Hardihood Books Newsletter 37
June, 2024
Greetings.
Welcome to the June edition of the Hardihood Books Newsletter.
Housekeeping:
Nothing to report.
Next Month and Beyond:
As next month marks the two-hundred and forty-eighth anniversary of American independence, we will be having our regularly-scheduled patriotic theme for July.
Why An Online Magazine for Fiction and Nonfiction?
As with some previous newsletters, this newsletter is outside the paywall and is pitched towards potential subscribers, rather than simply to current ones. Please feel free to share it widely. If you are already a paid subscriber, please share it with a friend or a family member who you think would enjoy it. If you subscribe, but you don’t read regularly, perhaps this will serve as inspiration for you.
Many Americans, young and old, urban and rural, with a graduate education and with a high school education, don’t read. But many of them would like to. They’d like to be readers, or they’d like to think of themselves as readers,1 but they aren’t currently reading. Perhaps they don’t have time. Perhaps they have other priorities. Perhaps they find that they have trouble focusing long enough to get into a book.
Here at Hardihood Books, we don’t care what obstacle you have to reading. We’d like to help you get rid of it. If you don’t have time to read – some of our stories can be completed in under five minutes. One or two of them can be completed in under one minute. You could read one while your coffee is brewing and you will be able to go all day saying that you read a story by breakfast.
If you don’t read because you have other priorities, the convenience of Substack allows you to pull up our short stories and novellas on your phone, anywhere in the world – in line at the grocery store, waiting for a ride, in the doctor’s office, anywhere you have some time to spare. If you’d like to read more, this is a way to use time you might otherwise scroll Instagram mindlessly for that purpose.
And if, like many young people, you feel your attention span is too short to focus on a book, you’re in luck. It will grow with practice. The more you read and the less you scroll TikTok, the stronger your focus will get. Start with short stories, and gradually work up to longer and longer works, the same as you would start with a low weight in the gym and gradually work up to pushing heavier and heavier weights. If you’d like more suggestions for how to strengthen your focus, you might appreciate some essays I have written related to this topic.
Which brings me to something else we like to write about here at Hardihood Books. Many young people don’t read because they spend so much time on social media. But almost universally, they don’t want to spend so much time on social media. They want to do “real stuff” in the real world, because it’s frustrating to look at pictures of other people living interesting lives and to feel that you don’t really do anything interesting yourself. Young people want to read real books, do physical things in the physical world, have real friends, have real adventures.
We believe in having a sense of adventure here at Hardihood Books. A sense of adventure, while by no means intrinsic to reading, is often bound up with it. Books can transport you to a world not your own, and can introduce you to heroes who live lives you wish you could. And they can teach you how to order your own life in a way that puts you just a little closer to those heroes.
Adventure, as J. R. R. Tolkien knew, begins at home. You need not travel far away to experience life as it was experienced thousands of years before you were born. You only need some imagination and a willingness to put your phone down and leave your house.
Physical action in the physical world. Reading. Finding adventure in life. Doing “real things.” Writing about them. Here at Hardihood Books, we believe these go together.
Let’s focus on reading. If you’d like to become a reader, or you’d like to read more, you can start today. We have plenty of free content, but if you pay just $5 a month, you can read a much more than you currently do. Maybe you’ll even want to write for us.2 We have a variety of genres, so you’ll be able to find something you like.
You might ask why we publish short stories and serialized novels and essays rather than just specializing in one. Because different readers will want different things, and some readers will want multiple things, and many readers will think they want one thing and discover they like something else which they might never have tried if it wasn’t available. And new readers often don’t know what they will like.
What we’re doing here is new. It isn’t exactly like anything else. It is similar enough to previous forms as to be recognizable (an online magazine for fiction and nonfiction), but there isn’t anyone exactly doing what we’re doing here. If you’d like to be a part of something innovative, if you’re a new reader (or you’d like to become one) and you’d like to read something current and something off the beaten path, or even if you’d just like something better to do while waiting for a cab, you can join our audience today. If you currently subscribe, thank you. If you don’t, please consider signing up for a free or a paid subscription.
In Closing:
Thank You and Until Next Month,
Ben Connelly
Here at Hardihood Books, we like both types. Admittedly, we prefer the former, however we believe there is hope for the latter. We believe in the principle of acting to become, or learning through habitual practice. In other words, we believe that anyone who wishes to become a reader can. How does one become a reader if one doesn’t read? Practice. One practices reading until one goes from being a person who practices reading to being a person who reads.
If you have an adventure you’d like to write about, or if you’ve written a story that you’d like to submit, please see our submission guidelines. You do not have to be a subscriber to submit.