In lieu of permission

Welcome to my tent in the digital Wild West, launched 25 minutes ago.

Welcome to Discussion Candy!

This is Cydney Hayes, reporting live from the brave new world of Substack blogging, and I must say I already feel late to the party. The Substack world is much more robust a media platform for a site I thought akin to, say, Medium. Turns out, the influence ceiling doesn’t stop at magazine writers who’ve brought their readers with them as they traded the drag of traditional publications for the creative freedom of blogging; there are also entire magazines, staffed and organized, publishing here and nowhere else.

Evidently, people here are covering (and, like anything popular on the internet, influencing) national politics, collecting tens of thousands of subscribers, making their livings, writing essays that get them contributor deals with the New York Times. In the few hours I spent exploring, mostly to see how authors named and described their projects, I also found Notes, the short-form social arm launched last month that’s rising from Twitter’s ashes, and the SERP tagline that reads, “A new economic engine for culture.”

Accurate, and exciting. Here I am an essayist, but I’m also a corporate copywriter who writes lines like this on the daily, so let me break that down for you:

• Economic = there is money to be made here

• Engine = wheels are turning, cogs are cogging, input is generating output, fuel is generating movement

• Culture = society is conversing here, talking about existing things and talking things into existence

So, I feel like I’m late to the party in the way a prospector might feel getting to California in 1850—as in, I may be getting recommendations for Substacks with 50,000 subscribers, but my New York-highbrow older sister didn’t even know what Substack was when I asked her if she wanted to subscribe. (Has she confirmed that, yes, she wants to subscribe? No, but you win some cultural ones, you lose some interpersonal ones. C’est la vie.) In any case, compared to the rest of the internet where amassing a million followers is a middling success, a place where the current subscriber record is less than 100,000 seems equal parts quaint and thrillingly underground.

In lieu of permission (op! title alert!) from traditional magazines, many of which at this point are publishing 20 percent quality journalism and 80 percent reupholstered advertorials, I’m begging for forgiveness as I launch Discussion Candy, an essay house where I’ll write about the topics I want to talk about with my friends at a sleepover at 2 a.m. or with a sexy barstool neighbor, drunk on negronis and the complexity of modern life. I have plans to write about making bad art, getting fired, the tactics of writing, the concept of the command position, cozy video games, internet forums, day jobs, the strange current state of San Francisco, being 25 in this kooky crazy mixed up world of ours, and much much more!

25 minutes post-launch, Discussion Candy is half-baked, rickety, and nicheless, and I kind of plan to keep it that way. Part of the Substack Gold Rush fun is its formlessness: The space is un-curated, devoid of brands (though they’re coming, I’m sure), and it’s still in that TikTok-in-2020 stage where you can make good content and throw marketability to the wind. Here, we can operate on vibes alone and name our blogs Tumblr-style nonsense. In fact, I had originally planned to call mine Lazy Girl Beach Club because yesterday that just felt right, but I set up the url and didn’t like the way it looked in the navigation bar, so I renamed it a slightly less nonsensical preparation of word salad: Discussion Candy.

Oh, and if you want that headline broken down for you, too, I hope this will suffice:

• Discussion = unpretentious philosophizing, chatting for the sake of intellectual exploration, no conclusions required

• Candy = yum yum yum so delicious can’t get enough absolute junk childlike wonder manic whimsy mmm-mmm good

Not to get too real on the first date (we don’t know each other like that!), but I’ve spent too much time trying to arrive at the magic number of published pieces so someone will give me permission to write what I want to write for an audience that wants to read it (mostly myself). So here I am, and I suspect I’ve come at an auspicious hour. They say the best time to plant a tree was 20 years ago, but 20 years ago I was a homeschooled kindergartener in Rhode Island, so today I am left with only one option: To leave my wife and kids in ol’ St. Louis and pitch my tent in the digital Wild West with nothing but a vocabulary and a dream. I’ve got frontiers to settle and candy to discuss. Welcome welcome welcome.