If you think that this writing is practicable, and that you could make your living by it - that you could, if needs be, support a wife - then by all means write. But you must work. Work and drudge. Begin at the bottom of the ladder and work upwards.1
And I wanted to be a writer. Almost everybody was a writer. Not everybody thought they could be a dentist or an automobile mechanic but everybody knew they could be a writer. Of those fifty guys in the room, probably fifteen of them thought they were writers. Almost everybody used words and could write them down, i.e., almost everybody could be a writer. But most men, fortunately, aren't writers, or even cab drivers, and some men—many men-unfortunately aren't anything.2
I could have been someone.3
Hello readers,
This is what I’m planning to write here in 2025.
At the beginning, my writing on Substack ranged far and wide and was rather scattered and confusing - it may well still be.
Nevertheless, I’ve been sending you three pieces a month for a while now:
Rover’s Almanac: a monthly metaphorical contemplation.
Roving: a collection of morsels, titbits and scraps.
Book of Travels: selected highlights from a week in the life of our family escapades.
Plus one or two additional articles here and there.
Substack itself is entering the enshitification4 stage, but there is still quality to be found, and read. I’m going to stick with it for now.
My focus now is to tell the story of our first year of life-in-a-van more comprehensively, from the beginning, in a cohesive way.
This is usually called a book.
If I do write a book it may mean a movement away from Substack and into a more traditional manner of publishing - we’ll see.
I need to focus my writing time so I will let go of the Rover’s Almanac for now and perhaps merge Roving and Book of Travels into one offering.
What will you get for your subscription money? A monthly romp with us in the van detailing our ongoing adventures, and a first look at whatever emerges as I open a channel for communication with book publishers.
Currently, twenty-six of you are paid subscribers, enriching me by £153 a month. I don’t write for money, but I do need money, to buy diesel for the van and fish fingers for the kids, so your donations and subscriptions are much appreciated.
Thanks for reading.
The Rover.
The Longest Journey by E. M. Forster (1907).
Factotum by Charles Bukowski (1975).
Well so could anyone.
Fairytale of New York written by Jem Finer and Shane MacGowan and recorded by their Irish trad-rock band the Pogues, featuring English singer-songwriter Kirsty MacColl on vocals (1987).
Enshittification, also known as crapification and platform decay, is a pattern in which online products and services decline in quality. Initially, vendors create high-quality offerings to attract users, then they degrade those offerings to better serve business customers, and finally degrade their services to users and business customers to maximise profits for shareholders.
Canadian-British blogger Cory Doctorow coined the neologism enshittification in 2022, though he was not the first to describe and label the concept.
It’s the Notes feature on Substack which is the real toilet. It wasn’t there when I started writing, or at least wasn’t featured so prominently, and is nothing more than an endorphin-fuelled social-media doom-scroll packed full of porn and mentally-retarded fascists (both left and right).