Oh, it's on again

Remember me? Because I sure remember you.

The reason you’ve received this email—this inaugural edition of my new newsletter, Hey Boomer—is because at one time or another you subscribed to a blog or newsletter I was writing.

If you were interested in what I had to say then, but find that you’re not now, I understand, apologize, and of course invite you to hit the unsubscribe button below.

As you might know, I haven’t written much publicly since the publication of my novel Everywhere She’s Not some four years ago. I posted a few pieces on my website that were 100% fun for me to write, and I collected into a book the best of Ask John, an advice column I wrote from 2016-2019 for the Asheville Citizen-Times/USA Today network. And that’s about it.

And few people saw any of those things, because years ago I backed way off social media; I posted anything about Ask John on social media exactly none times. I just don’t much care for what social media has become, so tend to use it sparingly.

I wrote my old blog from 2007 to 2014, was satisfied that I’d accomplished what I set out to do with that work; I wrote the novel I’d waited my whole life to write, and was more than satisfied with the way it was received, and then—boom—covid hit, and I found myself happy to stop writing, and to just start, well, purely thinking again.

And gradually, as I thought and just, you know, lived in the world, like you do, I found myself staring dead into the reality of another . . . major life dynamic that I increasingly, and finally irresistibly, wanted to write about.

If you knew my work before—the work I did on my blog, which was mainly about the ways that shittily-conceived Christianity is so often used to visit such terrible suffering upon so many innocent people—you know that a big part of what compels me to write publicly—like on a blog, or, say, in a newsletter—is anger.

I hate injustice. It makes me angry.

And when I am deeply angry, I tend to pick up my pen, and start writing.

And now I am doing that again. Except not on a blog this time. Blogs are dead, because of what the internet generally and social media specifically has become. And that’s fine. Things change.

And thank God they do. Because now we have Substack.

With Substack, I can do what I haven’t been able to do since, lo’ these many years gone by, I made the mistake of moving my blog to Patheos (which I did because the good folks at Patheos paid for traffic, and after six years I just couldn’t afford to keep blogging full-time for free—and even though it was doing at least 300K discrete views a month, I refused to run any ads on my blog, because I didn’t want gay teenagers who were coming to my blog to hear someone finally telling them that God is perfectly okay with them being gay to think that I was in any way beholding to anyone, or to anything, but the truth—and also because Patheos pinky-swore to me that they would never clutter their site with crappy ads, which . . . I mean . . . they were distressingly soon thereafter forced to do).

What I had on my blog, back before Patheos (and to some extent, for sure, during my early years at Patheos—and even to some degree during my years writing for The Huffington Post), is something I’ve not had since, which is an online community. A real community, populated by people who care about the other people who are commenting and sharing their thoughts about what I, and they, are writing.

If you knew me back then—if you were a part of what I was doing back then—then you know what we had. You know who we were. The care we took. The people we encouraged, and gathered around, and protected.

I didn’t want to start that kind of writing again—the regular, public, online-posting kind of work—if I wasn’t able to simultaneously, as part of that work, foster and cultivate the special kind of community that necessarily grows from people wanting to honestly discuss Something Very Real That Very Much Matters.

It was a freak thing, honestly. At exactly the time I realized that I wanted to write online the way I used to—and knowing that so much of what I used to do simply wasn’t doable anymore—someone pointed me to Substack.

And . . . yeah. Perfect.

So here I am.

So here we are. I hope it becomes a “we” thing, anyway. I’m sure gonna give that a go. Cuz I got some shit to say. And I’m as interested in what you have to say about what I’m going to be talking about as I am in what I’m going to say.

I’m looking forward to this.

John