🎉Announcing The Green Room: Season 2🎉
We’re getting tricked out for sophomore year.
The Big News
Welcome back to The Green Room in 2022. I got big plans, Jerry! Big plans!
Some of those plans include:
PAID SUBSCRIPTIONS - The Green Room is going pro, friends. Monthly and yearly subscription options will be available, with a second Founding Member tier also available (with added bonus benefits).
MORE! MORE! MORE! - Over the last year, I’ve grown to thoroughly enjoy Substack and learned how to structure my daily writing to avoid internal labor strikes. What this means is I’ll post more.
CURATED STORY PROJECTS - In addition to extra content, subscribers will also receive unique essays, short stories, and sample chapters from a series of themed projects I’ll be working on, including:
The Blunder Years (working title) - coming-of-age stories set in 1991-1992, when I was a middle schooler in Southeast Portland;
A Dreamer’s Guide to the Rose City, a guide to places around my hometown;
An in-progress memoir about life with my wife, Mindy, who died in 2013.
NEW MEDIUMS - Substack has options to dabble in podcasting and YouTube. I’m considering concepts for both this year.
WRITING GROUPS - I am now certified by Amherst Writers & Artists to lead AWA groups and will be looking to wind some up in 2022. (If you’re curious about this, or know someone who might be, let me know!)
Whether you subscribe or stick with the free follow, you’ll still receive premium hand-crafted stories and essays in your email inbox, fresh from the metaphorical printer.
(Just some might be behind a paywall.)
Why This Matters
I have wanted to be a writer since I was eleven. Since then, I’ve worked all sorts of other jobs, but I’ve held this dream all the while: to make a living with my writing.
Except ever since then, opportunities for writers have dwindled away. Newsrooms have been sharked and shuttered. Alt-weeklies barely limp by. The publishing industry now resembles the rest of American society, where top earners make astronomically more than the middle and beginner tiers. Celebrity matters more than craft.
Yet the calling I felt when I was eleven is a lifelong endeavor. Storycraft, wording, grammar: these are structures which take devotion, time, and a trained and peculiar eye to master.
“Writing is a marathon, not a sprint,” legendary literary agent Kathy Helmers told me when I was 24. The metaphor stuck with me, and I set my hope in this field to improve day-by-day and peak sometime in my 50s and 60s.
I won’t reach that hope alone. I need support from readers like you, who value good writing and the time it takes to cultivate.
Back in mid-August, the Yankees and White Sox played a Major League Baseball game at the Field of Dreams in Dyersville, Iowa, for the first time.
I like baseball, but I’m not a kid or elderly, so I rarely watch games. I tuned in for this one, though, and I’m pretty sure even the coldest hearts were melted when the players emerged from the outfield stalks.
The Field of Dreams is best known through the 1989 film, which tells the story of Ray Kinsella, an Iowa farmer who hears a voice telling him to build a baseball diamond in a field of corn.
If you build it, he will come.
An author imagines and types out a story. A diamond is carved from a cornfield. A film is shot. Forty years later, the Sox and Yanks are wandering out through rows, goggle-eyed, and hundreds of thousands of grown men are weeping.
So, okay, The Green Room isn’t the Field of Dreams. But it’s my own kind of field, my own sort of shop. It’s a place to work my craft and entertain the folks who hear or read my stories. And also to earn some scratch.
Over the last year, as I’ve considered taking the Green Room pro, those whispered words have become a theme and I believe if I build it, they will come.
I’ve been generous with my words all of my career, but automation and outsourcing can’t do what I do. Substack is one new service allowing writers like me a chance to survive while still allowing artistic freedom. After 30 years pursuing this dream, growing my skill, and learning from craftsmen in other trades to value my gifts, I also believe what I make is vital and beautiful enough earn our family a living.
I hope you agree, and I hope you’ll join along, and I hope this is one more step on the journey to telling you stories for decades to come.
Welcome to Season 2 of the Green Room.
YAY! Excited for more words from you and love the pep talk at the end - at least that's how I'm taking it!