Creating dad trying.

A new series documenting my Substack experience | 🚧 Substack journal no. 001

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🏗️ What This New Series Is About:

Welcome to my Substack journal where I document my experience creating and operating dad trying. This isn’t a “how-to” post/series by any means (more of a “how-the-hell” if anything). No advice, no best practices, no steps to “grow your Substack by one million subscribers!”—just reflections from an insecure writer on this crazy, difficult task of trying to make art I’m proud of and art that readers like you find nourishing, entertaining, and useful.

This, my friend, is a monthly series for folks who, like me, enjoy nerding out on and reveling in this beautiful, frustrating, sometimes demoralizing thing we call Process. I’m a work in progress and so is my art: I’m here to share with you my process of trying to get better (just a little, tiny bit) every day. 🌱

So, every month, I’ll be releasing a behind-the-scenes look at my recent activity on Substack: What I wrote, what I filmed, what I posted on Notes, what inspired it all, and how I felt after hitting that liberating but anxiety-producing “Send to Everyone” button. For folks out there who enjoy numbers, I’ll also be posting insights from my writer’s dashboard including my growth (or lack thereof). Of course, you can ignore this last bit if you find sharing numbers to be gauche or the comparison of numbers to be the death/thief of joy, but I find them fun and useful to reflect on, an “objective” dimension to the subjective things I make.

I hope you enjoy this new series and being part of my growth as an artist, dad, and human.

I appreciate you, and I’m grateful for your presence! 🙏🏻🧡

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Creating dad trying.

I joined Substack as a reader in October 2023 and eventually mustered up the courage to start my own Substack the following year on my birthday: April 1st. I’ve always been terrified of writing for a public audience—of writing anything that wasn’t hiding behind the labels of “academic” or “scholarly” writing—and so I figured the best gift I could give myself was the permission to act on a long-held dream I had always been too scared to pursue. Happy birthday to me. 🥳

Of Pigs and Dads

I originally wanted to name my Substack Fast Pig. It’s inspired by and taken from an exchange between two of the main characters in East of Eden by John Steinbeck:

“You can’t make a race horse of a pig.”

“No,” said Samuel, “but you can make a very fast pig.”

I love this quote. It’s one of my favorites, like top ten. The way I interpret it has something to do with pedigree and talent. I have never felt like a race horse (i.e., I’ve never felt like the fastest, the strongest, the most impressive, or someone born with talent). Instead, I’ve always felt more like the proverbial pig trying to be as fast as they can be, trying like hell to discover and reach my potential; I’m not interested in trying to change into something I’m not—I just want to make the most with what I was given. For me, the quote represents aspiration and striving, themes that are the bedrock of my Substack (along with my penchant for being self-deprecating, too).

But, the more I thought about it, the more I figured I’d be sacrificing clarity in favor of cleverness: Didn’t you catch the esoteric literary reference in my title? I’d also be banking on the idea folks would understand, like, and relate to the quote that inspired the name—but what if readers hated it?

Unsurprisingly, the perfect title came organically. Reflecting on a recent tough parenting moment, feeling down on myself, and frustrated by my inability to change and consistently adopt the behaviors I aspired to, all I could think of was how hard I was trying. Yes, I was failing, but I would never stop trying to be a better dad, ever. Talking with my wife, I expressed the same sentiment: I’m trying to be a better dad, and I’m going to be.

The next time I sat at the keyboard, I knew dad trying perfectly captured the ethos of my Substack in an unpretentious and straightforward way. I explain it like this on my About page:

I’m a dad trying to be better for my family, students, colleagues, and community, and that’s the animating spirit behind everything I do here . . . The original concept for this Substack is documenting my attempts and failures to do just that. This newsletter is me opening up my world and sharing that process of becoming and self-fashioning, thinking out loud with you about how things went, what’s next, and why.

47 Logos Later

I lost countless hours to branding and coming up with a logo, something I tried to capture and explain in my third Substack Note:

Here’s a gallery of some logo highlights (or fails), and I hope some opportunities for you to laugh:

9 Examples of failed dad trying logos

Here, you can see my lack of design skills but also some themes/ideas I’m working through:

• The Sisyphean task of becoming the perfect dad or perfect parent. I thought I was really clever using the cartoon baby head as a boulder, but my wife found it horrifying and told me it was the dumbest logo she had ever seen. I laughed and laughed and laughed . . .

• Playing around with traditional masculine/dad imagery like flannel and tree bark. Men!

• Minimalist logos stripped down to nothing but black and white letters and simple cartoons representing my perpetual exhaustion.

