The Monthly Update! Check out past updates HERE
The State of Gibberish
Time flies when you’re having fun and also when you’re doing whatever it is I’m doing. This was a busy month, and there’s a lot of cool stuff coming. Guys—it’s been a little bit since I last serialized a story, and I am exceedingly grateful for the love you all have shown Find The Blackpage! so far. From the bottom of my heart, THANK YOU. Thank you for subscribing, thank you for reading. It’s a real blessing to write for you, and I mean it. You all, right here, right now, today—you’re my dream come true.
What You Missed
Doesn’t seem like much but it took the wind out of me some days!
LIVESTREAMS
- and I are going through the Artists Way, a book about creative recovery. We’ve done a few more videos with more on the way, videos forthcoming!
FLASH FICTION FRIDAY
Weekly prompts keep on dropping! Check the prompts out at the Prompt Index page here and the stories shared every week!
🔒DEV DIARY
Last month, I quietly announced the introduction of a series I called “Dev Diary”, basically a Behind-The-Scenes project-planning and accountability weekly check-in to help me keep sane and to give Paid Subscribers a look at what I’m doing. It’s already been a huge help for me, so that’s continued to happen weekly.
FICTION
What Is Coming?
It’s been a little bit since Shaina and I did an Artists Way livestream but expect us to get back on that horse and keep on The Way.
I started doing a fun-for-me series on notes called SCOOT ROULETTE where I spin a wheel1 and choose one of now 22 different activities for Notes. I explain why I started this in the Dev Diary series, but for your benefit if you’re confused: I post a LOT OF STUFF on Notes, and it varies wildly from the ridiculous to the ponderous, and so that means following me on Notes is really a hard-to-predict grab-bag of stuff. I don’t keep on-brand, so to speak. So Scoot Roulette is a way for me to do one thing, every day, that is on-brand. Some of them will promo myself, remind people what I do here on substack. Some of them will promo you pillars of the Gibberish community. Some of them will be microfiction that is fun to write, some will be gratuitous community events. In other words, at least once per day, I remind everyone why I’m here, and then I go back to silly nonsense.
Also, I am doing a subscription drive called SUBTEMBER starting TODAY (but look for a post about this on Monday).
The short version is this: if you’ve been on the fence about paying for a subscription to Gibberish, now is the time! This is the steepest discount I have ever offered, and this is the only time this year I will dip as low as 50% off. SUBTEMBER is a subscription drive and with this particular drive I am raising money to pay for editing and revision for a forthcoming short-story anthology of my work. Subscribe or not, it’ll happen eventually—but paying for a subscription really helps me get this done faster. Again—more to come on this, but the discount is available starting today!
The Paywallening
Slight change coming to the paywall—right now it’s not quite 2 years of stuff that is outside the paywall. For example, on August 1st, everything from October 2023 and earlier will be paywalled. I am going to accelerate the paywallening so the months sync up2, which will mean eventually it will be only ONE YEAR of stories outside the paywall. To this end, starting September 1st, I will paywall two months instead of the usual one month. On 9/1/25, everything from November and December 2023 will go behind the paywall.
On September 1st, everything from November & December 2023 and earlier will go behind a paywall. The next stories to go under are these:
Writing Exercises
Flash Fiction
Republish: What Love Is - This is a short little flash fiction I wrote in a notebook in 2018.
Father and Sun - This is not actually going behind a paywall! This story is my pride and joy, and I am going to leave it out of the paywall as long as possible. This is a good excuse to put it in front of you again!
Republish: The Hero’s Journey - I wrote this in ancient times, it is a lightly fictionalized account of a particularly frustrating day at work. Get ready for some corporate-core bureaucracy horror!
Like A Fish In Black Water - This was my very first serious attempt at horror, as part of the shared-world “Blackwater Files” Project.
Personal Journal of Juror No. 6 - This is part lore-dump, part philosophical exercise about how I do droids differently in the Sandbox Earth science fiction universe.
Serials
No serials going behind the paywall this month!
Essays
No essays going behind the paywall this month!
This is your last chance to read these stories for free! Check them out now!
If a paid subscription is not something you can manage right now—never fear! Using the Referral program, you can earn a paid subscription by referring someone else to subscribe using your custom link!
By sharing this link with a friend or family, when they subscribe you will get credit for referring the subscription, and starting at 2 new subscribers, you will earn 6 months or more of paid access!
Thank you for reading!
Thank you for another great month of reading and writing here at Gibberish. I appreciate you all for sticking with me—here’s to another great month ahead!
God bless you all!
- Scoot
use “randbetween” in excel
I mean—in the future, on August 1st 2026, all fiction from August 1st 2025 and earlier will be behind a paywall.