Newsletter

The Whole Megillah

Teresa Van Santana

Jan 8, 2023 — 5 min read

Hey y’all,

How’s 2023 treatin’ ya? More of the same? I wonder if we could have seen that coming …

I had a tasty screed for you this time, but I’ve decided to set that aside in favor of walking you through everything I have going on creative and personally. Putting a little bit more of the classic ‘newletter’ flave inta this bee, as it were.

Anyhow, let’s get to it, leading off with the writerly stuff …

The Substack Reading Experience

A few days ago, made a great post about the differences between the Substack experience when reading through email versus on the website. You should check it out. Please do, in fact.

But, invariably, I know most of you will not check it out, due to busyness, laziness, or just brain fog, so I’ll summarize for you the points that seem most relevant to AiSwTVS:

The website has way more posts than you are getting through email.
It has organization to it, so you can read more content and follow it in a more orderly fashion than just whatever is in your inbox today.
Most of you have never seen it, and are missing out on a lot of what is happening there.

Alison admittedly doesn’t touch on the app, but I’ll make that one easy: it stinks.

Now, if you are an app lover, then I know there is not convincing you, so please just carry on. But the real experience is on the website, in desktop form. That is the best version of the site, both in terms of features and completeness. So if you want the optimal experience, that is where you should read Adventures in Secrecy. Having said that, I’m grateful, truly, if you’ve read a word I’ve written through any outlet. This is simply so you understand what I’m thinking, why, and what your options are.

The Web Verszh

“Okay, T,” you say. “You’ve convinced me! Tell me what I’m missing!”

Can do, you!

Let’s start with the main page.

Here is a screenshot of our landing page:

which, as Alison notes in her post, many of you have probably never seen. Which, you know, is chill. But if you want to, it’s there, waiting.

I’ll walk you through the two largest entries there, as well as the tabs under the title.

TVS

That post is about your host—me! Teresa Van Santana. It also contains links to other parts of the site and to Ello, as well as older bios—one of which has an explanation after a fashion of the name Van Santana, if you’re curious about that.

The Caverns

This is the master index for every post in my collection. You can find literally every post here, organized by section, arranged chronologically by date of publication. This actually takes a bit of work to set up and maintain, so I hope it’s useful to at least a few of you.

Chat

Substack added a chat feature. (Rolls eyes.) But I do like chatting with those of you who have been using it. If e’er you wanna hollah atcha girl, this is a pretty direct and easy way to do it.

Teresa’s Backbone

This is the most recent entry in The Secret of Secrets 1, my gonzo speculative fiction meganovel (of which Everything Fails is the first). It was going to be, like, twenty books? Now it’s looking like probably thirty. Or maybe just three? In print I mean. Who knows. It’s huge, though, and to say it’s sprawling would be an understatement. So I get if you’re intimidated or offput, yet I beseech you: try it! I have it on pretty good authority that my work is more satisfying the more you read, but there is a bit of a barrier of entry. Just jump in somewhere and relax. Then read a little bit more each day. Before long, you’ll have the hang of it. It seems more abstruse than it is, truly.

Teresa’s Backbone has her own index—The Backbone—which itself has two subsections: the master list of all chapters, which looks like this:

and then a subsection of chapters grouped by character, plotline, or theme, which I call ‘paths” as seen here:

And then there’s a picture near the top of my bare ass. Comic book ass, but still. Here it is, just in case you aren’t tired of it yet:

It’s meant to be a map of sorts? By which you can navigate. That’s not panning out very well, so it’s kind of just, I dunno, emblematic or something? We’ll see what happens as we keep going.

Anyway, this beastly gal will eventually see print and probably in multiple forms and versions. I have no timeline for this, as I have no idea when I will finish; however, there’s been some interest in a print version already, so I am trying to figure out how to deliver something while I’m still writing it. Let me know your thoughts on that, both in terms of interest and if you have any ideas about how I might do it.