I wanted to start off at the beginning this time by saying hello to my readers on Substack and in the other world, who also sometimes read my stuff. I know I’ve been gone a little while. I was busy with my new rebrand and my job, but before we start, I just wanted to say I missed you guys, and if you’re reading this, I’m glad you’re here.
The other world is The Grey Strand, and it isn’t just a new name painted on the old door. It’s a house, the place where I keep everything I create, because none of it ever sat comfortably in one category. A grey strand runs through every page, and if you hold it and pull, it plays a quiet note that climbs as it stretches. You can follow it from room to room, or ignore it and wander. The newest work is always in the Front Room. The Grey Reduction lives in the Kitchen, The Stew gets served in the Dining Room, and Serving Seconds has the Breakfast Nook. I brought the articles and episodes I made before the move, and none of them stopped belonging because I rearranged the house around them.
None of the rooms are the same kind of thing, and that was the point. The Office, where the research receipts live so anybody can check my sources, is under the same roof as a tarot Mirror in the Bathroom, because of course there is one. Wander far enough and you’ll find my books in the Study, older spiritual texts in the Library that you can read for free, sound in the Basement, tools and software in the Garage, and games and worlds out in the Back Yard. The Living Room has The Calling, and one room doesn’t have a name at all. I wanted one place where technology and mysticism, serious questions and strange little experiments, could all live together without having to agree on everything, with one strand running through all of it. The house puts it better than I can: take what’s useful, leave what isn’t.
I’m doing things a little differently this time around, too. I’m trying to find a new groove. I don’t know how successful these new methods will be, and there’s a pretty good chance some of them won’t work the way I hope. But I know myself well enough to know that I’d never really relax if I didn’t ask the questions in the first place. Why am I doing things this way? Does it still make sense? Have I gotten so used to doing something that I’ve stopped considering whether there’s a better way? I’m not interested in changing things just for the sake of changing them, but I’m also not interested in spending the rest of my life doing something a certain way simply because that’s how I’ve always done it. So I’m experimenting a little, and you’re going to see some of that happening right here.
I have one tradition I’ll be starting in The Grey Reduction from here on out. Usually it’ll go at the top of the page, but I’m explaining it today, and later explanations will be shorter. I choose to have a moment of peace and reflection with all of you before you get into the meat of the article. I took mine while I was working on this one.
It’s a few minutes when creating, producing, and accomplishing can all go fuck off for a while. It doesn’t have to be good for anything.
How long is up to you. Five minutes is a good place to start if you want a number, but one minute counts, and so does twenty. If a timer helps you stop checking the clock, set one. You can sit in plain silence, or you can go down to the Basement, where the Frequency Room has free tones that play as long as you want. If you go that way, use stereo headphones or earbuds. The tones are binaural, so each ear gets a slightly different one, and a phone speaker mashes them together.
Get comfortable. Let your breathing do whatever it’s doing, and watch it without steering it. Notice where you are, the chair, the room, whatever’s around you. Your mind will probably wander off somewhere. When you catch it, come back, and don’t give yourself a hard time about it. There’s nothing you’re supposed to feel, and there’s nothing to get right. Take as long as you want, and come back up whenever you’re ready.
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Welcome back. If you took the pause with me, thank you for trusting me with some of your time. And if you came straight down here, welcome too. You’re right on time.
The first time I sat down at a microphone to make Serving Seconds, I caught myself wondering why I was suddenly breathing manually. Every episode since has been easier to make, and every episode I can hear a little more of what I want to change. I still sit down and become intensely aware of every single thing my mouth is doing.
For information on how this and every one of my articles is made, read: Who Do You Think Wrote This? The whole process is in there.
The easier part is mostly the technical side settling down. I know how the chair needs to sit now, how close to get, and where the buttons are, and I don’t have to invent the whole process again every time I hit record. When I stop trying to push every sentence through the microphone like the microphone has personally offended me, I sound closer to myself. Lighter works better. Slower works better. Leaving a little space between thoughts works better than filling every silence because there’s another sentence waiting on the page.
The part I can’t unhear is the reading. I write the whole script first, so my eyes always know where I’m going before my mouth gets there, and sometimes I can almost hear the next sentence waiting in my voice while I’m still finishing the current one. I can hear the difference between me talking and me reading something I wrote specifically to sound like me talking. It’s close. It just isn’t the same thing.
Which would be easier to fix if I enjoyed listening to myself. I don’t. I can listen long enough to hear what needs work, and then suddenly every other job in the house becomes fascinating. Maybe the trash needs to go out. Maybe the counter needs wiping. Maybe the refrigerator has developed an emergency that requires my immediate attention. Some of that is probably the normal weirdness of hearing my own recorded voice.
If you want the next one when it lands, it shows up by email.
None of this is a complaint about repetition. I don’t want to wake up every morning and reconsider my entire tooth-brushing philosophy. But familiarity doesn’t check whether the groove is useful before helping you slide into it.
I’m starting to wonder how often I call something natural when what I really mean is familiar. Sometimes they’re the same thing, and a way of working feels right because it actually fits me. But the script has a lot of repetitions behind it, and the thing I’m thinking about trying instead, an outline with a pacing timer, would show up with nothing but instructions. Of course one of them feels easier. One of them has practice. That probably isn’t only a podcast problem, or only mine.
Then again, the script might simply be the right way. It keeps the episode on the rails, holds the pacing, keeps me accurate, and lets me say the exact thing I meant instead of something close to it. And if part of what bothers me is just my own recorded voice, changing the script probably won’t fix that part. An outline could easily make things worse, too. I could ramble. I could fill the gaps with ums and you-knows, lose a line I’d have been proud of, and spend a lot longer editing. I don’t know that any of that will happen. I don’t know that it won’t.
If I try something else, it deserves enough practice to get a real hearing, because putting a first attempt up against a pile of repetitions isn’t fair to either of them. Even then, I’m not sure trying it settles anything. Maybe some episodes want a script and some want an outline, which is more or less what happened with the house: nothing I’d made got thrown out, it just got rooms. Or maybe I end up right back where I started and glad of it.
I could have planned Serving Seconds for six months. I could have watched every podcast video on YouTube until the algorithm assumed I owned a radio station. I still wouldn’t know what I know now, because there was only one way to hear what I sound like reading my own words, through my own microphone, in my own room.
I had to make one. And the first way wasn’t wrong. I needed the script. I needed something sturdy enough to carry me through an episode while the chair, the microphone, and apparently my own breathing were all still new to me. If I had started with a blank page and the instruction to just be natural, there’s a decent chance Episode One would still be recording. The script got Serving Seconds made.
When I think I’ve found a better way to do something, I have a habit of looking back and quietly turning the earlier version into a mistake. I know better now, so apparently I should have known better then. But I only know lighter sounds better because I heard heavier. I know slower sounds more like me because I heard myself rush. I can hear myself reading because I read, episode after episode, until I could hear it.
I know better now because I did it then.
No ask attached to any of this. The jar is there if you want it.
So, I think I need to cut another groove beside the first one. What I want to try next keeps the structure and changes what kind it is: an outline and a pacing timer, with the talking points coming up on the screen as the timer runs, things I want to reach instead of lines I have to read, so I’d be finding the words while I’m talking. Maybe that’s a new mode in my teleprompter app, or maybe it’s something separate. Either way, it doesn’t exist yet, and I haven’t tried it. And if the whole thing sends me back to the script, then the script earned that.
A clumsy first try wouldn’t prove much on its own. If it works, I do it again. If it sounds terrible, that is useful too.
The rest of what I make, finished and otherwise, lives at The Grey Strand.