Good News About The Truth Barrier

And A Request

The Truth Barrier is growing.

Word is spreading. We’re getting recommended, cited, linked to, and quoted, more and more. It’s quite amazing, to me, and makes me feel overcome with a feeling I can’t describe.

I’ve been working on this craft for 36 years.

I actually feel proud.

I feel that I know what I am doing.

And: I know that I also knew what I was doing 36 years ago—but believed I didn’t.

That was part of the way I learned what I needed to learn.

What Are We?

I experience this place as the invention of a new form of “journalism,” which is emotion-based and symbiotic.

Not a handing down of received facts or wisdoms but a new way to watch how truth can form and re-form in real time, and never exists, actually, outside of its medium and motion.

I knew we had made it when I posted about my father’s death and so many people wrote in and said it helped them release tears that had been trapped. Inside, I said: “That’s it.”

We’re a symbiont.

Of all the things I am sometimes asked to do, honestly, this is all I want to do. I want to make this magazine a real contender.

Bioluminescence

Presently, my paid subscription rate is 4%.

If I can raise it to 8%, I can make this my main income bearing work.

If I can raise it, over time, to 15-20%, I can begin to pay other writers, and expand the travel magazine side of the magazine. (I use old fashioned words, because I understand them.)

A word about things that were tried

I received counsel recently, how Substack is designed, and why it is important to close some gates now and then (comments as well as content.) This was from a very generous person who works with Substack writers just like me, and when he told me what they earn I felt the need to argue for my own flaws.

I said things like, “I’m not a man, Tom.”

Anything to avoid stepping up. He was adamant that I do certain things and he pumped up my self confidence very generously.

”I’ll do as you say,” I said.

After something like 6 weeks, I was that billygoat that ran down the hill and pushed the gates open again.

I missed everybody who used to be in the comments section!

So…I tried to make a case against Substack’s algorithms.

We went back and forth like this, for hours, so many times.

When I said “I’m not a man,” I was not invoking victim feminism, but rather, the starkly real fact that women are in many ways naturally para-monetary. We don’t think our time is money. And it isn’t.

Writers do not “deserve” anything any more than buskers do. People pay what they wish.

I didn’t install your sink.

It’s complicated, bringing value that is in any way tangible.

Those 4% who are paid subscribers have been gracious enough never to complain that they have gotten no special content, thus far. I feel that we have very nice manners around here, and that makes me proud.

I want to sincerely thank you for everything you have done to elevate, support, and transform my life.

We have a very healthy number of subscribers, (over 10,400) and I have many fellow substackers to thank—just for starters, Jon Rappoport, Greg Reese, Margaret Anna Alice, and Mark Crispin Miller. They brought us many many new friends/subscribers.

If anybody is able to switch to paid subscription, it would help me enormously right now. Each one lends energy, and some of that energy is monetary.

There are so many great Substacks in this forest and we can’t all pay but a handful.

I get it, and I have the identical dilemma. When I bring in more, I can also donate more to others. Especially the small fish, who are close to my heart.

Substack has singlehandedly brought writers out of many forms of serfdom, including, most recently, the Huffington epoch of Czarist media. More on that another time when we are not battling against a deadly monster 24/7 and can turn to pipe puffing about the history of journalism, before Chris Best. (BCB)

The Vision For The Future

—I grow a travel magazine that pays writers.

— I start a podcast—interviewing a vast array of people.

—We all gather and talk about things we need to talk about, we counter isolation.

(I’ll tell you more about this idea soon.)

Also…I need to get back to the states. On an airplane.

With a kitten.

In the very next post, I’ll tell you about that.

You will love it, and actually, one of our subscribers partook in the rescue mission, in a very unexpected way.

Stay tuned for more…

Yours truly,

Celia

PS. It was suggested I add a PayPal link for micro-donations, for those who may wish to make a one time donation. Let’s see if it works. I imported it myself!

PayPal One Time Donation