Kumbaya Is Over

And so, with a couple of taps and clicks, the entirety of The Storyteller's Corner older than four weeks/one month goes behind the paywall. Believe me when I tell you, folks, I didn't want to do that until now. Sure, I had a small handful of pieces that had been paywalled, tales that I ultimately wanted to gather into a unified collection or two, but most of my work was intended to remain free to read in perpetuity.

This, obviously, has changed.

For a long time, several years, I approached being a storyteller as something I wanted to do for the love of entertaining people, to provide fantasy and horror without always necessitating that the audience fork out cash for it. I didn't want to become the sort of mercenary, "Fuck you, pay me" type that I have grumbled about for much of my time as an author.

Well, Kumbaya time is fucking over, and someone right here at Substack, either on staff or within the ranks of Stackers themselves, can count themselves responsible for the change of heart.

You see, folks, for the last few months, I had been working in partnership with a pair of outfits known as Montag Publishing and Liberty Magazine. These Stacks, owned and operated by a user named Samara, had been hosting new fantasy genre works from yours truly. Despite not seeing everything eye-to-eye on the socio-political spectrum, we were in hearty agreement regarding freedom of artistic expression, and based on that, as well as his general enjoyment of my prior fiction works, he agreed to bring me onboard his publications as a fiction contributor.

And then, a few days ago, Montag and Liberty got shut down, because Samara, along with a handful of other accounts on Substack, got nuked from orbit thanks to Substack's Trust and Safety team. Whether due to a horde of flagged comments or reported Posts or whatnot, I couldn't tell you right now, as I have no clue. What I can tell you is that when I reached out to Substack directly with my concerns as a contributor, I got zero response. Ditto for D.W. Dixon, another fiction author whose work on Montag is now inaccessible through their Stack, thanks to the nuking.

So, to whoever got Samara's account taken down, thanks.

You have spoiled entirely my stitch-thin hope that Substack wouldn't become just another place where mass flagging campaigns or petty squabbles could and would get creative voices squelched. I had already seen some fuckery going on, but was holding out some mild hope for Substack to continue to be better than Old Twitter.

So much for that.

Go fuck yourselves.

I'll also be going over and adjusting my list of folks who have been comped 'Paid Subscriber' status and reducing who is whitelisted considerably.

Now, to be clear, for right now, my Posts won't be going behind the paywall until they've been out for a month in most cases. But if this nonsense continues, I'll happily ratchet it down to 2 weeks.

I don't want to be mercenary about this, but to whoever had a problem with Samara, Liberty Magazine, Montag or any of the users associated with any of those three named entities/outlets: you did this.

You have earned a collateral damage casualty, which was my hope to stay relatively free spirited here.

I recognize that you probably don't care. If you do, send me a message explaining yourself. Otherwise, go away.