Xplisset Substack Sunday Rollup

You People Ruined Me. I Thank You For It.

I’m just a retired black cop with a keyboard. No not the keyboard Stevie Wonder uses. The QWERTY one.

These Sunday Rollups are meant to be a sort of XVOA Community Update where important messages need to be conveyed directly from me to you about the current and future direction of this newsroom. This is not some personal confessional where I attempt some type of self therapy in public and hope no one reads it.

Here is the problem. I forget these embarrassing self revelations and they are just languishing out there like faded memories in the back of my brain some damn where. I’m talking about this one in particular.

Somebody hit the cringe alert button. Look I’m conflicted about this but maybe there is a place to show this kind of vulnerability. Just not here. I gotta special place for it in the I Shouldn’t Say This section. This is where I get to say stuff ….you guessed it ya’ll, I shouldn’t say. I can’t believe I just wrote that. Mediocre satire mixed with self promotion. Oh lawd. Another cringe alert. Quick change the subject. People got short attention spans these days. They’ll forget I wrote it.

You people done ruined me. In a good way of course. I just wrote a piece in the I Shouldn’t Say This section entitled NGAF About My Or Your Writing. The whole premise was that no one cares about your writing. The acronym with its cold all caps type NGAF (nobody gives a f***) drives home this point. This extends toward any other art or craft that is an extension of you. Guess what ya’ll.NGAF about you either.

Here is the part I neglected to mention. NGAF About Your Writing was a book I was working on with a whole list of precepts and passages already committed to what you might call a manuscript before the manuscript. Let’s just call it the mess before the manuscript. In that mess I elaborate the process by which the writer first uses his craft as a shield to conceal his or her true thoughts as if someone really cares. When the writer reckons with the fact they don’’t then that’s when the truth comes out.

If that truth hurts and it lends somebody a hand with the pain they are wrestling with that’s when tables start to turn. That one person out there who sees themselves in the writing becomes more than just a follower, they become advocates who spread the word far and wide.

Thank YOU

I said all of that just to get to the point where I say thank you. Thank you from the deepest depths of my soul. I don’t know how you got here but you flipped open the door to this section looking for something to GAF about and you found it. It’s a GAF feeling so strong you didn’t just read it, no, you replied in the comments. It’s a GAF feeling so strong you didn’t just keep it to yourself, no, you shared it. For the select few of you who possessed the means, you didn’t just nod your head to the rhythm of these passages , no, you pulled out that piece of plastic and bought me time to raise the bar and turn the revelation of truth into an art form.

Yes that does sound arrogant as all hell. Think of it this way, arrogance is what competence appears to be when you get a whole lot more than you bargained for. It appears as if this retired black cop with a keyboard is flaunting it like Ike and Tina Turner singing Proud Mary on The Ed Sullivan Show.

All that competence comes with practice and here me when I say practice takes time. Yeah I know it’s become fashionable around here to reveal my cards and test the limits of how much I can reveal of a vulnerable side of myself that I absolutely should not be revealing to anyone, not even myself. Yet here I am doing what I said to myself I would not do at the start of this essay.

This Whole Thing Almost Came To An End

This whole thing almost collapsed into a once a week essay shell of itself. I almost gave it up and went back to work and saving what little bit of time I had left over for finishing my novel, War After War, and perhaps an essay or 2 on the book’s progress. That’s all well and good but about 15 people came on board for Author Room access as opposed to the thousands who signed up for free and the hundreds who became paid supporters of the essays, frequent reports on current events, and media critiques that exposed mainstream media outlets such as WashPost for its duplicity and hypocrisy.

And listen, let me thank you Author Room supporters specifically. It’s gonna be because of you guys that my literary agent signs on board without hesitation seeing that there is already a solid fan base before the book even hits the printing press. Don’t think for one second that I would have any regrets if it came to it and that was my only audience.

This War, oops, I meant this operation over in Iran as you already know has reverberated throughout this entire global economy and this lil ole micro Substack publication has been feeling the effects in the cancelled subscriptions and lack of subscriber growth. That was my reason for almost retreating. I refused to do another fundraiser while the economy appeared to be in free falling into some kind of black hole.

No sleep Just Doubling Down

It was during this time that I doubled down and attempted to play the can’t beat’em join’em game on Substack by diving headfirst into livestreams, video uploads, and note posting on the discovery feed note doomscroller app and there has been modest success.

