Exciting news!

Food for the Worm is a grant recipient & once again open for pitches.

**NOTE: submissions for the pitch call below are now closed. Thanks everyone!"*

Hi worms,

This is not a normal essay post, so enter at your own discretion. First, an announcement:

Food for the Worm is a recipient of the Horror Writers Association Rocky Wood Memorial Scholarship Fund for Non-fiction Writing! A huge thank you to the HWA for its generous support and a congratulations to the writers awarded some of the org’s other grants. It’s so cool to be validated :-) I love prizes

OK, but what does that mean for you? It means I’m able to launch a new project featuring more guest writers and more interesting essays on this genre we all find so very neat.

This winter, FFTW will publish a series of four essays all focused on horror novel adaptations, i.e. horror books that were made into movies. I’m looking for two writers to pen two of the essays. The essays should focus on the films more than the books, but other than that it’s a pretty open concept.

This is a paid opportunity. $250 per essay. Please send your pitch to mailfortheworm@gmail.com with the subject line “Bookworm: [NAME OF FILM].” These are the guidelines for submitting pitches.

The second thing I want to say is a note about the regularity (or lack thereof) with which I send newsletters. I hope my thoughts will be useful to other people who are worried about their productivity.

When I started FFTW it was, and remains, purely a passion project — something I could do to exercise my creative writing muscle and an opportunity to build on some ideas around fear that I’d started tossing about in college. I thought it would be fun and experimental and the people who wanted to read it would read it. And, I mean, that’s what’s happened! Unlike so many other things in my life, I didn’t want this to ever feel like an obligation nor did I want to put too much focus on growing the following inorganically or pushing for subscribers. For that reason, I didn’t set any sort of rules for myself about when I would write and publish. I just do it when I feel like it.

That was, somehow, two years ago. And while I’ve seen Substacks much younger than this one amass huge numbers of subscribers in that time by churning out posts every week or more (and by the way, a lot of those are superb), I just haven’t felt compelled to worry too much about how many people are here or whether I’m doing “enough.”

The most frustrating thing, for me, about the world of non-fiction writing, from news reporting to magazine think pieces, is the frenetic pace we’re expected to keep as writers. Every single — and I do mean every single — advice column for writers and creatives today includes something along the lines of “publish frequently.” I’ve worked in social media management (bleh) and found the same advice amplified by 10 million. (And I think that has more to do with the desires of the platforms themselves but I’ll not digress.)

But why? From a growth perspective, I get it. The more you put out, the more people you’re likely to reach and the more followers you’ll have and the more you’ll be able to… capitalize? spread your message? advance your career? etc. The more present you are on the internet, the more love the internet is meant to give you in return. But that feels a lot like fast fashion to me. Capital for the point of capital. Why would I publish something I don’t feel that confident in purely to gain readers whose interest comes from a piece of writing that feels inauthentic to what I’m doing?

Additionally, as readers and viewers and consumers, we’re absolutely saturated. What good is it doing us to be pounded with information every second of every day — especially when so much of that information is written without thought, without fact-checking, and with a bunch of rehashed ideas from the same exact piece of writing published 2.5 seconds earlier on an adjacent platform?

And the truth is, I’m busy. I’ve had a summer with lots of highs and lows that got a little crazy in the last two months, and I just started graduate school, and I have jobs. I just don’t have time to make a sacrifice to the Gods of the Content Machine as often as they may decree. I’m sitting on an interview with the creator of the Final Destination franchise — which I conducted four months ago! And I have to actively silence all the alarm bells in my head going off telling me I’m doing something wrong with my inactivity.

Also, you’re busy. No one is sitting around twiddling their thumbs waiting for me to drop 2,000 words on the Texas Chainsaw Massacre. We’re just here when we’re here.

Ultimately, what I want to say is: I like doing this. I like watching scary movies and over-thinking them and wondering if a guy getting his head cut off says something about the culture and bewildering my mom (who is supportive nonetheless). I really, really like working with other writers at our own disposal. I like editing their stuff and seeing it shine in the end like a little shell spit up from the ocean. So I don’t want to ruin it with a bunch of postmodern content bullshit about how much I should be posting and what kind of promotion I should be doing.

There will probably come a day when I open up a paid submission feature. And it’s true that when I have a guest writer I push their work out there with vim. Thanks to this grant, I’m going to be doing some advertising and outreach and maybe we’ll grow some. I could one day post weekly. Who knows! Anything could happen! But I’m not going to stress out about it. I want you to know that whatever I do in this one corner of the internet, I’m doing it because it feels right and true.

So, for now, I hope the way we do things here — sporadically and with whimsy — is OK with you. If you have thoughts to share on the topic, feel free to send ‘em. 🪱