Greetings!
Welcome to the April edition of the Hardihood Books Newsletter. I hope it finds you well. Thank you for your support and for reading.
Most of my subscribers didn’t express opinions on the “undisclosed location” gag, so I’ll ditch it for now. Until I can think of a better one, I’ll just say that I write to you this month from Michigan.
Also, I wanted to remind you about the new Substack app for iPhone, which I explained in last month’s newsletter and which is available here.
Some Housekeeping:
Because I’m making some big announcements, I’ve opened this newsletter up both to paying subscribers and to free subscribers.
From now on, I will be sending out two monthly emails. The newsletter will go to paying subscribers only. The monthly roundup will be a separate email and it will go to everyone. I haven’t decided which day I will send that. Perhaps a day or two before my newsletter. The newsletter will still go out on the last day of the month.
While I already indicate which stories and essays are behind the paywall and which are available to everyone, I will now be making that more explicit for the benefit of free subscribers. One of the reasons for sending the monthly roundup to everyone is to let free subscribers know which posts from the past month are public.
A couple of other items:
- I started a newsletter on LinkedIn called “Grit for Work” to promote my book. If you’re on LinkedIn, please feel free to subscribe.
- Also, as I mentioned last time, I’ve expanded print distribution of my book beyond Amazon. I ended up going with IngramSpark because – other than a small setup fee – I make more money that way. D2D Print apparently just uses Ingram and Amazon to distribute. I have more control if I go directly to both of them. And there was an issue with D2D Print where I would be competing against myself on Amazon with one version (the D2D version) priced $5 higher. All of this is to say that soon my paperback will be available for purchase beyond Amazon – including for libraries and bookstores (if they choose). Which means you could go to your local bookstore and ask them to order it. As of this writing, I don’t have an Ingram link for you yet, but I will update this page when I do get that link.
For Those Who Are New:
Welcome! Please check out my archives (which is now more convenient to scroll through than ever with the new Substack app!).
If you have questions about my publishing schedule or what I write, please see this post.
Monthly Roundup:
On April 2nd, I published the epilogue of my novella, “After America.” It was an interesting experiment (everything is an experiment) and I’m reasonably pleased with how it turned out. I enjoyed playing around with the genre and beginning to work through some ideas. If you were a little unsatisfied, that was actually my intent. The events of the last chapters and the epilogue were planned from the start. I actually like unsatisfying endings (they’re more enjoyable to write than to read, but I actually like some of famously unsatisfying endings from literature). A lot of my stories end somewhat ambiguously. That’s usually intentional, but perhaps I should work to give readers closure a little more often, because most people like that kind of thing.
Two days later, I published a free essay entitled, “On Contrarianism.” I wasn’t fully satisfied with it, but if you ask most writers about their writing, you’ll hear that a lot. Which is why I adopted the rapid-development model of, “80% solution in 20% of the time,” in the first place. I’d been tossing around the contrarianism idea for a while, but it finally seemed ripe and I wanted to jump before it slipped away. It’s a bit repetitive, but I made the points I wanted to make.
After that, I published the first part of a two-part story I’ve been working on for almost a year, called “Travails of a Twenty-First Century Woman.” It’s a “literary” story, which means “boring” or “plotless” or “character-driven,” and which also means it was a ton of fun to write. The protagonist is a successful, atomized, intelligent, detached, likable, self-interested, unattached, unaffiliated, mature, odd, young woman who is not lonely even though she is alone. She is both observer of life in the twenty-first century, and denizen of it – she follows some of the latest trends and avoids others. What is the story about? You’ll have to wait until part two (which, I will warn you now, contains some disturbing elements).
My other free post this month was a short story called, “Old-Fashioned.” It explores a couple ways in which people can be very modern (or at least anti-traditionalist) in some areas of their lives and very preservationist in others. The story is a little too heavy-handed, because I wanted to “heighten the contradictions” (as they say), or demonstrate how these things clash. Human beings are complex, and it’s not hypocrisy to be very radical and one area of your life and very traditional in another. Or to favor custom and history in some things, while shedding the old to make room for the new in others. It’s not necessarily wrong or right, but it is amusing.
