How to Use Platforms to Build Communities in Search of Greater Truth

I'm receiving some challenging questions from my readers and I love it

Hello Friends!

I hope you all had a wonderful weekend. Last night my wife took us all out to see Wicked. I found the film to be very emotional and had to hold back tears for most of it. It probably would have been better to cry, but my kids were along and I didn’t want to make them worried.

We need those emotional releases.

The film impacted me because it contains so many of the themes that are relevant in the world today. Con artists come to power by blaming innocent, marginalized groups for all the problems in the world. The general population is too ignorant and hateful to recognize the problems are caused by the con artist himself.

Welcome to life in the USA.

At the same time that I regret our country has chosen “the hard way” or “the way of failure,” in this last month I’ve gained a lot of insight into the problems that befall humanity. I didn’t want to have to do this, but my brain is working overtime, and the veil has been ripped away. Now it’s just a matter of hiding my work someplace safe before the book burners show up.

Download the podcast episodes. That will prevent me from being erased.

In the meantime, I’ve had some wonderful conversations with readers and I want to share the insight I derived from those discussions.

Creating communities

I had a nice video chat with

TimPrentiss

on Friday. He told me about his interest in using platforms like Medium and Substack to help cultivate local communities. It’s a nice idea, and I think we get so focused on using platforms from a business perspective that we forget the human element.

The human element is the most critical part.

I know that I probably spend too much time in front of a computer screen. I work from home so I don’t have the “office” camaraderie. About the only person I talk to other than my family is the local dog walker Isak (I’ll write more about him—he’s a character in my life and he owns a dog that’s part wolf).

Occasionally, I do talks at the local library, but I haven’t made the effort to put together a local writers group. Maybe I should do that, it would make it easier to find stories to boost.

Questions on Substack

I also recently received a message from

John Pearce

. He’s a wonderful writer, and I reviewed one of his books here. He recently informed me that he’s making the move from Wordpress to Substack, so I thought I’d offer some thoughts.

First of all, I think Substack is a much better tool for writers than Wordpress. The advantage is in Substack’s internal distribution mechanism. I had a Wordpress blog for a long time and it just languished. It was available on search engines, but you often got pushed down the search results.

Substack is a bit more human oriented and people find you. The best growth strategy is to be active on notes and read a lot of articles. By “active on notes” I only mean use it like we used to use Twitter. Be present and write engaging comments/observations.

I also really like Substack’s voice over and podcast features. The podcast allows you to get your work into a new distribution mechanism and find a whole new audience. I started off by simply posting the audio versions of my articles into the podcast, and it’s grown from there.

Here’s John’s Substack. He writes historical thrillers.

Philosophical musings

Finally,

Jeffrey David Hines

sent me a question last week. As I was writing my answer, I felt it gaining momentum and it became bigger than I expected it to be. Jeffrey is very thoughtful, and now he’s responded to my answer. You can read that here.

I like this concept of engaging with intelligent people and observing where the thoughts take us. I read Jeffrey’s response yesterday but I didn’t have the energy to sit down and engage it. Nevertheless, part of my mind has been working on it, and when I sit down to write I think I’ll have some good ideas.

It’s important to note that we’re all fallible, and that this discussion is ongoing. I am fully aware that I don’t have all the answers, but that’s not the point of this brief existence. The point is to look for them. Too often, we are conditioned that there are some topics we cannot question. That should be a red flag to all of us. It’s behind those closed doors that all the answers have been hidden.

So go forth and kick the doors down.

That being said, try to keep yourself from becoming upset with me if I engage topics you’ve been trained to believe are “sacred.” That training controls you.

That’s kind of a teaser for where the thoughts inspired from Jeffrey’s post are taking me.

With that, I’ll leave you for today. I think I’ll have a nice podcast for you this afternoon. Have a great morning!

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