the fun space, the canvas. If people came and read, then that was a boon. If people left a comment (thank you Caz, I remember, you were the first!) then wow, amazing. But nothing was riding on it. It was and remains an experiment and playground¹¹.

30 or so posts later and amongst a variety of other things, I’ve been carving out two stories that I hold tight to my chest with love and affection:

i) Brae’s meteorite, the diary entries of a hapless Renn and his love for Brae. When I transcribe your entirely-fictional-yet-feels-real-to-me diary, Renn, it brings a crushing warmth to my heart.

ii) Precipice, an exploration of writing within a SciFi world, exploring character, place, love, the interconnectivity between two cities so intricately linked yet so very different. It’s a world I keep wanting to come back to.

If those intrigue you, they’re all accessed from the tabs at the top of my homepage. I’d link to them, but eh oh, I’ve already included far too many links and there’s even more below!

And of those other things? There’s a few posts that I feel especially happy (is that the word?) to have witnessed emerge. From dream-seeded editing on the toilet and lamenting over a lack of coffee, to more serious posts like the magic of a wedding, to things that were scribbled out in the space of a train ride to the effects of having consumed too much Nabokov, often these have been posts that felt like they simply had to be deposited on the page there and then, lest Elizabeth Gilbert carry them off through a gust of wind to some other unsuspecting writer.

And through it all, what’s fascinated me from week to week is the not knowing, the what’s next, the rush of posting on a Thursday night, the catch-up of reading other’s work at the weekend and in evenings, the sense of impending self-deadline come the start of the new week.

The drafting, the editing, the cramming in a few hours before work each morning and late at night.

That, for me, is why we’re already at mid July!

And it's been a blast.

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Lost artwork | krowtra tsoL

A related joy each week has been deciding what artwork to pair with a post. When it comes to drawing, I have as much skill with a pencil as a Nathan with a pencil. Midjourney has had my back, though. Yes, yes, debates over AI artwork etc. etc. but until I commission¹² someone or go paid, then this is the express means of expression for the art-inept like myself.

Many things didn’t make the cut, of course, but everything has been kept, to be enjoyed as a timeline of progress and pitfalls on my hard drive. Here’s a few things swept up from that digital floor.

A random selection of things that didn't make the cut, featuring pages of Renn's diary, a young Brae, Jisa (her room, and her perched somewhere very much not her room -- that's coming soon), threads from eye and across (!) a face, and Nib. Credit: Midjourney, DALL-E, Firefly.

Putting an image in a post helps bring it to life. Sometimes its been the catalyst. Other times its been there just to reassure me.

~~~¹³

In closing, I leave you with pages of an unwritten graphic novel about, err, spoon-people, goat photography, insect terrors and commuting cats.

Thank you for reading.

All kinds of love, always.

—NS

Yeah so I went on a graphic novel spree in DALL-E. I want to read this.

1. OK so technically I didn’t publish my first post until the end of Jan, but it’s been six months since I created my account.

2. NO DELAY ON THIS HERE FOOTNOTE! he shouted.

3. A lie: it was a spoon. OK, OK, fine, it was a WhatsApp message, cast forth across the dining room in cowardly fashion because I was too embarrassed to say out loud “oh hey so look I’ve started a Substack thing. Sub plz, k thnx btw dinner’s ready x.”

4. I’ve seen many people write about this, but it is a true joy as a writer to have someone drop by and take the time to leave a comment. And as a reader, it’s special to have an author drop a comment back in return. I think some authors forget that, how important it is to nurture the connection in both directions.

5. Not strictly tête-à-tête, then, but you have to circumflex the circumflex whenever you can.

6. Yes, yes, Nabokov still on my mind.

7. It may seem excessive if I list name upon name, but very notable others whose work (and conversations with) I love, and who always give so much back to the community:

Dr. Kathleen Waller

(asking the best questions, thinking the best way; also does yoga),

Mr. Troy Ford

(writing with such flair it makes me grin each time),

Lonely Robot Theme

(thinking on loneliness, across film, books, television, artists etc—always so much to learn from these),

Garrett Francis

(a man whose quill is filled with the finest ink and capable of etching out intricate tales—big rec),

Elnora Fareman

(flowing words and thoughts that capture so much of how I feel about writing fiction), the recently-discovered

Chloe Hope

(writes about Death, and Birds, sometimes both, always with grace and beauty), the fellow Stephen King-love and thoughts from

Shaina Read

. I’m forgetting many others, I’m sure. Sorry!

8. Quite literally. Nadia means “hope”, which I only learnt via Nadia.

9. “Even a hedgehog understands”.

10. Should we even use that term now?! This is worth a read.

11. I’d be lying if I said I didn’t want to write full time, though. I don’t know if it’ll ever happen, or if achieving that would somehow dispel some of the side-magic that occurs when cramming in furtive attempts at creativity each day.

12. Should you read this and be an artist or know someone who is, then I would like to commission/collaborate on a few small pieces of illustration, so do let me know. You can see the kind of visual vibe that floats my gondola.

13. When will it be possible to have centred text, Substack? Hmm?