We need to talk

It's not you, it's me. But also, it's you.

Reader, I love you. Truly. I came to substack three years ago looking for a new creative direction, and I found it. And I found readers. Good looking people. People who laughed at my jokes. I learned to do difficult things, like meet my own self-imposed deadlines. For three years, every Friday morning at 10.30am, you could count on something I’d written pinging into your inbox. Given my prior history of dilettantism and sloth, that makes me very proud.

I started here as a (relatively successful) indie fiction writer trying to figure out my path. Three years later, it turns out that I’ve no real interest in writing fiction any more, which is lucky because on the way I got cancelled, lost my reviewing gigs, and had my reputation unfairly trashed; even former friends from that world no longer talk to me.

Getting cancelled was such a frightening and upsetting experience, but I’m glad it happened. Sometimes you’ve got to burn your bridges, to force yourself into a new realm. Jump or be pushed.

Which is kind of how I’ve been feeling about substack of late. It’s gone from exciting DIY publishing to a place where you just sort of have to be because everyone else is here. But my subscriber numbers have flattened, I’ve probably topped out my earning potential, the individual paid subscription model doesn’t really work anyway—oh and now we have the AI robots crawling around the place, harvesting our eggs and accusing us of not being real people.

To which I say, what in the Philip K Dick? A robot’s going to tell me if my writing is human enough? How would it know?

Look, I could bang on about the AI wars and how “Pangram” (demonic name), substack’s new robot bestie, is gonna screw us all over. But we all already know this, and most of us are still going to keep hanging around hoping that somehow it’ll all work out for the best. Which, to be fair, it might.

But on the other hand, it might just slowly stifle my personal creative freedom until I no longer have any love or passion for my work and I'm nothing but a hollowed out shell of an ex-artist.

So I want to try something new. And as it turns out, I’ve already got something new that I’ve been sitting on for a while, a way of making actual physical work and sharing it directly with people. So here it is.

Let me introduce you to The International Association of Time-Travelling Artists.

TIAOTTA is a membership organisation. You pay an annual fee (£50 in the UK and mainland Europe; £70 ROW) and sign up to the Association as a full member. You get a membership card and sew-on patch. You also get a quarterly newsletter, typed by me on my Princess-Matic, and posted to you, along with prints of my art and any other gifts I can muster.

It’s an old-fashioned postal club. Other than an initial email to request an application form, it’s an offline experience. You’ll get actual paper post from me every three months. And who knows what will come of that? There’ll be letters, a ‘classified’ section, and even a lonely hearts club, if members want one. Maybe we’ll organise real life meet ups and exchanges. You could join me on field trips to the UK’s cave art sites. We could set up in-person workshops and the TIAOTTA badge could get you access to all sorts of real-life experiences. Maybe some of you will start your own postal clubs and we can become a network. Or maybe it will just be a fun way to connect with a self-selected band of time-travelling artists.

The Princess-Matic was always destined for this

Here’s how to join: send an email to membershipsecretary@tiaotta.org with your full postal address and a brief (one sentence) statement of your reason for wanting to become a member. (Please don’t waffle—the Membership Secretary is very firm about the need for brevity.) An application pack will be posted out to you.

There are more detailed instructions here, should you require them. And if you have questions, please ask them in the comments of this post or DMs rather than emailing them to the Membership Secretary, who has enough on her plate.

I haven’t decided what to do with The Distractionist newsletter, although I am leaning towards shutting it down and archiving my posts offline. I’m going to pause paid subscriptions while I figure this out. If I close the newsletter you'll get a refund for the remainder of your paid subscription. If you want a refund sooner than that, email or DM me and I’ll sort it out for you, with love and gratitude.

I’ve also been thinking about making a book of the best Distractionist posts, including the essay that got me cancelled, and some new pieces that I think are funny. I guess I just want to make real life, physical things now, and share them with people directly.

If that sounds like fun to you, or if you are a person who travels in time or other dimensions as part of your creative practice, please do consider joining TIAOTTA. Did I mention you get a sew-on patch and a membership card? What more incentive do you need?

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