Substack Perks Come to Ruminato
My staff of one (me!) has been working hard to bring you goodies
Happy Saturday, Ruminato family!
While Europe was burning last week, I donned my designer hat to create a couple of Substack perks. I have more planned, so this is just a start.
I’ve been wrestling with ways to say thank you to paid subscribers without changing the nature of the Ruminato Substack, which follows the NPR model: Everything is free, including the Comment section: Pay if you can.
Like most of you, I am a paying subscriber to a very limited number of Substacks. I can’t pay for all the ones I’d like to. I rotate a few of them in and out of my paid subscription queue for budget reasons. But just the bigger ones, because they can handle the hit no matter what they say.
I don’t know how many people feel the same, but I’m sort of offended by the paywall system that hides content from non-paying readers. I’m not crazy about limits on comment sections, either, but I understand that from the larger Substacks, especially women, who are constantly under attack by lunatics. Their comment sections can quickly become cesspools, so it’s easiest, I guess, to just limit comments to paid subscribers.
At the same time, I gotta eat. And I’m not talking steak dinners. I’m talking those cheap Taylor Farm explosive diarrhea meals. Yes, as someone now on limited income, that’s my primary sustenance.
Charles, you idiot, my always clever readers will retort, you do know that that’s not the only way to eat a salad, right?
Alas, everyone’s a critic.
Anyhoo, my solution, thanks to Substack’s new(ish) feature, is to begin a series of perks.
Before I was a ranty Substack writer, I was a software guy (but not a tech bro!). Before that, and this is where Perks come in, I was a graphic designer and art director. This means I can do things like crank out a book in Adobe InDesign (expensive, but wonderful software) in a matter of hours.
So, I did. Twice!
If you look on the desktop version of the Ruminato website, you will see a menu item called “Perks.” All the perks I create can be found by clicking that link.
You can also find them here, so bookmark this page if you don’t want to lose the info:
https://www.ruminato.com/perks
For now, these are PDF versions, but other formats are coming.
Vampire Elegy
The first perk is my novel in progress, the sequel to Psalm of Vampires, tentatively titled Vampire Elegy. Each chapter is available free here on Ruminato. But paid subscribers get the perk of having them all in one place in the form of a PDF file (other formats coming soon).
You can always find the free version starting here:
The downloadable book is available to paid subscribers here:
The book version is a downloadable file that requires a paid account. It will be updated each time a chapter is published.
Note that Vampire Elegy is a work in progress. The title might change. The plotline might change. Genders might even change. Fun fact: When I first started writing MagicLand, he was a she and she was a he. Then I flipped them. After an initial shock, the characters recovered, and it turned out okay!
See? Republicans worry too much.
Short story anthology
The great conceit of any writer is that we assume other people want to read our stuff. There is heady blindness to truth in that regard, I’m sure, but I proceeded as if with my next Substack Perk, which is an anthology of all my fiction here on Substack.
There is more of my fiction here on Substack than I realized. Enough to fill a nearly 400-page book.
If you’re a paid subscriber, you can find the book here:
Honestly, it’s still a little rough around the edges, but I will keep updating it until I’m totally happy with it, which means it will probably get updated 1,398,543 times. At least.
I will also be making the anthology available to all my subscribers for a very small one-time donation (about the cost of a Taylor Farm salad, hopefully without the repercussions). I’ll send out a “Breaking News” email when that becomes available. It will also show up on Amazon soon.
I hate the fact that it is necessary to rely on Amazon so much, but hey, if Kamala had been elected, Lina Khan (pdf link) would have been able to maintain her plan to break up Amazon, so blame the people who didn’t vote for her. We’d be living in a very different world now if so many men didn’t hate women so damn much.
No AI
I don’t use AI for any of my writing. Not for plot development. Not for character development. Not for names. Not for anything. The best way to encourage human writing is by supporting those who shun AI, especially if you like the work. You don’t have to pay a dime. A simple restack helps tremendously.
So check out the perks. More are on the way.
Thank you for reading. I love all of you, unless you’re Andrew Tate and reading this between rounds of cage fighting with your neighbors in your new home.
![Have You Reported Andrew Tate Yet? [UPDATED]](https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/$s_!FHw8!,w_140,h_140,c_fill,f_webp,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep,g_auto/https%3A%2F%2Fsubstack-post-media.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2Fb073a3ef-6357-4b0f-b199-0a590b5938b0_4247x2831.jpeg)
Notes
I generally shun generative AI art, too. I’ll admit to some curiosity when it first emerged, but since I’ve been using Photoshop since it was a tiny application called Barneyscan bundled with scanners, there’s no excuse for me using it. I have found that more and more stock images I use as a base image are AI, though, so stuff slips through once in a while.
For those wondering: I’m aware of less expensive graphic software than the Adobe stuff, but it’s what I know. I’ve been using it for nearly 30 years. Canva, for example, looks wonderful. But I’m getting too long in the tooth to think about switching now.
