Told with chilling wit and razor-sharp irony, ‘The Doctor’s Version’ explores power, manipulation, and the ease with which evil can disguise itself as professionalism. Careaga delivers a compelling crime story in which the most dangerous person in the room isn’t the addict—it’s the man utterly convinced he’s the hero.
More than a crime story, it’s a masterclass in unreliable moral perspective.
I hope you’ll hop on over to Substack to give it a read.
My flash fiction piece, “Pancho Villa’s Revenge,” is the first story to grace the new literary magazine ‘Sunday Morning’
Yesterday saw the launch of a new literary magazine, Sunday Morning, which is edited by Iryna Somkina. As Iryna explained in a recent Friday Five on this site, this publication is intended to publish short pieces of fiction or poetry every Sunday morning–some “slice-of-life, domestic prose” short enough to be enjoyed over coffee, tea, or your Sunday morning drink of choice. So I was extremely happy when she chose my flash fiction piece, “Pancho Villa’s Revenge,” as the story to launch this new project.
The story is a slice-of-life tale of two brothers discussing family lore over glasses of whiskey. There may be a slice of real life infused into this story, like a zesty lemon peel twisted into a drink. I hope you’ll give it a read–even though it’s Monday now–and also hope you’ll keep track of Sunday Morning. I expect great things from this project in the Sundays to come.
When I embarked on this writing journey two-and-a-half years ago, in addition to reviving and repurposing this website from its former life as a marketing high ed blog, I also created a Substack account. All the cool kids were doing it, and I wanted to be among them. I was thinking I could simply automate a feed from this WordPress blog to push my content to “the stack,” as the cool kids call it.
After several attempts at automating post exports, it hasn’t worked out. The only thing that showed up whenever I attempted this was the header and any introductory text (see below). Nothing more.
This is what readers see when they click through one of the WordPress posts imported to Substack. But there’s no other content available beyond the header and subhead.
So instead of trying to dig into the coding and risk FUBARing this site, the Substack site, or both, I decided to use the Notes section of Substack to manually share snippets about something I’ve posted here.
I like the Notes function of Substack because it has more of a social media feel to it. It’s a bit like Twitter, which I like. When I open Notes, I can see what people I follow are sharing or talking about.
In Notes, writers will be able to post short-form content and share ideas with each other and their readers. Like our Recommendations feature, Notes is designed to drive discovery across Substack. But while Recommendations lets writers promote publications, Notes will give them the ability to recommend almost anything—including posts, quotes, comments, images, and links. Our goal is to foster conversations that inspire, enlighten, and entertain, while giving writers a powerful growth channel as these interactions find new audiences.
Glorious.
A lot of other writers use Notes as a social media-style means of updating readers with short items. Here’s a snap of my recent Notes activity:
Two recent Notes posted on my Substack.
I guess I’ll keep sharing links to things I post on this site to Substack Notes and hope a bit of traffic will trickle over from there.
Phenomenal growth
Since its founding in 2017, Substack’s growth has been phenomenal, with 35 million users (subscribers and authors) nine years later. Five million-plus of them pay money to read, view, or listen to content on Substack. (Substack recently added video and podcasting to its suite of offerings.) “Today, 52 newsletters on Substack earn at least $500,000+ annually,” reports Backlinko. “These newsletters are estimated to generate at least $40.2 million in subscription revenue.”
Historian Heather Cox Richardson’s “Letters from an American” is by far the most profitable, brining its author $5 million in annual subscriptions. Of course, Richardson, like practically every other Substacker I’m aware of, also offers a freebie option, but those who subscribe apparently receive additional content or other goodies.
Other journalists and writers are also cashing in. But I’m not one of them. I never intended my Substack to make any money, so I was surprised when a couple of months ago, one of my 42 subscribers pledged $50 in annual support. This pledge came, apparently, from the goodness of this person’s heart, since I offer no incentive for anyone to subscribe and never expected anyone to pay for content they can read for free. If anything, the way I use Substack–as a social media feed where I (mostly) share links to content not hosted on Substack–seems like a disincentive to subscribers.