Then, scrolling through pictures on my phone, I came across a picture Leah took of me at the hospital about 48 hours after our son was born. In it, my hair is tousled, I had barely slept in days, and, sitting there exhausted, I’m working on my laptop: It captured everything.

Once again, the right decision was an organic one:

The final and current dad trying logo

If you have a favorite logo or an idea for a new one, let me know in the comments. ⬇️

Being an About Page Maximalist

If there’s one thing I’m just bonkers for here on Substack it’s “About” pages. I love them. I see a lot of advice here on Substack encouraging folks to keep it short and to the point: Your Substack in -1 character! Value proposition! Subscriber benefits! ATTENTION SPANS! Sell! Sell! Sell!

Well, personally, I think gratuitous About pages are awesome. I’m here to connect with people, and I’m happy to spend time getting to know a writer and their publication even if I need to come back a few times to finish reading their About page because my three-year-old son is climbing onto the kitchen counter and reaching for the knife block. Please don’t reduce yourself to one sentence to “sell” me a subscription: I’m here for depth and for you.

Then again, maybe I’m just a narcissist, but shouldn’t you know that? 🤔

Anyway, I wanted to launch with a maximalist, exhaustive About page that would tell my readers everything they needed to know about my publication and its neurotic author. Because the name of my Substack suggests this is a parenting Substack, but given the fact I actually lack an obvious niche or focus, I felt compelled to explain myself to future readers the best I could.

I spent a lot of time editing the video for the About page (something I referenced in my first Substack Note ever!), and I’m not sure anyone has even watched it. Still, I’m happy it’s there, and I hope it gives new readers an insight not just into my writing or my Substack but also my dream of making videos and, eventually, educational content and documentaries. 🎥

Post 000:

For my welcome post, I wanted to create a list of 50 random personal facts, and then link each fact or “fragment” to a post once I wrote it.

I liked the idea of giving folks a “choose-your-own-adventure” post where they could explore whatever they found to be the most compelling, fun, or weird. Really, I just wanted to write something that would quickly let people get to know me, and perhaps allow me to get to know them if they decided to leave their own “fragments” as a response in the comments; quite a few readers have taken me up on this, and it’s been an absolute joy reading them.

In terms of likes, views, restacks, and comments, this is one of my least “successful” posts, but I like it and plan on keeping it pinned. If you haven’t read it yet, you can check it out here.

A quick look at the numbers behind my welcome post.

The Year of Throwing Everything at the Wall and Seeing What Sticks:

I spent a lot of time not writing leading up to launching dad trying in April 2024. For a platform like Substack, this is obviously counterproductive. And my best ideas—or at least I think so, anyway—came to me organically when I least expected them and wasn’t trying to force anything. I could have saved myself a lot of time and effort by just writing (imagine that—keeping the main thing the main thing).

No regrets, though.

I wanted dad trying to launch with plenty of content demonstrating who I was, allowing readers to connect with me on day one. That’s why I spent so much time laboring over the About page, the videos, and “Jacob in 50 Fragments”: I wanted to provide different opportunities for readers to connect with me.

From a branding and marketing perspective, I struggled—and still do—because it’s hard to brand and “sell” something still in the process of being formed: I don’t know what my niche is, and I don’t know who my target audience is. I want to write about fatherhood and my family and my life, but I also want to write about Don Quixote, semicolons, self-development/wellness culture, pro wrestling, reality TV, and everything else one can find within the various constellations of Jacob’s Universe. The minute I feel like I have to write something, this becomes work, and then my Substack is dead. My life has plenty of work—it needs more play.

If folks decide to subscribe to dad trying, I want them to subscribe to all of me: Not just one part of me cut off and expertly curated for maximum marketability.

Sometimes I think there’s an arrogance to not having a niche: I’m just so complex and interesting and fascinating that I can’t possibly be expected to write about one topic—I’m Whitman! Stand in awe of my multitudes! It’s like, dude, c’mon, just pick a lane and respect folks’ time.

But I’m not in a lane: I’m running around screaming in the open field next to the highway. I can’t be expected to pick anything yet.

My first year on Substack is hereby known as The Year of Throwing Everything at the Wall and Seeing What Sticks: I’m going all in, throwing everything I’ve got and everything I am at this project, and we’ll see what happens.

Who knows? Maybe by this time next year dad trying will be a stamp collecting newsletter?

What I hope doesn’t change are the friendships I’m making here on Substack.

Thanks for being here—it means everything to me.

Coming Up Next: April 2024 | My First Month on Substack

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