Henrik Karlsson (@henrikkarlsson): "Today is my 1 year anniversary of being a full time writer on Substack. Some reflections. For context, I worked in art gallery for the first three years I wrote Escaping Flatland. Some people said I’d miss having colleagues when I quit to write full time, and that is to som…"

For context, I worked in art gallery for the first three years I wrote Escaping Flatland. Some people said I’d miss having colleagues when I quit to write full time, and that is to some extent true. For better or worse, nothing happens in my life anymore unless I initiate it. But I mostly like that, the responsibility and intentionality it forces. And the good thing about an art gallery is that you can just walk in! I’ve occasionally worked from the café of my old job when I missed them. I said recently that the main benefit of having a large-ish audience is that I can afford to write more. The rest was mostly more satisfying when I had 100 to 1000 subscribers: then I had interesting people to write to, and I made friends, etc. After that it mostly gets overwhelming, you start receiving hate, and the noise drowns out the signal. Tamseel pointed out that I missed one important privilege of writing full time: I now think about my writing all the time. I’m never distracted by other work,

For context, I worked in art gallery for the first three years I wrote Escaping Flatland. Some people said I’d miss having colleagues when I quit to write full time, and that is to some extent true. For better or worse, nothing happens in my life anymore unless I initiate it. But I mostly like that, the responsibility and intentionality it forces. And the good thing about an art gallery is that you can just walk in! I’ve occasionally worked from the café of my old job when I missed them. I said recently that the main benefit of having a large-ish audience is that I can afford to write more. Th