Hoarse Whisperings 2.0

Follow-up to I am Presently Failing – Part III

Pardon the dust. I’ve been doing some renovating.

Per the prior two parts in this week’s little spelunk into knowing thyself and re-centering, I have a bunch of changes planned for the next phase of this Substack feed.

The changes are intended to 1) Remedy what I know have been some less than reader-friendly aspects of my feed; 2) Preserve things I want, need, and love about writing and publishing; and 3) Hopefully, put me on a healthier path toward being able to make a go of writing for a living.

Overall, the intent of the changes is to:

• Make it easy for readers to identify the kinds of content they like and want to read

• Accommodate readers’ preference for pieces skewing shorter; and

• Establish a structured but flexible framework around what I write and publish

With that in mind, a central pillar of my Hoarse Whisperings 2.0 plan is to move towards a ‘content architecture’ approach. Rather than every piece being a standalone which is independent of the others, I plan on working toward an architecture organized around series, themes, and features.

Series

Ongoing series’ with a specific, defined focus which I publish editions of over time though not necessarily serially.

I have several planned as initial offerings:

Psycholitics – pieces about the intersection of psychology and politics. The driver of this series is my interest in understanding things like what makes a prominent figure tick and what drives public attitudes, behaviors, and political positions.

If you enjoyed reading my threads on Twitter about Trump’s narcissism. Pieces filed under ‘Psycholitics’ is where you’ll find more like them.

The Human Experience – pieces that are primarily stories about people. If you enjoyed things I’ve written like the one in December about the woman who cut my hair or folks I meet at bars or the guy who runs the cigar place I frequent, this series will be up your alley.

 I kinda hate the name but don’t have a better one as yet, so that’s just gonna have to do.

The Owner’s Manual – This series, you’re just going to have to take my word for it on for now because it centers on something I haven’t explicitly written about yet: making sense of this human machine we all drive around. This series gets into things like: What makes us tick, shapes our experience, drives how we think, and impacts how we feel… and how can we use that to drive happy? This series is basically bite-sized topics for we drivers. We inherited these cars. No one gave us an owner’s manual. The posts in this series get into things that might be good to have in the mental glove box as we try to keep it on the road and enjoy the ride.

Themes

These are just the things I find myself writing about often because they matter to me and I care about them but which aren’t a series per se. They’re just recurrent topics. The largest of which is:

Parenting, Fatherhood, and My Relationship with My Son – If those entries are among the ones you like, you will assuredly find more of them in the future and they’ll be prefaced with something that makes it easy to spot them in your inbox.

Branded Features

That term may not be the best descriptor but the gist of this category is ongoing series’ that are not defined by their specific content or topic and are instead defined by things like their writing style and attributes.

The two I have in mind to start which drove this story are:

Morning Walks – Light, short pieces with under <5-minute read times on an array of topics. These pieces will typically fall earlier in the week and will be written in a flowing style. The intention is to give you more snacks and light meals especially during the work week while also freeing my Golden Retriever Brain to do what it does best, most easily, and most happily… and that’s going for walks.

Short Writes/Short Reads – Like Morning Walks, these pieces, obviously, skew shorter. The intentions are to 1) keep reading times under five minutes while covering topics I find myself interested in and think are worth writing about; and 2) keep the writing time on my end to <4 hours. By default, that skews the style toward conversational and flowing.

Longer Reads – These are pieces which are… longer to read. These will appear nearly exclusively on weekends and could include: creative writing; longer pieces from the above series’ and themes; or new topics altogether.

Since Branded Features are defined by attributes other than topic, it is entirely possible that some things I post may fall into one of these categories and also into one of the content-driven categories. e.g. There could be a Short Write/Short Read on a topic that also fits under Psycholitics. If so, I’ll find a way to label the piece with both, so if you find yourself really liking something on the menu here, you can find it whenever it pops up as the special.

I like this architecture. I feel like it is an elegant accommodation of what works for writer and hopefully reader. And I like the set of things I’ve laid out to write. I like the balance of lengths and medley of topics – and, being perfectly honest, I love the Morning Walks and the permission they grant me to be just me free and unencumbered. I already wrote the intro edition of that new offering. You’ll be seeing it soon.

All of this will assuredly evolve and change - and there will assuredly be a Hoarse Whisperings 2.1 and 2.2 and 3.0 - but today, seven months into this, this feels pretty good and positive and exciting to me.

Thank you for being here… and now, let’s gooooo…

…but first, before we speed off, tell me what you think. We’re in this clown car together. I may be driving but we share custody of what’s on the radio. Let me know what you think of the channel lineup.