Hardihood Books October Roundup
Happy Halloween
Hi,
Welcome to the Hardihood Books October Roundup. I hope autumn is treating you well.
Please check out the Poll Question at the end of this email and reply to me with your answer if you have an opinion. Thank you.
Substack just launched their much-anticipated Android app which complements their iOS app. If you’re an Android user, you can learn more at the link I provided.
Also, I decided to bring June’s “Intertextuality and Emergent Order” out from behind the paywall. This seemed to be a popular essay with some readers, so I figured I’d make it available to everyone. This decision was partly motivated so that I could link to it in something else I wrote (a post for the social media/blockchain platform Diamond – which was co-founded by a friend of mine). Please give it a read if you like literature or the economic idea of spontaneous order (or both).
What I Published in October:
As was foreshadowed in last month’s roundup, the first story this month was an alternate history story. Titled “But For a Turn of Fate,” it takes place in a world in which World War II never happened. As with last month’s “What If It Never Happened?” this story deals with themes of hubris and the human bias against chance. We think that we are in control of events, but almost always fail to predict the future with any degree of accuracy. What if we are neither in control of events, nor controlled by them?
The next story I put out is called, “The Tragedy of the Illumination.” I think it’s funny, and it was terribly fun to write. There are some inside jokes, which might only appeal to a niche audience. However, it’s free to the general public. I hope you enjoy it and find it funny. It’s a bit of a story within a story, or at least it’s framed that way (there isn’t much plot to the outer “story,” just a man telling his friends about something that happened in college). If you like economics, you might like this story.
After that, I put out an outside-the-paywall essay called, “Natural Selection Doesn’t Need Our Help,” which is about the role of human beings in the natural world. The approach I favor is a balance between pursuing our own ends (as any sentient species would) and strict minimalism (minimizing our impact). I doubt any sentient species would really be different than us in regard to its impact on the environment, but given that we are finally somewhat aware of ours, we can begin to try to limit it. But my piece isn’t really about that. It’s about the attitude we should take towards the natural world, one of humility bordering on fatalism. I primarily focused on evolution, the mechanism of dynamism and spontaneous order in the natural world (or the living portion of it). Inevitably, that brings up questions of religion, so God occasionally comes into the piece. I’m a Christian, but not a Creationist. If that fact bothers you, you might want to skip this piece.
Next, I published a story called, “A Time to Mourn.” It’s a short story that takes place at Halloween, but (as you might suspect from the title) it isn’t happy or funny or festive. Autumn takes many forms and elicits many emotions, and this story was an attempt to capture sadness and to write something seasonal, but also tragic.
I also released an essay called “Veracity or Self-Expression?” and subtitled, “What is the Purpose of Writing?” It’s paywalled, but has a free preview (something I’ve been doing more and more now). This essay is on the shorter side, and it could be better or more thorough, but I wanted to explore the difference between writing (and speaking) for attention and writing (or speaking) because you believe the content matters in some way (and is true). This question doesn’t just apply to nonfiction – fiction writers talk all the time about writing “stories that are true,” by which they don’t mean stories that literally happened, but stories that reveal something true about the world.
Finally, I released a story called, “Ghosts Aren’t Real,” which is also set against the backdrop of Halloween. This isn’t a humorous or lighthearted story. I don’t write horror, and this story is no exception, but it is a bit dark. I subtitled it, “A Story about Horror,” in part to signal up front to readers that if they don’t like disturbing stories, they might want to skip this one. The story uses the setting of Halloween to juxtapose the fantastical imaginary monsters commonly associated with this time of year, with frightening things that exist in the real world. Millennial readers (and some older and younger ones as well) will probably get the musical reference.
Since my Halloween-themed stories this month weren’t funny (and also weren’t free), I figured I would link to a few stories I put out last year at this time, which were both. “I Don’t Believe in You,” and “Halloween in Omaha,” are free to the general public, and contain many comedic elements. “The Forest of Gaunt,” is behind my paywall, and is filled with fantastical and absurdist elements. I can’t do a traditional Halloween horror story in the vein of Stephen King, so any Halloween stories I write are either going to be funny, or weird, or tragic, or scary in a realistic way.
In Closing:
Poll Question: Should I email every post to free and paying subscribers, or should I continue my current practice of posting short stories and essays on the site and emailing you only at the end of the month?
Substack recommends that I email out every post (in fact, the platform reminds me almost every time I hit publish). I’ve been intentionally declining to email out every post to avoid cluttering your inbox. But, according to the masters, the 2020s call for a different approach (i.e., pushing newsletters directly to readers rather than asking readers to take the extra step to go to the site). As an inveterate behind-the-times-er, I like manually typing the name of site I want to visit into my search engine and then reading in my browser (and I dislike reading in my inbox). However, perhaps most of you feel differently. Please let me know your thoughts. I would appreciate it if as many readers as possible gave me feedback on this.
Feel free to reply to this email or get in touch with me another way (Twitter, LinkedIn, direct mail, courier, telegraph, etc.). Thank you in advance for your input.
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Cheers,
Ben Connelly