Thanks and how to support this project.
Please share this writing with people who would like it.
Greetings,
Please consider this a quick note in-between the regularly scheduled “Focused Investigation” (the longer, more complex piece that is released Sunday at midnight Eastern Standard Time) and the “Scattered Thought.” (the shorter, simpler piece that is scheduled for release on Thursday at midnight, again, Eastern Standard Time.) My goal is to release these two pieces each week and keep at it for some time. What I absolutely do not wish to do is to release a huge number of pieces the first week and then get tired and release less and less as time goes on.
Again, two pieces a week. One short, one long, that is the goal.
However, from time to time, there may be something that I want to say and it seems best to send out an additional piece to cover it. Thus this third piece for this week.
How to help this out project out.
Thanks for your support. Thanks for reading this and the other pieces. After the first one was released an unexpected thing happened. A couple of you sent me money. Now money is a good thing to have. Even if I do not think much about money, my bill collectors and the landlord and the car insurance and the grocery store people and countless others do. So thank you for the pledges. Money is a good thing to have and I do need more of it and I have to learn to focus more on money. I really do. And while substack is a for-profit company that encourages writers to “monetize” their writing and charge money for their work, I had a plan in place. In my plan, the writing came first, and AFTER I had established a reputation for creating good writing with interesting content AND found an audience that appreciated the sort of writing I like to do, THEN I was going to start asking for money.
Honestly, I didn’t have the system set up to send the money to a bank, and in one case I even offered to return it. (The offer was actually declined. Thank you again.)
So here’s what I want if this is going to work well over the long term. Pardon the caps, I don’t want to be rude, BUT WHAT I NEED NOW IS READERSHIP. For this to work well, the pieces I write need to reach their audience. We live on an over crowded planet in the internet age. There ARE people out there who would love to read about Asian history, critical analysis of strange claims, history and pseudohistory and sorting the two out, and simply will not believe their eyes when they see what I have written. Now there might not be many of them, but they are out there. It is a big world and niche audiences are the big, new thing in media. The pieces just need to find those people and vice versa.
So please share these pieces in places where you think people might like them. If you have friends or know of a social media outlet or discussion forum where people might like something I wrote, please share it.
That’s what I would really like, and that is how you can really help make this work. Share these pieces with people who might like them. For this to work, over the next few months, I need to build up the subscriber list and try to get this writing to people who would appreciate it.
Two pieces a week, one long, one short, that is the goal here.
Having said that, I have six pieces up and in the pipeline, ready to go and am now prepared until April 21, and have started the next two big pieces. These include, for the longer “Focused Investigations,” a piece on pseudohistory, another on ninjas and ninja history, and, just to shake things up, a piece on Russ Meyer, the notorious exploitation film maker, and how he created the first modern porn film. After that I think I will return to writing a couple pieces on the San Francisco Tong Wars.
For lighter pieces, the “Scattered thoughts,” one on Chinese asylum seekers, another on misconceptions of Western and Chinese accomplishments, and a review of Augustus Roe’s book, Legendary Masters of the Martial Arts: Unraveling Fact from Fiction. After that, I am not sure what I will write about, but I do look forward to sharing samplings from my ninja book collection with you, my readers.
Thanks.
Peter Huston