The Sunday Post & A Reflection Leaving Substack

Christ is risen! It’s Easter today. And I can’t not start my post with that. Jesus Christ’s resurrection is everything. As a believer, knowing I have the promise of eternal life helps me hang on during difficult days.

It’s been a long time since I posted something more reflective on my blog. And I decided to search online for any of the blogging themes that used to be popular in times gone by. And I came across the Sunday Post! It’s a themed post hosted by The Caffeinated Reviewer and has been around for a long time in the blogging world. I’m so glad to see it actually around.

So, I’ve unofficially but officially left Substack. Some background on that: I started Substack back in January 2024. I began it as of a way of basically sending out requests for sources or products as related to my commerce writing gigs at the time. That’s truly all it was for. It was the place a lot of freelancers had gone to share their calls for sources or products. At that time, I was very busy with my commerce gigs and so that felt a natural transition.

Then, if you feel really nosy, you can track the change in my writing life to the exact month and year: January 2025. That’s when I lost a major writing gig. I felt just flummoxed on how to replace that income again. Not to mention, I had no idea what to do with my Substack and it’s slightly engaged audience.

Transition, I did. And it was only for the grace of God. I’m thankful every day that He helped me through that time period.

So, I started using Substack in different ways. Featuring podcasters. Featuring a weekly theme of a book, movie, and wildcard.

Then late 2025, around September/October-ish, my weekly book-movie-wild-card theme became a slightly regular feature. It was going okay but I was itching to kind of recreate that feeling I used to have from blogging. That community. That engagement. That thoughtfulness.

Well, about a month ago, I tried something new. It was inspired by me being a podcast booking agent. I wanted a way to connect with podcasters outside of the pitching process. Maybe make connecting my clients with hosts a bit easier. I started a Substack featuring a call for guests from podcasters.

Man, you guys, it kind of did well. I went from balancing between 350 to 400 subscribers to 800 in a few weeks. I saw my Substack recommended by people in casual social media conversations. It was happening! I finally hit it with that one!

Then, last week happened. I had a moment that just hit me hard professionally. It was a result of unfair treatment and, without getting into it, kind of shifted my perspective a bit. As Saturday rolled around and I queued up another Substack post, I realized…I can’t. I couldn’t do that anymore.

First, doing that sort of gathering all week and monitoring of social media for calls for guests is a lot of work. Putting the post together is a lot too. And I thought, it’s not the best use of my time and energy.

And that’s when I began think about the Substack model in general. It’s not conducive to a community feeling. What people don’t know about the blogging days of yore is that it was absolutely a community vibe. That’s what I missed. It’s poignant that your feed on Substack doesn’t populate with “new posts” but rather whatever is most popular or sporadic. Substack now feels more like if Twitter (it’ll never be X to me) started a blogging platform.

So here I am. I have for now started up a newsletter that allows you to get monthly updates from me, sharing a curation of whatever I’ve blogged about each month. I’d love it if you subscribed. It’s just one month and hope it won’t clog your inbox too much.

And you’ll even get a podcast tracking sheet! I’m confident you can modify this for your own purposes. I’d even be happy to help you out with that too. Just subscribe and send me a note.

I’d love to know what you are working on these days and what’s on your heart. What do you think about Substack and blogging and anything else? Drop me a note in the comments.