Hi! It's Time For a Fresh Start!

As with so many of these things, there's no one answer.

It’s time for a change

From Oct 1st, I will no longer be posting to Patreon, where I've been sharing my writing to paying subscribers for more than three years. Instead, any and all writing I share with the world will live exclusively right here on my Substack, a newsletter platform designed for writers. 

If you were already a patron – thank you! – you will have received your first month's Substack subscription absolutely free, and you won't need to do any signing up in advance. I’ve punched your details into the Substack computer (bio bop boop!) and you'll continue getting updates from me as you have been doing except, hopefully, they'll be better. After that first month you'll have the option to stay on as a free subscriber – more on which below – or you can sign up to get full access, and support me, for $6/month or $60/year or $99/year as a founder member. 

What you will need to do is to cancel your Patreon subscription, which you can do via the app or on Patreon.com, by heading to My Memberships.

Quality vs quantity

But why am I making this move? And why now? In trying to figure out how I'm going to word this post – on why I'm leaving a platform that has, along with my subscribers, been very good to me over the past three-plus years. I've read a lot of other creators' posts on the same topic: what they said when they decided to switch from Patreon to Substack. 

A lot of them talk about how the Substack platform itself is more intuitive from a reader's point of view (it is; the layout of Substack itself more closely resembles a blog or website, and does, in my opinion, make it easier for subscribers and readers to go through previous posts, to search for topics that might interest them or simply to see the range of writing a contributor has been putting out there).

There's even a Substack Reader, which allows you to see any and all Substack publications you're subscribed to, in the one place. It reminds me of my old beloved Google Reader, which I used for years to read updates from the myriad fashion blogs I once followed.

Some other creators, like Tsh Oxenreider, talk about how Substack makes it a lot easier to build a community – to have interesting and fun and dynamic conversations with people through Substack's "Threads" function, something that simply isn't available on Patreon, and honestly I don't think Patreon's comments really lend themselves to getting any kind of back and forth off the ground. Tsh also touches on something that I really like about Substack: its simplicity. It's super easy to sign up, as paying or non-paying subscriber. It's super easy to find something you might want to read. 

I also think it offers a better user experience than Patreon, which feels a bit clunky to manage sometimes, whether through the app and the site itself. Above and beyond all of that though, switching to Substack offers me a chance for a fresh start. 

I've been running my Patreon for more than three years, and over those three years I have added, frankly, far too many tiers to keep up with. I have committed to writing four pieces a week (and I frequently fall short, for which I am sorry), along with sending physical post out to 60+ subscribers each and every month; and writing a short story for $25+ subscribers. 

I promised honest and accurate money diaries, detailing each and every cent I'm spending, something that has become more and more difficult since getting married and sharing finances with my husband who, though he has an online presence of sorts (an Instagram, and a Facebook where he shares terrible Dad jokes), is not an internet person and has not signed up to have his own finances exposed to 1,000-odd subscribers. Switching to Substack will allow me to re-evaluate what I want to write more of; what feels valuable to me; and what no longer feels important to share with the world. 

So the plan is this: I'll be writing less stuff, but it'll be better. Each and every week, each and every subscriber – whether paid or unpaid – will get a kind of weekly digest: an op-ed written by me on a topic that feels important or pertinent to me, or something that's in the news (I might have written about Gabby Petito, for example, and our collective obsession with missing pretty white women, and missing pretty white women only; or the sheer frustration of watching supermodel Doutzen Kroes – crucially, not an epidemiologist – use her massive platform to extoll the virtues of not getting the Covid vaccine). 

Every paid subscriber will then get a more personal essay, also once a week. A rumination on new motherhood, maybe; observations from life in middle America; a piece of fiction that came to me at 1am in the morning and simply had to be written down. 

So… What's that about money?

Here's the other big difference. On Substack, you'll have two subscriptions to choose from. 

The free sign-up, which will get you a weekly digest; or the paid subscription, which will cost you $6/month (or $60 per annum if you sign up for the whole year), and will get you both the weekly digest and the weekly personal essay. 

You'll also be able to sign up as a founding member – which essentially means that you want to support my work and have a little extra to give. You'll get everything I publish on Substack and you can choose how much you want to pay for that privilege (the suggested amount will be $99 annually, but you can crank that up or down as you see fit). 

I ndeireadh na dála…

I want to create better work. I want to be able to build more of a community, where we can get together to discuss what we're reading; the shows we're watching; how we've been affected by the US travel ban, or maternity restrictions in Irish hospitals (barbaric, at this stage, honestly); what strong feelings we're having about the Dune trailer.

I want all of that for us, and I think Substack will be a better place to offer it.

I hope you'll sign up over there, at whatever level fits your budget and reading capacity – of course, there'll be a very obvious "unsubscribe" button at the bottom of every email newsletter if you're not into it – and that you'll consider supporting me, especially once you notice how great this new me is going to be. (SO GREAT.)

Thank you so much for coming this far with me – I can't wait to see how much further we can go together. xo