Spaghetti + Wall

Less efficient, maybe less effective, more fun

When I was a kid and we had Sunday dinners at my grandma’s, she would always call us over to the stove when the spaghetti was almost ready. We’d each get a few noodles from her spoon with instructions to throw them against the wall. If they stuck, we knew the pasta was ready. If they flopped to the ground, they weren’t al dente and needed a few more minutes of boiling.

It was ridiculous and we loved it. Can pasta really be evaluated in its doneness by how well it sticks to a wood-paneled wall? Wouldn’t it be more efficient and effective to simply taste the noodle and see if it’s done?

Of course.

But efficiency and effectiveness were not the point of spaghetti throwing. The point was to laugh and be silly, throwing perfectly good food against the wall. The point was to break the normal rules of decorum. To play. To have fun.

Which leads me to the creative process, this newsletter, my unfulfilled promises, and blogs.

I was there. When the blogosphere was blooming a thousand flowers of random thoughts, essays that took days to read, and threads upon threads of comments that were sometimes more interesting than the original post.

So, basically, what Substack has become. Blogosphere 2.0. Lincoln Michel hits on this in his reflections on four years of writing his newsletter.

Which is exactly what I like about writing on the internet. I grew up on the blogs. I lived the blogging life. I was there, man. Sure, sure, all us elder millenials are stuck in blog nostalgia (blogstalgia?), but that’s because blogs are better than social media. We lost something when we gave up the blogs for Facebook, Twitter, and the rest.

I still have a blog. It’s on my website, which existed long before Substack did, before my newsletter did, before any of this. And I still try to write semi-regularly there. This newsletter has been silent for several months, but I’ve written quite a bit on the blog over that same span.

As Michel points out in his reflection, the newsletter is like a blog, but when it comes into someone’s email, the writer feels a certain responsibility. If I’m going to clog up your inbox, it better be for something worthwhile. A longer piece. More crafted and constructed. More polished. More hefty.

But the beauty of blogs is that they oscilate between hefty and light, erudite and ephemeral. Blogs are freewheeling. They’re someone’s little corner of the internet, and if you want to stop by, you get the whole corner, from dust motes to floor lamps and everything in between.

Newsletters — again, because they come via email — are different. You’re not coming to my neck of the woods, I’m coming to yours. I feel funny poppping over for a quick chat. I feel like my visit should mean something.

Which means, essentially, that I hardly visit.

If my newsletter were more like my blog, I would write and send it more frequently. Blogging, to return to my opening anecdote, is like throwing spaghetti at the wall. It’s messy, haphazard, not particularly efficient or effective, but it’s FUN. I can blog more freely because blogging is fun. It’s low-stakes. Some spaghetti sticks, some doesn’t, but it’s not really about testing whether the pasta’s done. It’s about throwing the pasta. The anarchy is the point.

Would I be able to write and send newsletters that were more “blog-like”? Or is that a violation of the “email rule” that says don’t clog people’s inboxes? I’m not sure I would “clog” anything because I don’t think I could write and send something every day or every other day. I’m not sure I could even send something every week.

But the newsletter abides by the same rule as all my other writing: the more important I make it, the more blocked I become.

The blog, despite its flaws, despite the spaghetti falling to the linoleum floor, is not important. It’s why I’ve been able to blog since 2006. It’s random and messy and there are no rules. I might not have time to blog, but I never struggle to write blog posts.

When the writing becomes “important,” then I struggle to write. Time, no time, doesn’t matter.

Maybe it’s the format (email), maybe it’s the feeling that my newsletter has to “be” something specific, but every month, it gets harder and harder to write.

And yet the blog abides.

So I keep wondering: if these Substack newsletters are basically blogs under a different guise, what’s stopping me from throwing spaghetti at my Substack wall?

Yes, readers might not like it. I might lose subscribers.

Or readers might like. I might gain subscribers. It’s the nature of the experiment. Some noodles stick, some don’t.

Honestly, I don’t write this newsletter for metrics. I’m not trying to get a little orange whatever-check next to my name. I write — as I always have — for fun. I write because writing is better than not-writing. I write because it’s how I process my thoughts and engage with the world. And it feels good when someone responds, when I get to read what others write and join a larger conversation.

What’s happened lately is that my newsletter has become a not-writing space. I can chalk it up to being busy, but the truth is that I’m afraid of the newsletter. Of writing something dumb. Of not crafting a homerun every month. Stupid insecurities, really.

What if I wrote the newsletter more like I write my blog? Not with every random picture or “input update” I put there, but with decent-length posts that maybe aren’t the most polished or hefty but are interesting to me. More freewheeling. More anarchic. More spaghetti.

Some will stick, some won’t. But that’s true for any piece of writing. Even my favorite writers on Substack only get my engagement some of the time. We only have so many hours in the day.

I guess there are probably a bunch of writers on this platform who treat their newsletters like blogs, and I’m just a dunderhead who took four years to figure it out. Maybe my new approach won’t work. Maybe it’s a stupid idea.

But throwing spaghetti against a wall to see if it’s cooked is sort of a stupid idea too.

Stupid, and awesome.

Speaking of the blog…

I apply butt-to-chair and get some good fiction writing done. I also started a new notebook and christened it with a new guardian spirit. And I wrote a rant/essay on why I like essays.

Also, on the teaching/education front, I got a little “old-man-yelling-at-clouds” with some thoughts on how schools don’t always do the best job teaching “stuff” (aka: knowledge, information, facts).

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That’s it for now. As always, thank you for reading!

And if you are looking for Arthurian fantasy, consider my novel, The Thirteen Treasures of Britain, or if you want a dash of nostalgic coming-of-age, 1990s-style, there’s Avalon Summer and its companion fantasy, Gates to Illvelion. Or you can check out my short stories HERE.

Remember, if you enjoyed this post but can’t afford a monthly subscription, you can always buy me a coffee.

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As always, this newsletter remains free and open to all who want to join me in exploring the various contours of the fantasy genre. Thank you to ALL my subscribers!