(Get to) Know Your Audience

Plus, what's coming next

     Greetings and salutations, all, and welcome back to The Storyteller’s Corner. As we come to the end of the first week of October, the glorious Spooky Season (my favorite month of the year), I find myself wanting to lay out what’s going to be coming down the pike in the days and weeks ahead for those of you who have opted to spend some time here with me. Before I do that, though, I feel compelled to tend to something that I hadn’t even thought to do before, and thanks to a brief but meaningful interaction with one Mr. Gabe Hudson, I’m going to take a minute aside to do it.

     As a purveyor of the fantastical, horrific, and science fictitious in main here on my Substack, I have not really gotten to know much about you, my audience. It isn’t like this is an impossible task; there’s only 42 subscribers here. I should be more than capable of learning at least a little something about you fine folks, yes? David Perlmutter I already know a very little, having had the honor of sharing a publisher with him for several years over at Untreed Reads, back when it was owned and operated by the superb gentleman and guinea pig aficionado Jay Hartman.

     And there’s Nathansifugaming, Nate, who is a fellow fan of video games and a content creator over on the video sharing/streaming sites of Rumble, Bitchute and Odyssey, a good bloke who appreciates the artistry of the classic 2D sidescrolling adventure just as well as he enjoys the deep character-building and world immersion of 3D RPGs like ‘Star Wars: Knights of the Old Republic’.

    Treeguyp, as his email moniker goes, is my long-time best friend and a fabulous family man, Paul Lamker. I spent a great deal of my adolescence hanging out with that guy, playing backyard football, Goldeneye 007 on the N64, running Dungeons and Dragons sessions, talking sports, generally hanging out. We haven’t physically been in the same room in over a decade, but if there’s anybody I keep in regular contact with online who I would actually go out of my way to defend to the death, it would be Paulie, whom we all called Church Boy back in the day.

     And Mr. Jake Winberry, I know you poke your head in to read the emails, though you’re so busy with your own pursuits, I cannot possibly blame you for not interacting here more. We talk through Telegram, and that’s more than one could ask, given how much our families keep us occupied and maneuvering through this life, yes?

     Even as I write these tiny slivers about these four gentlemen, I realize that it would be nearly impossible to fully expand upon and demonstrate a working or relational connection with the entirety of even a smaller subscriber base. For goodness sakes, I could quite likely put together an entire novella-length work just telling stories about the shenanigans Paulie and I and the rest of our little posse of dolts used to get up to back in the day!

     And I cannot but believe that, given the chance, I could do the same for anyone else who has taken the opportunity to come back here more than once and share their hard-earned down time with me. To make any such effort with the size of some folks’ audiences would be beyond enormous, and into the realm of the truly ridiculous to even make a passing effort at! The sort of folks who utilize Substack as a place to come indulge in some reading, be it non-fiction (the majority of material on the service) or fiction (my preferred area) are not at all the typical ‘zero attention span Netizen’ one can find mindlessly and passively allowing TikTok to feed them the next short-form video, or listlessly doomscroll through their various socials in such a dead-eyed zombie fashion as to make one wonder if maybe Romero wasn’t a filmmaker so much as a prophet.

     “Braaaaaaaaaaains!”

     So, the effort, monumental though it may be, shall be ongoing. It has to be, frankly, and in truth, I cannot do it alone. So I encourage you, good reader, to feel invited to tell me a little something about yourself. It doesn’t have to be any kind of deep, dark, tightly-held secret. It needn’t be something that you wouldn’t share with anyone else online, although if any of you can tell me where that gods-awful smell comes from any time I have to kill one of the many wood spiders that find their way into my daughter’s bedroom on an almost daily basis, I would be more than grateful. I’m sure I could research this on my own, but damn it, what are friends for if not helping me avoid the tedium of trying to parse through what’s real and what’s propaganda over on sites like Wikipedia, eh?

     All kidding aside, though, I genuinely mean it, folks. Always feel free to reach out, to leave a comment just saying ‘hello’, and let me learn a little about who you are. You deserve my time and attention just as much as you’ve let me know I deserve yours by subscribing to this Stack, and coming back to it when you do.

     And to Mr. Hudson, a great thank-you for inadvertently reminding me that my audience is not just a number to be displayed on some statistics breakdown page on my Substack account. These readers are people, and they deserve a little more care than I have given them in my three years on the service.

**

     With the main body of this piece now done, I’d like to take the opportunity to explain what’s coming down the pike for the Corner here in the coming days and weeks. Firstly, in keeping with the spirit of my beloved Halloween, I will be continuing to bring you fine folks re-presentations of some of the older Amelia City Stories, as well as presenting a new original work in that realm, coming in the days immediately ahead. There will be three older Amelia City tales, capped off with the fourth being my newest creation from that unpleasant place.  After that batch has been produced for your pleasure, I will be bringing you all, in the form of podcast/audio files, the presentation of my 2019 novel “The Big Tour”!

     “The Big Tour” isn’t precisely horror, but rather, what I would personally view as more of a dark fantasy novel, peppered with enough Halloween-flavored vibes that I think it still perfectly appropriate to start offering during the month of October. There’s thirty-four audio portions, so obviously, it will run well past the end of this particular holiday season, since I tend to only put out a single fiction offering per day, just to maintain regularity and respect that Substack users only have so much time on any given day to spend with me. I respect that they have other folks to read and/or listen to, after all, so I’m not about to inundate them unnecessarily.

     Now, to be clear, yes, “The Big Tour” is a commercially-available, for-sale novel, which one can purchase through Barnes and Noble’s online sales site. The late, great Harlan Ellison would doubtlessly dub me a ‘fucking amateur’ for not INSISTING that anyone who wants to take in that story should pay me up front for the privilege of indulging in my artistic efforts there. I am aware that I’m possibly shooting myself in the foot by sharing, for free, a work that is otherwise completely available for sale, and thus, for my financial benefit and gain. Why hurt my own sales numbers by doing this?

     Simple, really; because it isn’t all about money, and even folks who can’t justify the expense deserve some entertainment, ladies and gentlemen. So why not be the one to bring it to them?

Cheers