Weekly Digest 008
Week of 7/14- 7/20/2025 - The Fighter's Edition
The Weekly Digest is a weekly (no shit?) update that captures all the topics that aren’t worthy of their own post. At the end of each week, I share a collection of thoughts, recommendations, and links. Like everything else I write, it's awesome, but it may be too long for email so make sure you click through.
🤬 Fight! Fight! Fight!
Several years ago (when this joke would have been topical), I tweeted something to the effect of “Haters gonna… bring up some pretty valid criticisms, that you should probably reflect on.” The initial promise of the internet was a free exchange of ideas. Without going down the rabbithole of why that didn’t happen as planned1, it’s pretty obvious that we’ve moved beyond questioning whether someone’s tone just got lost in translation and just assuming they’re an asshole troll.
One of the — admittedly cringy — phrases that sticks with me from my corporate widget-making is to “assume positive intent.” It feels like a necessary antidote to the internet’s overwhelming (though I’d argue not inherent!) toxicity. The irony of this, of course, is that I went and picked a fight this week (more on that below), but what I wanted to talk about here is the opportunity that assuming a positive intent affords those of us here in the Substack “community.”
We are all — even purported readers like me — writers here. And any good writers knows that they can be a better writer. It’s part of the fun/madness of writing that you’ll never be able to perfectly capture the thought or image or story rattling around in your skull-muscle and transfer it down to the page/screen with absolute fidelity. BUT you can get incrementally closer. To that end: most of us have something we can learn from the rest of us.
I initially started this section with the title “Let’s Be Mean to Each Other” as a tongue-in-cheek call-to-action. More precisely: let’s be more open to critique, and accepting critique, from each other. Part of the reason I include a “Chirps” section in my Substack Summer reviews is because no book is perfect, and if an author is here on Substack this gives them an opportunity to get direct feedback on their work. Is my feedback as valuable as Harold Bloom’s? Probably not, but Bloomer ain’t reading Substacks and I am.
So, a small ask from me: next time you’re about to a positive comment on someone’s Substack work, try to articulate something about it that didn’t work for you as well. Of course, heap the praise and drop the like but one insightful bit of feedback is worth a thousand little red hearts2.
And it also keeps writers from restacking their own quotes on Notes to try to drive readership. Nothing is tackier than a writer quoting themselves.
📚Book Bits
It’s an interview-review! I put the dashing and lovable
and his Shieldbreaker: The Last of the Etela through the paces, and in typically pugnacious fashion3, Tom and I are squaring off for Round 2 on Substack Live!Assuming there is no kerfuffle with family, Tom and I will be on Substack Live Sunday 7/20 at 8pm EST. We’ll take questions from the audience, chat about Shieldbreaker, and generally have a good time.
No Dogs in Philly by
review is scheduled for 7/23. I recently found out that Andy is a fellow Green Mountain Boy. The Hub of Literature is moving north from NYC; you heard it here first.I have been slow in starting Hell or Hangover by
because I’ve been busy running my mouth (again, see below), wrapping up my previous reviews, and trying to play catch-up on my Substack backlog.All that said, they4 don’t call me the Hardest Working Man on Substack for nothing; the review for Hell or Hangover is scheduled for 7/30.
And as always, if you’d like to know more about the Substack Summer, look no further:
💡Substack Spotlight:
Even though I’m the dude-guy who reads, it’s rare that I’m in on the ground floor of someone’s Substack. Allow me to signal boost
and their great short story “The Light in Her Mouth.” This is such a great little “slice of life” story, so wonderfully rendered. Stick-tap to for tipping me off. Do me a solid, Vinny Reads… uh, readers, and show this story some love.
