Everything Old Is New Again

Just over twenty-five years ago, during a particularly tumultuous time in my young life, I found myself falling behind on my personal correspondence. Maybe it would help me keep it together, I thought, if I could write multiple people all at once? So I started an email list for my personal updates, told some friends about it and put a sign-up form on my personal web site … and on the first of October, 1997, I sent my first, trivial little note out into the world.

I called the mailing-list-slash-journal Nine Lives, after a quote in what was then (and all these years later, is still) my favorite poem: “Curiosity”, by Alastair Reid.

... Let them be
nine-lived and contradictory,
curious enough to change, prepared to pay
the cat-price, which is to die
and die again and again,
each time with no less pain.

I was twenty-seven when I started writing Nine Lives, and I was a mess: traumatized, undiagnosed neurodivergent, and as-yet unmedicated. I was a raw nerve exposed by a broken tooth, learning how to human in real time by trial and a whole lot of error; I knew all about ‘the cat price’. I imagine a lot of people who read my posts did so just for the soap-opera quality of my life, like rubbernecking at a train wreck.

I still have those journal entries from 1997. I know, because I happened to mention it, that nine days after my first entry I had seventy-eight email subscribers. When I shut the mailing list down four years later, I had over two thousand, just from word of mouth. No platforms, no algorithms, no marketing. You can’t go home again, I know — but gosh, do I miss living in a world where that was possible.

The irony of course was that, far from streamlining my personal correspondence, the responses coming in from both friends and strangers quickly ballooned it. In self-defense I ended up creating a bulletin-board style forum where Nine Lives readers could talk with me and each other. Pool soon took on a life of its own, becoming a lovely little place where a few hundred people hung out and had lively, interesting conversations. It outlasted Nine Lives by quite a few years, until the late aughts when social media sites like Facebook and Twitter finally siphoned off enough attention that it began to stagnate.

2001 was the last year I regularly wrote to Nine Lives. I stopped journalling online primarily because of other peoples’ privacy: in late 2000 I’d started a serious relationship with someone who had two young children … and a wife. A year later the five of us were all living together, and I couldn’t keep talking about my life with the same unbridled honesty when so much of it involved one adult who wanted to keep her life private and two children who couldn’t consent to a breach of theirs. So I stopped writing anything deeply personal.

Twenty years passed. My partner’s first marriage ended, the kids grew up, and I slowly realized that once again I was free to write whatever I wanted. The question then became … what did I want to write, now? And also, would anyone even care to listen? The internet of today is very different from the one of two decades ago.

So, it turns out, am I. Reading those posts now, I barely recognize myself in some of them. Although it does make me feel absurdly old, I think it’s a good thing; it means I have, in fact, been “curious enough to change.”

My early-fifties life is (mercifully for me) not nearly as dramatic as my late twenties were. The people who followed my headlong, whiplash love life in the original Nine Lives and lost track of me thereafter would likely be astonished to learn I’ve now managed to maintain the same primary relationship for twenty-two years and counting. If you’re here for the disaster rubbernecking, I’ll probably be a disappointment.

On the other hand, I have a quarter-century more wisdom and insight, and I think — I hope — that’s worth something.

A cat minority of one
is all that can be counted on
to tell the truth.

I’m still feeling out the full answer to ‘what do I want to write now’, though I’ve known for some years that top of that list is a novel series: I’ve got a third of an epic science fantasy written (and rewritten, twice, because once again I’m learning by doing), and I have no desire to give that goal up or even significantly slow it down. So I won’t be one of those people who sends out newsletters twice a week (or more!); I’m too busy fictionalizing. Twice a month, maybe? Perhaps a bit more at first, for momentum’s sake. We’ll see.

But fiction alone doesn’t satiate all the same yearnings that personal nonfiction does. I still find myself wanting to tell real life stories, it’s just that now they’re less ‘weekly soap opera’, and more ‘thoughtful reflection amidst a larger context’. (The best of the original Nine Lives entries — the ones still worth reading, in my opinion — were the ones where I did offer reflection and context.) I like the way that the process of explaining things to other people sometimes pushes me to better insights than I come up with alone in my own head.

Beyond that, I may sometimes just write, you know, thoughts about things. I can’t tell you which things yet because I won’t know until I get there. I do think pretty much constantly about humans, though — what we do and why we do it — so that’s likely to be a recurring theme.

... To distrust
what is always said, what seems,
to ask odd questions, interfere in dreams,
smell rats, leave home, have hunches ...

One aspect of all this is exactly the same as 1997: I’m here to find the people who want to hear what I have to say. That’s it, that’s the plan. If I’m really lucky, some of you will offer up kind and insightful replies, and this will become a bit of a community, like it did once before. Perhaps a few of you will stick around and buy a book of mine someday.

But directly monetizing (ugh how I hate that word) this newsletter is not my goal. I have paid subscriptions turned on for exactly one reason: because (knowing how tech companies tend to operate) I suspect if I turn it off, Substack will bury my letter and make it undiscoverable, thereby defeating the point of being here (as opposed to blogging to a scant dozen people on my own web site, because the internet signal-to-noise ratio is so horrid now, and no one knows it exists).

(Update, August 2024: Since writing this, I exited the Substack “Nazi bar”, which ultimately led to a substantial increase in my own costs to produce Nine Lives. Also, I’m trying to value my own time more? So I am now actively asking readers to subscribe or donate to defray my direct and indirect costs. If that’s not something you can afford, though, you can still subscribe for free.)

Whether you contribute financially or not, if do you like my writing, I would very much appreciate word-of-mouth, in whatever technological form that takes this year. If you’re one of my people, then transitively you probably know someone else who is also my people, and if you could help connect me to them in the midst of this fragmented discordant techno-cacophony, that would be lovely. Thank you.

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