Past and future, work and vocation

Life updates, housekeeping

It feels weird to say given how bad the world is but 2025 was a very good year for me. As I wrote last spring, we bought our house in April and won the free preschool lottery around the same time. Financially transformative. Working at the movie theater was also a weirdly positive experience even as my pride took a beating every time a customer asked me if I was a college student—glad I can still pass as 23 in the eyes of its elderly clientele I guess but no, I’m a decade out from school and scooping popcorn for a living. After a year and change of unemployment it got me out of the house and interacting with strangers again. Several of my coworkers have become real friends; my social circle here in Santa Fe has been pretty limited so finding more people I really connect with is huge.

I think 2025 also goes down as my best year of writing ever. I am very proud of what I produced over the last twelve months. I think the Blood Meridian/River of Shadows/genocide piece is the best thing I’ve ever written. The Coen series has come into its own with the Fargo and Lebowski pieces. The MGS2 essay is an example of my favorite kind of writing: a piece that takes one artwork as its subject and then fractures outward to bring in every connection I can make. I love to see a critic’s mind at work in this way. As far as I can tell regular readers don’t really dig it but we’ll come back to that. The words came more easily than they ever have before last year. My review of Late Star Trek was long and I worried Adam would be mad I gave the goods away but I loved the book and the words came easily and that was a great feeling so I wrote them all down. My essay on The True Story of the Novel and literature’s ability to oppose the transactional logic of capitalist society came and went without a lot of love—if there’s one piece I hope you’ll go back and read if you missed it at the time it’s that.

And now the big one: through almost no doing of my own a real job as fallen in my lap. I talked to another dad at a birthday party and was interesting and interested in him and blah blah three months later when he had an opening in his department he thought of me. And I’m qualified for it! It’s a spreadsheets-and-emails job for the city, that actually puts to use a lot of skills from my old trade media job in New York. Apparently a decent chunk of it will be calling and bugging vendors about all the shit they’re behind on because everything happens late in New Mexico. They asked if I was up for that in the interview and I told them “being a journalist is being a pest.” It’s the highest pay of my life, plus government benefits and pension plan. The retirement plan vests to 85% of your top salary after only 20 years. I could be in and out before I’m 55!

That sounds like a joke but I really am thinking on that sort of timeline for the first time in my life. I had started feeling really down about my long-term career trajectory lately. I’m 34 now and obviously the writing isn’t going anywhere, in terms of supporting a family anyway. As I wrote a year and a half ago, I feel like I have no marketable skills besides writing. This opportunity has changed everything. Instead of desperately trying to avoid thinking about the future looming over me, suddenly I am able to imagine ten, twenty years from now. There’s a trajectory and an off-ramp. So that’s the plan. Assuming I don’t get sent home on the first day for not knowing a basic accounting term or how to make a SUM function in Excel (I have two weeks to study before my first day lol), I now have long-term financial security really for the first time as an independent adult. It’s just a matter of showing up and white-knuckling it toward retirement, assuming Santa Fe doesn’t burn to the ground or until President Mr. Beast dissolves the government and eliminates my pension.

All this is weird to think about. I’ve never had qualms about being old and washed but I think I’ve held onto some sense of youth and authenticity by remaining broke as hell. My politics moved farther and farther leftward over the past decade largely in response to staggering wealth inequality and my strong sense that I would never escape financial precarity. And now, without feeling like I’ve “applied myself” or whatever I just sort of have. How am I supposed to wear my Defector Quit Your Job shirt when I’m banking years toward retirement? These are stupid thoughts but it’s disorienting to step out from under conditions that have structured my beliefs for so long.

Another way of putting all this is that the big writing career dream is dead. I am not going to write for the New Yorker. And honestly, good riddance. That was the dream because that was the dream. Do I actually want to work at the New Yorker? I mean, yes. But also, I’m so at peace with it. Without being too self-congratulatory, I am so happy with what I’m doing here with this newsletter. I went through a whole back and forth with pitching over the past year. Last spring I tried really hard, for instance, to place the Late Star Trek review in a real publication. I wrote the best pitch email of my life noting the book spoke to a lot more than just that single franchise, called in friends for help me find appropriate editors to hit up, and got back nothing. Not a single editor responded—editors I’ve worked with, editors I approached with a mutual contact as recommendation in the first line. So I gave up and just started posting everything here without even trying. Over the summer I had coffee with a writer I really admire when she was in town and she told me I was one of the people she thinks “really gets it… actually sees the big picture.” It was one of the nicest things anyone has ever said to me about my work and I was reinvigorated to start trying to pitch again. I tried to place the Blood Meridian article and again got nothing back in response and again got discouraged. As I was drafting the MGS2 piece and it was going pleasingly off the rails I realized, if it had to run somewhere real they would try to smooth it out and take out the digressions into Chicago School economics and whatnot. But that was the best stuff in the piece imo. I want to write stuff that crazy and blockquote-y and then also stuff as stupid as the Death Note piece. I know my work is flawed in the way all unedited work is flawed and I do wish I could have that real writer-editor relationship to help me grow but also—when I have been edited it hasn’t been some intensive back-and-forth pointing out my tics and blindspots it’s been a perfunctory list of GDocs edits and two notes asking me to say more here and here.

