Here we go again: Restarting the ol subscription tiers

I'm committing to a plan.

Okay, guys. Okay, okay, okay.

Short version: I’m restarting my Substack paid subscription options. I’ll be doing a weekly post (generally around Sundays) for paid subscribers, often focused on questions submitted in the comments, sometimes involving extra content around one of my novels.

Long version: Folks have been asking me to do a Substack or a Patreon or a subscription something for quite awhile now, but while I was doing three four years* of pretty insanely intense in-person and virtual writing retreats, I didn’t have the bandwidth to think about what a year-long plan of content might look like. I was using all my brain wattage to handle the logistics of those big endeavors** and swim through the complex waters of all those student novels, and anything I had left over was given to my own novel-writing. When I teach, I have to be in it, letting my students’ novels really subsume my entire subconscious, and that meant there was little time left over for any meaningful prattling on socials.***

*I have been telling people “three years” for so long that I didn’t realize that an entire extra year of teaching passed while I did.

**Between 2021-2025, I shut dozens of writers into Scottish castles and eco-farms and Icelandic spa retreats to work intensively on their novels with me, and finished the entire endeavor off with 800+ 1:1 30 minute student Zoom calls. The only reason why I can’t call it insanity is because it was very successful. If I wasn’t so proud of my students and their accomplishments personally and professionally, it would definitely count as Extreme Folly.

***If any of you have yet read THE LISTENERS, teaching is my personal Avallon IV.

But in February, I began my (at least) two-year hiatus on those intense writing programs. Fly! Swim! Be free, students! They are off finishing drafts or starting editing or getting to know their new agents and editors or even taking their own hiatus after such intense focus. And since I’ve set them all free, I’ve been reassembling my sense of self (interrupted, of course, by a month of touring).

In that time, I realized several things about myself.

1) I wanted to create a lot of stuff over the next few years. Joyful, big, batshit stuff, things that celebrated and challenged the more complicated human I have become in mid-life. It was truly revolutionary to remember how creating-on-the-internet could feel while I was drawing 90+ dachsunds into copies of the Old Masters.

2) I wanted to find an internet place to be a more open version of myself for readers who are interested in that. Not a more truthful version of myself, as I think I’m pretty much a truthful self already on all my socials, but a more nuanced and messy and full version.

3) I wanted to commit to putting a lot of words down each week, just to see what I looked like on the other side of it. Years ago, I did a years of weekly short stories with Merry Sisters of Fate (archived here) and although I don’t think I’m ready to sign up for that again, I remember how fluent that regular practice made the work of articulating myself across all written forms. I want to see if I can recapture that.

4) I wanted to continue to peer at traditional publishing to see how I feel about it. Is it serving readers; is it serving writers; how do I think it can be improved; where do I belong inside it. I have moved into adult general fiction now, which has different rules than young adult fiction, and as I explore the new pastures, I want to be constantly curious about if I enjoy it or if I need to kick some boards out of a fence. There are several writers doing serial novels on Substack. Do I want to do that? Do I want to think about doing that? I don’t know, but I know that engaging regularly is the way to start investigating these thoughts.

5) I wanted to make the internet a better place to be. I’m only one person, but if a lot of only-one-people are creating meaningful things for the internet, we can win it back from the slop. As I was drawing a dachshund every day, I realized just how nice it felt to be building a safe island of creativity on the internet—it was so charming and pleasant to see the little community arise around those posts. And I liked having my word doc full of planned artists for the next few months to come; nothing like crossing something off a to-do list.

So all that combines into me committing to a proper blog again for a year. The truth is that I’ve been blogging since the beginning, back when I was a full-time artist (some of you have been following me since the very beginning of that career, which astonishes and delights me; thank you, crazy to think of folks commenting on Greywaren Art long before the Raven Cycle ever existed), and I really like processing things through this lens. In the spirit of exploration, I tried starting a TikTok and restarting my Tumblr, and I didn’t like either, so here I am, in the OG format, long-form words on ye olde blog. It feels like home. Making this a subscription blog and hiding it away behind a few clicks and bucks makes me feel like I can be more of myself.

I already have a word doc of potential topics on writing and reading and novel extras, but I’d love to get in the habit of you guys asking questions in the comments and me nabbing one for a post the week after. So many folks came through the signing line asking when I would restart the in-person retreats and this feels like a way to keep talking about writing until I ever do those again. And I’m open to hearing any other suggestions for what you’d like from me. .

Let me be quick to say that you don’t have to pay anything to get into a subscriber-only Stiefvater community—I’m going to link here to the Facebook community and the Discord community, both of which are moderated by kind volunteers. I’m not present in either, but there are hundreds and hundreds of Stiefvater readers who are, all chatting in the safety of a closed-door meeting space. There is also another way to hear me talk about writing, my 8-hour video writing seminar with its very long accompanying writer workbook; it’s not free, but it’s cheaper than an annual subscription here.

Anyway, I think that’s all; let’s play it by ear and see what everyone wants to hear, and slowly we’ll settle into a format that makes sense. Just making a productive and wondrous corner on the internet together, yeah? Something sustainable and affirming.

Submit your questions and topics in the comments, or just say hi . . . let’s go!