It’s like living a double life. On the email essay side I’m the Clark Kent nerd writer and on the notes livestream notes side I’m attempting this kind of trickster unscripted persona is the best way I can describe it. Keep in mind this is a balancing act I gotta accomplish while keeping these two sides from merging. I got the message from the hardcore email readers. You don’t want anything to do with videos or anything else in that Substack app.Its working. Engagement has been through the roof. A handful of free subscriptions came through as well as a couple of paid subscriptions.

So, given the amount of time and mental gymnastics I’ve had to put into this to get those results I can’t call it anything other than a Pyrrhic victory. I don’t sleep in beds. I’ve continually laid down on a couch too uncomfortable to fall asleep in when I get tired and thereby forcing me to write or think about writing. It’s about to get real ugly because even the couch is too comfortable. The floor and some type of Army style sleeping bag is the next level of discomfort I’m willing to endure on a daily basis in order to perform the mental gymnastics that it takes to push out content on a daily basis. I’ve even experimented with laying outside on the floor of a shed and got fantastic results.

My friend Diane Love (St Petersburg FL) is going to recoil in horror that I brushed off her advice which I did not, initially. I did get l8 hours of sleep for couple of days and felt great but the voice in my head stopped and the fuel for writing just evaporated.

A Special Thanks To Those Who Gave Coffee

This was the final backstop that came through and gave XVOA the financial floor it needed to go from worrying about keeping the lights on to concentrating on the type of reliability, competence, and an actual journalistic style content you would expect from a fully staffed media operation.

I was amazed that there were so many additional people willing to give not just as part of a limited duration fundraiser but as a spontaneous expression of solidarity and support for this independent media outlet. It’s become a ritual with every post now. All it takes is a handful of people leaving a minimum of $5 or more with each post that guarantees this operation can continue todo produce the following like clockwork”

Blackout Daily Brief

The daily read for people who want the real story behind the headlines: what mattered, what got buried, and who got left holding the bill.

ATH Intelligence Report

A daily column built to track the process by which extremist politics gets cleaned up, repackaged, and introduced to the public as normal civic life.

Additionally from time to time there’s:

Author’s Room

This is where I build my books in public. War After War is the primary project right now, so you get behind-the-scenes dispatches on the characters, the research, and the scenes that won’t leave me alone

I SHouldn’t Say This

This is the series where I write the thing I know I probably should leave alone. That’s the stray thought. The bad thought. The too honest thought. The one that keeps pacing around in my head after I hit publish on everything else. Only paid subs get access to this room.

Upcoming Projects

War after War and its followers are slated to get the red carpet treatment sometime around June and July and this will culminate with a finished manuscript. This will be a ten day sprint with twice daily updates on my process and progress.

Now imagine being able to touch, hold , and take Xplisset to bed with you and then leave it on the bedside table. Nah, not me silly. XPlisset Magazine. Here:

This first issue cover which is simply a proof of concept at this point as seen above is scheduled for a launch date of May 1st.

It’ll feature a full write-up and interview with Steward Beckham from Stew On This, a 50-state Blackout Brief section, a Green Book inspired section on safe spaces for LGBTQ folks, and reporting tied to HBCUs and the world around us. Basically, expect something that feels part journalism, part cultural record, and part proof that this thing is a real publication that could have real impact outside of its Substack corner on the internet.

So listen we got Blackout Brief. ATH. Author’s Room. I Shouldn’t Say This. The Notes. The livestreams. The magazine. War After War. All of that is one thing now whether I planned it that way or not. I kept acting like these were separate little experiments. You people kept showing up like the whole thing was worth building. That will ruin a man. In a good way.

Because once people open the emails, reply in the comments, buy the coffee, pay for the room, and start expecting you to mean what you say, you cannot go back to playing small. You cannot keep hiding behind that line about being just a retired Black cop with a keyboard. The keyboard part is still true. The “just” part done got shaky ya’ll.[

And that is where Proud Mary comes in. It starts off nice and easy. Then Tina and them drag that riverboat clean into the city and all that polite restraint is over with. Same song. Different gear. That is what y’all did to me. This started as a little ride I thought I could control. Now it moves like something that knows exactly what it is doing, and around here competence has a way of looking like arrogance when it gets too loud, too sure, or too alive. So yes, you ruined me. Thank you for that.