Hello, Substack!

My name’s Henry. G’day.

I’ve finally decided to pull the trigger on making a Substack after a fair amount of procrastination.

I’m a writer. At least, that’s how I’d like people to see me one day. I work in Environmental Design for a day job. I care a lot about social issues and (obviously) environmental ones. I write science fiction thrillers, and they take several forms, all of which have been published and produced myself (Available here if you’re at all interested!). For the books I’m currently working on, I’ve decided to pursue traditional publishing, and I have no idea how that’s going to go.

But that’s not why I’m here.

For about six weeks or so last year, I had a Medium blog. Don’t bother to go looking for it: all the posts have been migrated to this Substack already. My favourite is probably the article I wrote about Satire and Warhammer 40,000, which you can read here if you want.

If you had a look, you’ll have noticed it is quite long for a blog post. This was the style I was writing in at the time: a weekly 2500 to 3500 word articles that explored a subject in depth. I liked being able to do that, but unfortunately I have a full-time job, so both seeking and finding something to write about each week was fairly exhausting when I was going to that level of detail. Add to that the fact that I am working on three pieces of long-form fiction of my own, as well as, you know, having friends and requiring nourishment and sleep.

I burnt out on it fairly quickly, firstly for the aforementioned reasons, but also because Medium, as a website for finding and connecting to an audience, sucked. I found myself writing what I thought were fairly well considered, high effort posts, only to be immediately subsumed into auto-generated or lazy spam posts that were just feeding an algorithm to scrape up the meagre pay offered by Medium’s opaque payment system.

So I stopped, but I always wanted to keep going, and I honestly love trying to engage with the world, with literature, with movies, and even with games on a thematic level. My books are driven heavily by their theme and the message I’m trying to get across.

I’ve started this Substack in an attempt to find people who are interested in reading about art, life, and everything in between. I’ll be aiming to post something about 500 words or so every couple of weeks, though there may be times where that falls off. I don’t have a clue exactly how this is going to look, but I want to write about what I’ve learned since I started writing fiction in 2018, the state of art and culture as I see it, technology, and whatever else has captured my interest that week.

My next post is going to be about the story I wrote and released as a podcast between 2020 and 2022. It’s called Sunward Sky, it has just ticked over 36,000 listens, and I’m going to write about how that happened (Spoilers: I have no idea).

I hope to see you there. Drop a comment (is that a thing you can do on Substack? I know literally nothing), hit subscribe, follow me on twitter at huntingsunrise, and I’ll see you soon.