Welcome to my Bearstack!
Promoting healthy attention spans!
Hey folks, welcome to this new thing I’m trying!
Welcome! If you don’t already know me, I’m Bear Wiseman. I spent 10ish years in music journalism and now I’ve stepped away from that in order to pursue my own interests in art. Currently, I’m working on a handful of projects that are fun and inspiring for me, like writing critical reviews of more than just music, live reports of the local scene with an emphasis on indie/underground/psych/metal, my Gathering of Geeks podcast, my Off the Record Interviews, and my Unleashed series about concept albums. However, this post is about why I’m trying to move my following over to Substack from Facebook and other socials.
1. Why this, why now?
If I’m being frank, I just really don’t like most social medias and I don’t like what they’ve done to my attention span. Since 2012 when I got my first smart phone for my then-job, I’ve noticed my ADHD symptoms drastically increase and my creative output take a significant nosedive. Depression and other factors surely played their own parts in it, but ultimately, as I reflected on my daily actions and what I spend my time on that isn’t writing, I came to the conclusion that it was an addiction to my cell phone, and more specifically to socials. As much as it benefits me to promote myself on socials, it actually doesn’t get me anywhere if the time I spend on socials is taking so much from me that I’m not spending any time actually doing the things I love.
This is why I want to go back to emails. I’ve always loved emails. I like the convenience of being able to contact people conveniently from anywhere in the world, fast as lightning strikes, while being able to still take the time to express things the way that feels best for me and include pictures and other tidbits for flavor. I also love writing people letters, blogging about life, and keeping journals.
Having a Substack allows me to have the best of many of these worlds: I can write a catch-up letter to anyone who’s interested in what I’m doing, with links to my most recent articles and publications, without space limitations, while keeping everyone up-to-date! I’m doing this in the hope of manifesting the type of following that is most in-keeping with my own vibe, so for that, Substack seems ideal for the type of writing I do.
2. What’s moving here?
Monthly Mayhem started out as a way for me to collect all of the articles I’d been writing for Tuonela Magazine and share them on my website. Originally, I would only write a paragraph or so for context and then just spam links, but after a while, when I started to work on my own site more and on music journalism less, I began to recap my months in a bit more detail to allow the inclusion of my podcasts and other things I was up to. Eventually, towards the end of 2023, this morphed fully into the Monthly Mayhem catch-up blog, that now features a full recap of my month (in as brief as I’m capable of being…), with links to everything new that month!
3. How much spam am I going to get?
Since this is a monthly recap, you’ll only get one email from me in the first week of the month!
I hope to add a subscription tier eventually, but I’d like to have more articles and essays written before I commit to that, since Substack doesn’t have a pay-per-thing option the same way Patreon does. If I can build a good following in my mailing list, I’ll be able to significantly decrease my time on socials and free myself up for more creative work, like short stories and the aforementioned essays! I hope to start sharing some more in-depth life experiences and how they’ve come to shape my reality, as I believe stories are what make up existence, so essays on life are a really exciting topic for me!
4. Consider subscribing (even if you’re not interested)!
Social media isn’t great for promoting writing, because, as I mentioned, it’s fixated on making catching attention for short periods of time. My writing is not well-suited for that. No one has time, during their daily BM or wherever they sit down with their phone or tablet, to read the entirety of most things I write. I get extremely few clicks through Instagram, despite it being my primary place of self-promotion. So I figured that if I want to find the type of people who enjoy the sort of work I do, I should have a mailing list. Then, people can read about anything and everything I’m doing if/when they have time, and won’t miss out because an Instagram story only lasts for 24 hours. I hope that my work will be a bit more timeless than the general 30-second reel. That said, numbers are still important in this game, so having people subscribe, regardless of whether they read my emails, still helps me, so if you’d like a way to show your support that’s completely free for you, join the mailing list regardless of whether you feel like reading it.
Thanks for following along with me, be kind, and stay geeky! All the good vibes to you and yours!
Bear Wiseman