Burn After Submitting
9/27/25
Sometimes I don’t think of this Substack right. Sometimes I ask myself the wrong questions. I think, wait, only 50 people follow this Substack, is it time to pivot. Should I start one where I write about VHS tapes or cocktails—2 things I dig and know a lot about. (And maybe I should start that Substack, but maybe not as a pivot.)
Maybe what I am doing here should only be for a small amount of people. Sometimes I want to start something that is actually amongst my direct contacts. A text thread about poems and stories where we talk about the things we love. Where we go deep on stories and poetry. But as life has progressed and I had a family and I moved away from the parts of my life that were dedicated to art I find I don’t know people who read. Not in real life, anyway.
I went broke about seven or eight years ago. I had a little business going where I was ghostwriting biographies for people with enough money, who wanted to say something. Small time politicians, a couple tech start up people, financial advisors who thought they could see crashes coming. Life kept getting more expensive and that kind of work kept getting cheaper. I moved on to writing short bios for people on LinkedIn but I wasn’t a good sales person. I couldn’t find those Glen Gary leads that would keep me in clients.
As the bills piled up, I realized I couldn’t afford to keep going.
Before I started that small ghostwriting business, I lived in New Mexico where I wrote horror movies and worked for a couple production companies reading scripts and developing projects. It was during this period of my life that I knew the most amount of artistic people. Every bar conversation and coffee shop meet up were full of lively conversations about books, movies, art, music. This was the high point of my life. But my wife and I had just had two kids and we knew we couldn’t afford private school and the public school system in New Mexico was atrocious. So we fled to New England purely to give our kids a fighting chance at a future.
It was here that I began my now failed business. After that I moved back into the bar life. I went back into the hotel world. This was a world I knew well in my twenties. I moved west working in hotel and motel bars in order to travel, write, and gain experiences. It was a great time!
Weirdly, even though some of it I lament, it is a great time now. I dig working in hotels. I meet tons of new people everyday from all over the world and sometimes we have amazing conversations.
In this world, I meet very few readers. I find far less people to discuss books with.
My dream would be to find a place again where I could have exciting conversations about books, movies, art, and music. This occasionally happens on X. I will post some piece of art from a museum I recently visited and a conversation will begin. A couple times since starting Burn After Submitting I have found myself in lengthy conversations about the stories.
My hope is that those conversations will become more frequent.
You Teach Me How to Be by Emma Burger on X-Ray Lit
https://xraylitmag.com/you-teach-me-how-to-be-by-emma-burger/fiction/
David’s Going to Die by Aurora Huiza on X-Ray Lit
https://xraylitmag.com/davids-going-to-die-by-aurora-huiza/fiction/
Last of the Cowboys by Aaron Gwyn on Panoptica
https://www.panoptica.ai/a/last-of-the-cowboys/
Flesh and Mud by Katie Frank on Burial Magazine
https://burialmagazine.neocities.org/fleshandmud
Valedictorian by Sarah Chin on Cincinnati Review
https://www.cincinnatireview.com/micro/micro-valedictorian-by-sarah-chin/
Woodstock by Andrena Zawinski on Club Plum Literary