Big Doings at the Circle K

I’m finally working my Substack up. My vision here is smaller, more frequent posts about this and that, rather than a big update each week. Basically, I want to make my content more interesting to you guys who are being generous enough to follow me.

I’ll be importing all of you from my mailing list and I hope you’ll stay here with me. Fair warning, instead of one post a week, I’m likely to do 2 or 3. Again, I’m aiming at smaller and more interesting, because your time is valuable and I need to provide commensurate value in return.

That’s a big reason why I’m making this shift. I believe I’m not giving you enough, so it’s time to up my game.

This includes a lot more multimedia content. More pictures, for one thing. Here’s a fun one to get started. If you look on the back of my books, you might have seen this as my author picture.

What you might not know is the provenance of this picture. My wife at the time, Kate Gill, took this picture of me at Gettysburg overlooking the Devil’s Den. If my face looks grim, that’s because it is. It’s hard to look at the field without envisioning the battle, at least for me.

In addition, I’ll be doing at least one podcast a week. I’m devising a regular schedule. I believe it’ll be something like this:

Week One: Writing Processes. I’ll talk about something relating to writing. This could be just a way to think through things, something as an editor I look for, or anything else I think could be useful to writers. This may very well include me learning something myself and hopefully I’ll have some guests help along the way.

Week Two: History Day. I’ll talk about something in history I find cool.

Week Three: Review Time. Here, I’ll talk about some book or magazine. This will tend to be older SF/Fantasy, including magazine reviews of old Astoundings, Galaxies, and the like plus the occasional Dragon. I love this content and some of it is still fresh and exciting.

Week Four: Rob’s Sports Report. I love sports and I can always find some cool topic to discuss. Expect one to be about the Super Bowl.

Week Five: Grab Bag. Obviously, week 5 will be rare, but it’ll let me go wild!

Send me suggestions of topics you’d like to hear and any other questions. I’ll do a mailbag segment periodically.

I will try to keep to this schedule, but will adjust as seems interesting and useful, especially when you guys want something.

Thanks for being along for the ride. I hope you’ll stay here while I make this transition. I’ll do my best to make the hassle worthwhile!

Have a great day!