Jay Bushman

Um, hi. Been a minute, hasn’t it? I started this newsletter back in 2020, part of promoting my book NOVEL ADVICE: Practical Wisdom for Your Favorite Literary Characters — still available at your bookseller of choice! But posting fell off a while ago, due to a combination of factors — getting busy with work and trying to figure out how to navigate our slow-motion apocalyspe and, honestly, discomfort with Substack as a platform and a lot of their choices.

It’s been 14 years (!) plus a little bit more since a ragtag group of weirdos, looking for compatriots in the wild west of LA’s new media landscape, hung out a shingle to see who would show up. Since then, transmedia has become a buzzword, a sensation, a pariah, the newest hottest thing, hopelessly passé, and resurgent all over again. We’ve lost count of the number of hype cycles. We’re all older, possibly wiser (possibly not), and it’s been too long since this tribe came together.

When I was a kid, my parents sent me and my sister away to sleep away camp for a few years, to a place in Westchester County New York called "Camp Hemlock." As a bookish, indoor kid with an overactive imagination, under-active coordination, and the kind of sardonic world-weariness only achievable by a thirteen-year-old, it was a challenging experience for me.