One year of Myth Takes!

Today marks one year since I launched this newsletter with a Buffy the Vampire Slayer reference, and I’m so grateful to all of you for joining me on this journey.

I didn’t know what to expect, exactly, when I started this project. Would I find it hard to publish every week? Would Substack’s metrics drive me insane? Would anybody want to read my weird thoughts about Euripidean fat jokes, the plural of ‘octopus’, and ancient sex positions?

To my surprise, it’s been a pretty uniformly delightful experience. Yes, sometimes it’s been challenging to write a newsletter every week, and a few times I haven’t managed to press send until Sunday afternoon or risk losing my weekly streak (the horror). But the steady pace has felt good to me. I’ve deeply appreciated the stability it brings to my writing rhythm, because the process for writing books is so cyclical. During the long fallow periods when I’m trying to stay sane while waiting to hear back from my editor, having this newsletter as a regular, steady outlet has been a huge relief.

The weekly pace has also meant that I branched out more on the topics I wrote about, because I simply didn’t have a meaty Classics-related essay in me every few days. So I’ve ended up writing about whatever happens to be occupying my brain. Most of it does fall broadly at the intersections of Classics, literature, parenting, and feminism, but sometimes it’s about video games or AI or stuffed animals, and that’s fine. Better than fine, really. And I’ve written more than 85K words here in the past year, a whole-ass book’s worth.

I’ve heard a lot of excellent newsletter advice, and I’ve ignored most of it. I don’t stick to a specific “niche” in my posts. I don’t publish at the same time on a regular schedule. I don’t paywall posts or comment sections. (I did quietly launch paid subscriptions a few months back, but for now, paying is strictly optional.) I don’t interact a ton on Notes or promote my posts on other platforms.

I may do any or all of those things in the future — who knows? — but up until now, I’ve only done what feels good and right to me. The only piece of advice I’ve taken is to write the newsletter I’d like to read: something fun, smart, weird, and joyful, which hopefully makes people happy to see in their inbox. I want to like my own newsletter, to reread what I’ve written here and enjoy the occasional sparks of humor and insight and vulnerability.

That focus on writing the newsletter I want has made it much easier for me to not sweat the metrics game. I’m not going to pretend that I don’t look at metrics at all. I know some people genuinely don’t care, but I think most people who say they don’t might be trying to perform some kind of cool-girl act because they think it makes them seem breezy and authentic or something. I have more respect for the newsletter writers who are hustling and are transparent about the work that it takes to make something like this a full-time job, although that’s not me, either. I’m just going to keep doing my thing, and I’m honestly humbled that over a thousand people have signed up to have my weird random thoughts delivered to their inboxes. I know how full those inboxes can get.

For my fellow nerds who do like metrics, here are the top Myth Takes posts of the year:

Most viewed:

Most liked:

Most commented-on:

Most new subscribers:

Those four pieces really capture the range of this newsletter. Like me, this space is a little bit all over the place, and I love that.

(Also, I went to a kid’s birthday party at Chuck E. Cheese last weekend, and it truly was the 9.5th circle of hell. My views on that subject haven’t changed. My partner asked if I wanted him to throw me some kind of Myth Takes party, and I asked him if he hated me.)

To celebrate this milestone for the newsletter and make it easier to navigate the 60+ posts I’ve published, I’ve added article tags in the menu bar. If you’re new here, give them a look! This year has been a tough one politically, and it seems like in response I really leaned into the fun and the queer and the weird.

And truly, thank you to everyone who has read, subscribed, shared, liked, or commented on one of my posts. Except for the guy who commented asking me to please keep politics out of this space, then deleted the comment before I could screenshot it to mock him. That guy sucks (and, also, did he get lost? Because hahaha at the idea that I would ever keep politics out of anything). My only response to that is this flawless comic that I think about at least once a week:

But to the rest of you wonderful people who aren’t that guy: thank you for joining me in this space. Community feels more important than ever these days, and I hope reading this weird Classics nerd newsletter has made you feel a little less alone in your brain. Writing it has certainly done that for me.