Molto Amaro
"It's a bittersweet surrender."
And We’re Back!
Welcome to the first LAST CALL dispatch of 2023, and I hope the New Year is treating you well thus far. The beginning of January is always a strange, sometimes sad time as people rebound and recover from an extended period of celebrating and (hopefully) relaxing as the cold reality of facing another year head-on manifests itself. It’s like settling the tab after a night out on the town.
This week, specifically January 11, marks the sixth month anniversary of the launch of LAST CALL. I had been planning and plotting to launch a Substack newsletter since fall 2021 and had marked January 2022 as my original go-live date (New Year, New BTP!). My friend and colleague Robert Simonson beat me to market with the January arrival of The Mix (happy one-year anniversary, Robert and MK!) and set a very high bar for me as we both travel in the same lanes of the drinks and regional foodways scene.
I spent the first sixth months of last year researching Substack and diving into best practices documents, articles, and forums; created countless Google docs and spreadsheets with potential names (sadly, The Brad Thomas Parsons Project was lost on too many young folks in my test group), mission statements, potential topics, and editorial calendars; fretted over frequency, pricing models, and how to generate subscriptions and cultivate a dedicated core of paying subscribers; and had several supportive Zoom calls with a Substack Writer Development advisor who got me to actually start the official process by April.
But I continued to overthink things into summer with no actual Substack to show for all my hard work. Finally, one evening over drinks with my dear friend David Lebovitz (who writes one of the most popular Food & Drink newsletters on Substack, with thousands of paying subscribers) and he wisely counseled me to “just send it.”
And so I did.
Creating and sending out a twice-weekly newsletter is a lot of work, especially when I’m also freelancing for other publications and working on a new book, but there’s a reward in writing for myself. I’m a one-man-band operation and whether it’s published in a book, magazine, or online, sharing work with readers can feel like writing in a vacuum. It’s a cycle of pitching or landing work, researching, writing, editing, publishing, promoting on perpetual repeat. But writing LAST CALL feels like a direct connection with readers, and I’m so appreciative for every comment, like, share, and paid subscription you offer after receiving one of these newsletters.
Thank you all again for your support of LAST CALL, and my continued work as a writer and author. It means the world to me.