Guess who's back, guess who's back, guess who's back…
It's not Slim Shady
Wouldn’t it be nice if it was Slim Shady, though? Or someone as cool as Slim Shady?1 Like if we were as cool as rappers in the lit world, I think more people would read lit mags. We should be. Ain’t a rapper just a poet that stopped apologizing?2 Woah…
Anyway.
Hello and welcome to the second coming of the startup diary of Chill Subs. We are gathered here today because we hired an editorial director named David and he thought we should bring our startup diary back. We said no. And…well, I won’t say he bullied us. Because bullying is wrong.3 But he’s been right about a lot of other stuff so we’re doing a trust fall here…on top of you, I guess.
I know, you're worried we might bring this startup diary back again, only to abandon it again. And you should be. We can't be trusted with a startup diary.4 But like, man, could the stakes possibly get any lower?
It’s been how long since we last spoke? Six months? A year? Give it to me in emails.
Okay, so what are we going to do here? A lot of what we were doing before, but like, with an adult in the room.
Hey, David.
And with a plan. An outline of a plan. A dog’s fart in the direction of a plan.
We’ve noticed along the way that there are a lot of answers we’d love to give to questions people have but don’t really have a place to give them. Or we put them in a place so inaccessible in a tone so boring nobody reads it anyway. Some questions are dumb and some of them are actually keeping us up at night. We can't always tell which is which.
For example:
Why don’t we ban magazines who are being pricks? And what does it mean to be a prick, anyway?
How do we make money and why haven’t we gone out of business yet if we give so much stuff away for free?
Wait, why is there a fucking seal now?
Won’t AI replace everything we do in a couple months?
Why did we think it was a good idea to let people review magazines?
Wait, is that even a seal?
What do the editors of Best American Essays smell like?
Kahlua.
And lots of other things that take a long time to explain so we don’t want to annoy everyone with super long emails full of jargon. So, instead, we’re sending it here. To people who like to be annoyed by us.
And maybe some life updates. Like Chill Subs is having two babies! And we still don’t have an HR department so we’re not sure if we can say that. And Nikita moved to Berlin! And we’ve got sooo many new people working here now. Like 20. Mariam got a full-time job so she is not going to make everyone into birds.5
We also have so much data now about different stuff in the writing world we’d love to write reports on. And weird problems that have been nagging at us all year.
Like, are literary magazines meant to be read in the first place?
And: How are we going to stop AI submissions?
And: How do we make the literary world more international (other than saying “we want more international people!” over and over).
And: WHY IS THERE A GODDAMN SEAL NOW?
But one thing has changed:
This is all going to be free now. No paywalls. The name Things We Do While Waiting to Die will stay the same because, last we checked, still dying. We are keeping it on Substack because change is hard and the goal of this is to make it very-very not hard. David promised.
Right, David?6
So if you are really into Chill Subs, or really curious about the lit world, or just want to see how many dumb jokes I can shove into product updates from a literary tech company, stick around.
If not, no worries. Go do your thing. Sing for the moment. Clean out your closet. Lose yourself.7
Sorry and welcome back.
Is Slim Shady still cool? Am I old?
And there goes the most elevated observation in the whole piece. All downhill from here. Everybody wave.
And because he’d edit that out. But he def bullied us into it and apparently hates reading footnotes so we’re safe here.
Do we even count as a startup anymore? We have salaried employees!
But we did manage to bribe her into continuing to do the cover images. Wait…are salaries just bribes to get people to do stuff?
We’ll see. Also, I don’t hate reading footnotes.
Mom's spaghetti.
my palms are sweaty
Welcome back, my favorite substack! I do really want to know your insights into almost all of the questions you posed in this update, so I'm looking forward to future posts!