In the spirit of good-natured sparring mentioned above, I would also like to call your attention to
and (“Mami” and “Thaddy,” respectively). They’ve been engaged in a jocular tête-à-tête around horror, worldbuilding, in medias res, and (likely) who gets custody of me for which holidays. Here’s a couple articles to get you started:
Recent Book Haul:
I did not buy a single book this week. I may just financially recover after all. I did however get a couple of ARCs sent my way since I’m like Big-Time now. Once we get a little closer to the end of Substack Summer, I’ll tip you off to what I’ve got in the hopper for the Fall. Spoiler alert: more “Substack” and small press novels. What can I say, The Kid5 loves an underdog…
🖋️Writing
I did a dialogue exercise as part of the Storyteller’s Workbench workshop. It was a challenge for me. I realized that I do a lot of my writing with the subtext is under the “action” so I felt like a complete babe in the woods trying to create subtext with just dialogue. I opted to up the difficulty level for myself and write it in a screenplay format, so I didn’t have any description and minimal action to establish myself.
I, of course, waited until the last possible minute to write this because the adrenal glands require constant flagellation.
I also descended the crystal staircase from my ivory tower to bestow my opinions on you all regarding how to make your Substack more readable.
This is all about how to leverage Substack’s (limited) toolset to better organize your work and allow readers to find it. I don’t talk about UX, graphic design, or marketing — this is mostly about how to use Substack, your titles, subtitles, tags, and Section to improve visibility.
🪶Miscellany
I’ve said before that when says tells me to “pick your battles,” my default choice is “all of them.” In that spirit of shooting my mouth, I popped off on Liza Libes’ intellectually bankrupt article for
:https://therepublicofletters.substack.com/p/your-kink-isnt-art/comment/135921996
As of this writing Thursday afternoon, the moralizing firebrand (5k+ subscribers) is sitting at 60 likes, and The Kid (<200 subscribers) is at a respectable 60. Clearly, I don’t respect weight classes. What I do respect, however, is
’s much more fulsome, generous, and evenhanded rebuttal to Libes’ article. To be clear, I don’t think she deserves it but I’m glad Slater wrote it nonetheless:
I promise I’ll try to follow Slater’s example going forward, but sometimes I just can’t abide — as my new BFF Connie put it — “sanctimonious bilge.”
Yes, I did have too much fun creating that banner graphic. 🤙
— V
*Cough* CAPITALISM *Cough*
This exchange rate is subject to fluctuation due to inflation, and/or writer’s ego
We’re developing a theme here. 🥊
“The kid” is a self-referential nickname. I am the kid. The kid is me. I am not a kid, but I am the kid.
Do you ever sleep? If so: When?
One of the tricky things about Substack is there’s not an interactive draft feature that readers can dip in and out of. I’d love to see Substack create a beta readers feature where you can push a draft out to a handful of subscribers that’s avail for, I don’t know, a few days, then reverts to a publish or restart option, and the draft goes away. Substack draft impossible. I haven’t thought through all the features but, I think, anything in Substack has to be “published” to be read. That’s kind of an all or nothing approach that doesn’t easily lend itself well to feedback.
I have this in another writers’ group, but it’s all using a Mighty app, for that group. There’s another group I’m part of on here, Michael Dean’s essay architecture, where we attempt to do this in a chat but it only kinda works sometimes, largely because it’s just us sharing google doc links same as if we emailed them to each other. Using Substack for this adds zero value to the process.
If feedback/editing functionality was better integrated within Substack, where I could customize the draft push to allow for more targeted feedback, I suspect other writers would use Substack to do this more. But I’m not sure that’s anything that benefits substack financially, so it’s prob pretty far down their roadmap.
As is, everything on Substack that subscribers and readers see is, by and large, finished. And if a writer isn’t explicitly asking for feedback on a finished post, I tend to highlight what I appreciate, and let any thoughts on what I think could improve it If the writer doesn’t ask, critiquing a finished post just seems kinda dickish. I also think many readers know what would make something better to their eyes/ears. Not sure how well the masses deliver on feedback that would consistently reach the same consensus.
That’s a way-too-much-flat-white reply there. I like the sentiment of what you’re throwing down here. I hope others take you up on it and you keep connecting with good readers. From what I’ve seen, you’re a good reader and those aren’t easy to come by.