My final short story this month was the second half of the two-part, “I’m Not Sure You’re Using It Right.” This was a dystopian science fiction story set in a world in which human beings have tamed the world and conquered nature, and in doing so subjugated themselves. I didn’t set out to write the world C.S. Lewis predicted in Abolition of Man, but the world I wrote resembles his observation that when men conquer nature, they will in turn be conquered.
The second essay this month was called “Running and Place.” It’s an exploration of rootedness in the modern world and digital life and, of course, long distance running.
Also, I published an announcement about a new policy I’m (loosely) implementing called “Signpost Warnings.” Basically, there will be a quick heads up to the reader at the beginning of any post that contains any graphic violence/language or references to sex/drug use, etc. I don’t write sex scenes, but sometimes I write characters who refer crassly to their sexual habits (or scatological habits, for that matter). Likewise, I don’t think my content is particularly graphic when it comes to violence, but I suspect I have a higher bar than some of my readers, so these “signpost warnings” will be a way of signaling to readers that, even if I don’t personally find something “gory,” they might. And while I may not have as much personal experience with “key bumps” as some members of our nation’s highest legislative body apparently do, I reserve the right to have fictional characters do things that you can only get away with in fiction (or if you’re a member of the British Parliament).
Next Month and Beyond:
May is my one-year anniversary on Substack. It remains to be seen exactly what I’ll be doing to commemorate it (I’ll see what some other writers on the platform do), but one thing I’m doing is releasing “The Return” for paying subscribers, as I foreshadowed in some earlier newsletters. It will go up on the site as an extra short story (not included in the four-per-month tally), on May 1st. Conveniently, that’s tomorrow. (Or, more likely for you – given the time I usually schedule these newsletters to go out – today.)
The Fun Bit: Why Did I Write a Book about Grit?
This month, I thought I’d offer some final thoughts about why I wrote the book I did. I’ve given some of that explanation previously, but I have more to say.
I wrote it to address a problem (or set of problems) I see in modern society, which I call “the problem of ease.” Over the last few years, other people have written books that either addressed aspects of this problem or related to this theme. But my book is different from each of the above in key regards. As I see it, the problem of ease is one of the central problems in the modern developed world and – while I don’t provide any societal solutions – I did want to help individuals navigate it.
I wrote the book I wanted to read. It had what I was looking for, and hadn’t found, in any previous books.
Grit is one of those things that can seem like something you shouldn’t have to think about. You either have it or you don’t, or you either learned it or you don’t. But I disagree. Perhaps at one time life was such that people didn’t have to think about grit – they learned it by living. Now that life is easier, we have to be more intentional about it. There isn’t anything wrong with that – just as there isn’t anything wrong with the fact that we need to be intentional today about exercising, while our ancestors got plenty of physical activity trying to survive.
To that end, I also wrote the book as an explanation of, and defense of, my own desire to do difficult things. As I wrote it, I gained a much deeper understanding of that desire. In fact, I’d argue that it’s fundamentally natural and an important part of living a flourishing life. Taking cold showers seems anachronistic to the modern cynic, but there’s nothing more unnatural than surrounding yourself with comfort and digital devices twenty-four hours a day.
Finally, I wrote it because “doing tough stuff” was something I knew a little more about than most people I knew. It was a skill that I was a little better at than other people, so I figured I had something to teach.
In my next newsletter, I want to do a follow-up to this one, answering the question: Is there anything I would change about Grit or add to it?
Sidenote: I’m having trouble coming up with a better name for this potpourri/miscellaneous section I include in each newsletter. Sometimes it’s fiction, sometimes some brief thoughts on a topic, sometimes a mini-essay, sometimes a peek behind the curtain. I don’t like “The Fun Bit,” but can’t come up with a better heading. If you have an idea for what I can call this section, please send it my way.
In Closing:
As always, thank you for your support, and for reading and subscribing.
Until Next Month,
Ben Connelly