What I Learned By Writing...Oh My God...a THOUSAND Posts
Six of them good!
This is my one thousandth I Might Be Wrong post. I started this blog-slash-podcast as a 12 year-old street rat fresh off the boat from Ireland; it was originally a broadsheet called Orphan Tom’s Parade O’ Japery. I now command a sprawling media empire that would make William Randolph Hearst piss himself with jealousy. It gratifies me to say that I Might Be Wrong has achieved its core goals, namely: 1) To enrich myself, and 2) To relentlessly slander my enemies. Thank you to everyone who helped make this dream possible!
But have I learned anything? Well, I’d be the Densest Motherfucker Alive if I hadn’t. I’ve learned a lot about cranking out content like a Keebler Elf of saucy political takes, and also about squeezing cash from the money-stuffed suckling pigs that we in the biz call “potential subscribers” (or sometimes “marks”). And now — like a Zen master descending from a mountaintop upon achieving Nirvana — I shall bestow my wisdom on you. Though mostly after the paywall, because lesson #1 is that Orphan Tom didn’t get in the penthouse by giving free rides to deadbeats.
How do I produce four posts and two podcasts a week? Simple: fear. Fear that if I don’t descend into the comedy mine and chip off a few joke nuggets, I’ll have to get a real job. Writing advice often discusses environment and process, about how to achieve a flow state in which you coax the muse down from heaven to give you oral while brilliant insights stream from your fingertips. And for writers who can do that: Super nifty, I eagerly await your Substack advice column. But I suspect that many writers find themselves thinking: “This is hard. The blank page is staring at me like the goddamned Eye of Sauron, I’m sweating like a pedo at Disneyland trying to come up with an idea, and it feels like the No Talent Swat Team is going to crash through my window and haul me off to Failed Artist Guantanamo any second.” And my message to those writers is: You are not alone.