To be clear, I plan to keep writing. But it’s an incredible relief to be able to put aside concerns with subscriber growth and monetization to instead just care about the work. Because, frankly, that’s already how it’s been, just with the added anxiety of knowing I was failing at the career part of it all. Of the writers I read I consider Max Read the best at “newslettering”—which is not a backhanded compliment against his skills as a writer, I’ve been reading Max for a decade and read Read Max religiously and it remains totally wild he reads and recommends my writing—but he has thought a lot about how you make a newsletter work and his results speak for themselves. Among general best practices like ‘having a beat,’ his biggest advice is, paraphrasing, ‘produce 1200 words every week that are timely or relevant in one way or another’ and ‘offer consistent bonus content for paid subscribers.’

I have not followed any of these tenets and again my results speak for themselves. As always there are sTruCtuRal ReAsoNs I can blame—everyone agrees the tech dipshits running Substack turned down the big knob that put new eyeballs on articles and most people are oversubscribed already—but it doesn’t matter. The fact is that after almost four years on here I have just under 500 subscribers. I was surprised to see that that number has more than doubled over the past year, which is cool, but it is what it is.

It’s frustrating. I know my writing isn’t exactly changing the world but I think it’s consistently enjoyable and always adds something new to whatever I’m discussing. I love writing that gives me a new perspective on a book/movie/video game I thought I had figured out and I guess I thought there would be a bigger market for that sort of thing. Oh well, I think my work has value.

But with my new salary coming soon, I can see and accept that I shouldn’t be charging for this newsletter. It was very sweet of those friends and family to support my work in that way for no benefit in return, although I wonder how much having a benefitless paid tier has actually hampered my growth over the past two years. In any case thank you to Ian, Mary, David, Aunt Susan, Grammie, Lauren, and Barbara. I appreciate it so much but I’m deactivating paid subscriptions as we move into this new phase.

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When my dream of writing for a glossy magazine was most fervent, I absolutely hated writing. Every sentence was pain to wring out of myself. The end goal was the only thing. To use a threadbare cliche, I didn’t want to write, I wanted to have written. I had no respect for the process and I didn’t have any sense of fun. I wanted every single thing I wrote to be monumental, which of course meant, though I didn’t realize it at the time, a monument to me. I couldn’t see a given piece of writing as simply one part of a body of work, some of which would inevitably be better or worse than others. I couldn’t fathom writing as something that I would do, and do, and do again. Because that is what a vocation is. Work is something we seek to complete. A vocation is what we return to, something that, if we’re lucky, never ends.

I no longer mind that my writing will not be my work. I hardly think I’m the best writer out there. But it matters to me that I do it and enough of you like my stuff that I don’t feel totally deluded. Now, when I don’t expect anything to come of it beyond the process and the finished product, it feels right. In two weeks I’ll start my new job because I have to earn money. But that doesn’t change anything. I will still have my vocation.

I’ll leave you with a passage from Natalia Ginzburg’s essay “My Vocation,” which is admittedly about novel-writing not essays:

Sometimes I would think that I had not been so unfortunate in my life and that I was unjust when I accused destiny of never having shown me any kindness, because it had given me my three children and my vocation. Besides, I could not imagine my life without my vocation. It was always there, it had never left me for a moment, and when I believed that it slept its vigilant, shining eyes were still watching me.

Such is my vocation. It does not produce much money and it is always necessary to follow some other vocation simultaneously in order to live. Though sometimes it produces a little, and it is very satisfying to have money because of it—it is like receiving money and presents from the hands of someone you love. Such is my vocation. I do not, I repeat, know much about the value of the results it has given me or could give me: or it would be better to say that I know the relative though certainly not the absolute value of the results it have already obtained. When I write something I usually think it is very important and that I am a very fine writer. I think this happens to everyone. But there is one corner of my mind in which I know very well what I am, which is a small, a very small writer. I swear I know it. But that doesn’t matter much to me. Only, I don’t want to think about names: I can see that if I am asked ‘a small writer like who?’ it would sadden me to think of the names of other small writers. I prefer to think that no one has ever bee like me, however small, how much a mosquito or a flea of a writer I may be. The important thing is to be convinced this really is your vocation, your profession, something you will do all your life.

Thank you all for reading these last few years. I appreciate it immensely. Talk to you soon.

here’s Sophie