That Practical Substack Post, Pt1

A New Year's goody-bag of really useful things

Portland lighthouse and deep blue sky - no filter!

Warm greetings from chilly West Dorset, home of this iconic lighthouse. Here’s a little interlude of hopefully useful things this week, while I gather the details with my partner for an upcoming bigger, news-filled post. I have been meaning to post this for quite some time, after receiving some questions from friends new to writing on Substack. If you don’t write or publish on Substack, then feel to forward it to someone who does, or just scroll down to ‘This Week’s Good Thing’. There’s also a poll for a date and time for paid and founding members to get together with me on Zoom next month.

This isn’t a ‘get rich on Substack’ post or a ‘use these three weird tricks to double your readership’ skit. Such things popping up in my Notes feed is one of the reasons I am rarely on Notes these days. I’ll assume that if you write here, you know what you’d like to say and that you don’t need advice from an unqualified fellow writer.

I am always immensely thankful that people choose to spend their time reading my work, and grateful that some of you choose to pay for it. It makes a huge difference and means that half my working life is now spent writing (the other half is spent teaching hand craft, movement and art skills). I hope that I can travel to teach less as the next few years go on and devote more time to this Substack and my next three planned books… By today’s count 4570 people read this Substack and about 100 people pay to read it, with about the same amount of people receiving ‘comps’ from me so they can comment. I set up commenting like this as I had too much time taken up with anonymous trolls in 2023, so it is purely a gatekeeping device to keep things civil. The irony of that term is not lost on me…

When I started this ‘stack, I was lucky that several good friends were already writing on here and were kind enough to recommend me to their readers, as they knew my words from Dark Mountain and / or the very long emails that passed back and forth between us. Without their help at first, I would not so quickly have gained a readership after sending my first newsletter to 18 friends and colleagues. I have kept and grown it over 26 months mainly by not thinking about numbers, popularity or trends, but by staying true to what I care about and am interested in. I post other people’s work to Notes whenever something great catches my eye, (in the same way I use ‘stories’ on Instagram for my Found and Ground art account.)

I have been impressed by how

School of the Unconformed

go about showcasing other writers, artists, and give practical ways of getting less embroiled in the machinations of virtual life. In that spirit, assuming that you do write here, or perhaps online elsewhere, here’s a few things that give me pleasure to be here, and make publishing this way less mundane and identikit. I was originally inspired by

Rhyd Wildermuth

‘s lovely wild boar logo and page break device, shown here.

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Sound and Vision

This week, visual aspects. It’s easy as falling off a log to physically ‘just write’ here on Substack, that is the consensus from almost everyone I know. With just a few simple settings and a pared-back design, this editor is so much clearer and simpler than, say, Microsoft Word. Recently, attempting to write something for a publication using my default old Word editor on this laptop, I was shocked how tricky and longwinded operations were which are intuitive here, such as adding links, footnotes and formatting. Maybe because I am far more interested in the content of writing than cutting-edge typographic design, or even imprinting my own ‘look’ on the text itself, when I am not writing longhand in a notebook with my usual Platinum Preppy 0.2mm fountain pen, I now write mostly on Substack editor, and cut and paste it elsewhere as needed.

Where I do like to add my own feel and design is in the visual elements: hand-drawn title, photos, paragraph breaks and now ‘No AI’ or ‘human-made’ stickers. Substack has made good instructional posts including videos about how to add images and clips, but just pressing the buttons on the menu bar at the top of the editor is most of it. What I’d like to share first is how to make your own line breaks, which could be of anything; decorative, functional, humorous. The plain fine-line style dividers in the drop down menu ‘More’ at the top right are useful enough, but sometimes you just need a stronger graphic element. In keeping with my DIY aesthetic, mine were hand drawn, in iron gall ink with a quill pen, no less.

