What '5AM StoryTalk's' First Year on Substack Taught Me

Happy anniversary to everyone who helped make this arts newsletter such a successful and meaningful creative conversation for this past year!

Excuse the extra article this week. But I need to point out that it’s the first anniversary of the launch of 5AM StoryTalk – which I have, from the beginning, described as a place to talk about stories in all their forms, the craft that goes into them, and the role art plays in our lives.

This feels like something worth commemorating, and so I thought I would take the opportunity to do so in enumerated fashion. I like lists, what can I say?

1. Thank You!

And I don’t just mean to my paid subscribers, though I am immensely grateful that so many of you have found my writing here valuable enough to your lives to purchase monthly and yearly subscriptions. When I launched 5AM StoryTalk, the hope was to create an inclusive community of arts lovers keen to talk about the arts in new and exciting ways. Because of you, this has been a largely successful endeavor. Look what you helped make happen:

2.  Why I Thought I Launched 5AM StoryTalk

This is how I answered the question “Why am I doing this?” when I wrote up this newsletter’s About section last April:

Because it brings me joy to talk about the arts, it’s really that simple. But also, the idea of helping some navigate the business of art is certainly appealing, too.

That said, talking about the arts is an education in itself. By expressing ideas to you, by putting my philosophies into a kind of structure, by answering your questions about craft and the business of art, I improve myself as an artist. In other words, this relationship is symbiotic.

3. Why I Now Realize I Really Launched 5AM StoryTalk

The thing is, I was wrong about why I was doing this. I understand that now. So, here’s some real talk:

In 2020, Covid blew up our lives and, with it, the still-unstable writing career I was building for myself outside of America. Then, my father died. Then, my family decided the best thing for it was to move from the United Kingdom — which we loved — to the stability Australia promised. It was a jarring transition, especially since we arrived in Oz at the start of another long-term lockdown. While my career had many glorious high points during this time, including the publication of my debut novel Psalms for the End of the World, all of the chaos took a toll. My writing slowed. I felt sluggish whenever I felt in from of my computer screen, my fingers reluctant to work. Whereas I used to be able to churn out first drafts of scripts in one to three weeks, now the process dragged on forever to the point I almost didn’t want to start in the first place. New fiction felt similarly exhausting to work on.

Something had to change.

That’s when I launched 5AM StoryTalk. It began as a passion project, yes, but maybe it was more of a creative exercise. I needed to write for myself. I also needed to force myself to write at a clip I had become unaccustomed to. And the best way for me to do both was to talk about the thing I loved most – writing and art in general.

In some ways, I now understand it was the equivalent of a film hero working their way back from a terrible injury. It was painful. It was ugly at times. But slowly, begrudgingly, my creative instincts began to cooperate again. Flab turned into rock-hard muscle again, you might say (incidentally, the only rock-hard muscle I’ve ever had). Article after article flew from my imagination on to your computer screens and devices. And as that happened, the screenwriting and fiction writing began to feel less daunting, too. My mind and body were suddenly back and, with it, my mental health began to improve dramatically, too -not a bad side effect.

You could even say, 5AM StoryTalk helped creatively rehabilitate me after the worst stretch of trauma in my life…because it did.

4. What to Expect from Year 2 of 5AM StoryTalk

I have endless ambitions for this newsletter, but my personal life and professional life as a screenwriter and novelist keep getting in the way. So, I’m going to stop prognosticating about what’s to come, if that’s okay. Well, beyond more of what I’ve been doing – talking about who we are through the lens of pop-culture. This includes my artist-on-artist conversation series, which I can at least discuss with some concreteness at this point. Here’s a list of the artists I’m speaking with throughout 2024 (it expands weekly, so check out Notes for updates from me): Scott Frank (creator, “The Queen’s Gambit”), Derek Kolstad (writer, John Wick), Lena Waithe (creator, “The Chi”), David Shore (creator, “House”), Kelly Sue DeConnick (comic book writer, Bitch Planet), Amy Seimetz (creator, “The Girlfriend Experience”), Brian Duffield (writer-director, No One Will Save You), Colleen Doran (comic book writer/artist, A Distant Soil), Nick Antosca (creator, “The Act”), Louis Bayard (author, The Pale Blue Eye), Kay Cannon (writer, Pitch Perfect trilogy), John Rogers (creator, “Leverage”), Liz W. Garcia (writer-director, Space Cadet), Tony Ayres (creator, “Clickbait”), Dan Sterling (creator, “Animal Control”), LaToya Morgan (creator, "Duster"), and Michael Brandt (creator, “Chicago Fire”) 

In addition, I’ll soon be joined by these great film/TV minds: Christine Vachon (producer, Killer Films), Franklin Leonard (founder, The Black List), and Maureen Ryan (author, Burn It Down: Power, Complicity, And A Call For Change In Hollywood).

5. Speaking of Which, I Should Remind You This Newsletter Takes a Lot of Work

5AM StoryTalk is a labor of love on my part. I hope it matters to you, I hope it makes you think, I hope it inspires you in some small way on your own creative journey. Much of it will — and always will — remain free for those who dream of becoming professional artists themselves but cannot afford a luxury like a Substack subscription.

But I need to point out that I’ve brought you more than 200 articles in a year through my labor and informed by my twenty years as a professional writer and fifteen years as a professional artist. I hope you recognize that has value. In other words, if you have resources, please consider supporting my work and writing here at 5AM StoryTalk. Here are some pay-what-you-can anniversary discounts on paid subscriptions for you (they’ll expire in about two weeks):

10% discount on monthly/yearly subscriptions

20% discount on monthly/yearly subscriptions

30% discount on monthly/yearly subscriptions

40% discount on yearly subscriptions

50% discount on yearly subscriptions

60% student discount on yearly subscriptions (you’ll need an educational institution’s email address to use this)

Please note it’s possible you’ll have to unsubscribe from a free subscription to use these discounts. It’s a quirk of Substack’s, not mine; sorry.

Oh, and if you don’t feel like paying for a subscription, but you do feel like showing your gratitude for what I do here, consider buying me a coffee!

6. In Closing, This Community Is Only As Successful As We All Make It

I get it, there’s clearly an element of salesmanship that seems built into this statement. I want you to go be my little foot soldiers and help me grow my arts newsletter. I’d distrust that, too. But if you’ve been here for the past year or any fraction of it, then you know I spend a lot of time trying to communicate with you and creating opportunities for you to talk to each other about art. What I mean is, I think I’m clearly trying to do my part to keep up my end of this bargain.

If you feel that’s true, please consider evangelizing for 5AM StoryTalk elsewhere on this platform and on social media. You can do this by sharing articles and essays from me that you love. Or better yet, because it benefits you, go to my Leaderboard, grab the link there, and spread the word that way. Every free or paid subscription you rack up contributes to you earning comp’d months of paid subscriptions - granting you full access to everything I do here.

Most of all, thank you for being here, thank you for reading, and thank you for making yourself heard and seen in 5AM StoryTalk’s comments sections. See you around, fellow arts and coffee lovers!