Most writers on Substack I interact with aren’t there to make bank but to use the space as yet another platform for sharing their thoughts, stories, poetry, etc. Others are using the platform to host some very fine literary magazines.
Despite all the hype about Substack, I’m reluctant to do much more with my presence there. I have a well-established presence here on WordPress, with 200 or so subscribers, and also on Medium, where I have 963 subscribers. (I use Medium also as a place to cross-post from WordPress, and I do it manually and sporadically, and yet the subscriber count remains steady.) Then there’s Twitter (4,938 followers, many of them inactive) and my Facebook group “Andrew Careaga, writer,” which has 285 members. And Instagram and Threads and Bluesky and…
The point is, Substack may be the hot platform for writers right now, and there are a LOT of terrific writers on that platform. But there are still a lot of writers using WordPress, and a lot of good literary magazines use WordPress, too. There are also some terrific literary magazines are cropping up on Neocities, including Burial Magazine, Michigan City Review of Books, Mucky Mondays, and, coming very soon, Sunday Morning.
Writers can make money (in theory) from any platform, but Substack’s subscription model seems to hold some allure for some writers. And it’s nice that subscribers who want to pay writers for content are able to do so without much hassle. (Substack gets its share; of the $50 donated to me by a reader, Substack pocketed $8.10 of it.) Still, a lot of writers and online magazines continue to offer their content for free, on Substack and elsewhere, and that isn’t necessarily a bad thing.
In conclusion, I leave you with this note from one of the first writers I started following on Substack, Sherman Alexie, who is also one of the more active big-name authors I follow.
A recent note from writer Sherman Alexie, a veteran Substacker, about Substack’s growth. For more about his “haven for Nazis” comment, see this article.
‘Community has always been a thing for me, and I saw a chance to give back to some of the writers I admired.’
Ever had a case of the Mondays? Of course you have. But thanks to Shawn Scott Smith, a writer, editor, and pinball aficionado from North Carolina, you can get your week off to a better start by reading a poem or flash fiction piece selected and curated by Shawn via his online literary presence, Mucky Mondays.
Shawn Scott Smith
Shawn launched the project earlier this year, and it didn’t take long for him to fill his calendar for 2026. (I’m one of the lucky mucks to be included in Scott’s publication this year. Check out “Scenes from a Chinese Restaurant,” which Scott kindly nominated for a Best of the Net award.) He will solicit submissions for the 2027 lineup beginning in November.
An accomplished writer in his own right, Shawn’s first collection of poetry and short stories, Telemetry: Poems and Shorts 2014-2017, was published in 2018. His newest book, Atomic Number, contains 117 poems, each one titled after an element of the periodic table. (Check out a couple of poems from the collection.) He’s also been published in a bunch of literary magazines, including Alien Buddha, BULL, Burial Magazine, Dodo Eraser, and Hawkeye.
Read on to learn more about Shawn’s writing journey, the origin of Mucky Mondays, his pinball obsession, and more.
If you tend to hop around from project to project, or take interest in a variety of topics, or generate a ton of disparate ideas, or write in different genres and voices and styles, and wonder if you’re an oddball, well…
OK, maybe you’re an oddball. But maybe you’re also a creative type who can’t stick to one thing.
That’s not a bad thing, as author David Epstein (whose book Range: Why Generalists Triumph in a Specialized World ought to be on every writer’s reading list) points out in this 20-minute video. In fact, he writes, “your scattered interests might be your biggest creative advantage.” Take, for example, two British musicians who came of age in the late 1960s: David Bowie and Peter Frampton. As Epstein explains in the video, Frampton found his lane quickly as a guitar prodigy while Bowie was all over the place. Both achieved success, but one’s path was narrower than the other’s.