One of 4 branch motifs I drew in ink on paper for use as paragraph breaks

The method for this was the same for my hand-drawn Uncivil Savant wordmark, tree logo, paragraph breaks and no No AI images. Whether you choose pencil and paper, pen and ink, watercolours, marker pens, cross-stitch embroidery, collage or one of those 1980s gadgets that emboss words onto a plastic tape, all you need is a flat image that you can either scan on your home printer / scanner, or take a digital photo using your phone or camera. In the image above you can still see the grain of the paper, I could have left it like that, but I wanted an image with no background. I used ‘Photos’, the free photo editor that comes with Windows, to adjust the contrast and brightness until the paper was pure white and the image was bold and black, see below.

The next image shows how I selected the icon to the right at the top and removed the background so that only the ‘figure’ remained, with no background, (by selecting the central parrot picture). I then saved this image as Motif 1, and repeated the process with a few other branch drawings, some of which I flipped in orientation or symmetry until I liked how they looked. Later, I did the same process with my handwritten ‘Uncivil Savant’ and the No AI stickers. It can be done in Canva and other much more complicated programs online, but in a bid to keep things quick and simple, limit my time faffing about online, and avoid AI when I can, I chose the simple in-house option. You can also almost certainly do all of this on your smartphone, including making a ‘sticker’ of it by holding down your finger on the part of the image you want to cut out. However, I only learned that this was possible this year, after making these, having been a Adobe Photoshop twiddler in the days before it was subscription-based. The phone sticker-method uses AI. But even this simple Photos laptop app uses AI on some other operations…

Later I changed the tone of the images to sepia and brown in Canva and saved them as separate images for when I didn’t want just black. You could just draw things in different colours, if you wanted to keep it really old-school. Save your images in an easily found file on your computer and insert them as photos in the usual way using the picture icon at the top of the screen. Size them as large or small as you like and that’s it. I’ve helped a couple of friends clean up their hand drawn and written Substack icons and titles, and all of them looked great with after adding just a little bit of contrast and making sure words were horizontal rather than veering off at an angle.

A reversed, colour altered version, one of my regular paragraph dividers.

I used the same method for my No AI and Human Made stickers, which you are welcome to screenshot, download, and use for your own AI free art and writing. You can get them here and read about why here. I might make them a bit more monochrome at some point, but for now, they look suitably hand made.

I drew this with pen and ink and I still like the paper showing as the square background. I increased the contrast a little in the photo editor, but changed nothing else.

Some handmade wordmarks of note can be found here and here.

Here’s the scanned black ink hand written wordmark, made with a reed pen and iron gall ink, before I saved it in the wine red colour that I use now. I was attempting to get a slightly Celtic uncials feel but with a much less neat and even appearance. after about 10 attempts, this one looked just right.

To upload your own wordmark go to your settings and click here, you’ll need a long thin image for your title at least 1344x256 pixels. You can also edit your theme, fonts and colours here.

If that’s been of interest or helped in any way, then I am glad!

Next time, audio: recording, editing, noise reduction, production and troubleshooting for total beginners. All you’ll need is your laptop and one or two free programs. I’ll be covering microphones, pop shields, and I’ll also show you a phone method for when you are away form home but still want to add audio to your posts and don’t have your laptop or microphone with you.

Also, making ends meet, how to receive one-off payments and donations for your work here when people are not subscribing as regulars.

This week’s good thing: Ingrained by Callum Robinson. This beautiful, funny, engrossing book started my reading year off beautifully. My nephew’s partner Clo chose this book for me in our family ‘Secret Santa’ (which only includes books, whether for the 2 year olds or the 80 year old). It’s a wonderful new tradition that we are sticking to, everyone felt one thoughtfully chosen book beat any amount of small trifles. Part page-turner, part journeyman yarn, this paean to trees and the beauty of wood speaks beautifully of being a son, of making ends meet against all odds, and about the rigour and care that go into the joins between things; whether dovetail joints, family and marriage bonds, or the unique camaraderie found in a bespoke craft workshop. I cannot recommend it highly enough. Dose yourself up on Scottish forests, swirling elm grain and community-based alternatives to the gnarly end of capitalism.

Talking of which, if you find my Substack interesting, useful or inspiring, but aren’t in the position to subscribe, you can always…

Online meet up for paying subscribers and founder members.

It’s free, lasts an hour or so, and we can chat about anything on your mind or you can ask me anything Uncivil Savant-related. It won’t be recorded, we’ll just hang out.