We'd Love to Chew with our Mouths Closed (But We're Choking)
March Updates: Merch previews, daddy problems, and more.
There is a saying in writing to “kill your darlings”. It's when you are forced to cut a certain line, scene, character, chapter, idea etc. from a piece of writing because, even though you love it, it isn't working.
At Chill Subs, we're more like a DMV of darlings.
Our ideas wander in all half-baked and lovable, and we can't help but tell them to take a number and promise we'll get to them.
For example, we want to develop auto-generators for submission templates, literary bios, and cover letters. Toss in your info, and poof! downloadable .docx formatted to industry standards.
Another is our Chill Subs republication program to give works from defunct magazines a new home on our website.
And BADGES, oh sorry, darling, don't worry, we see you. Badges will be used for writers to award kind nominations for different litmags.
And we do not mean darling in the pejorative sense, but in the sense that we're truly in love with them all and refuse to cut them out of our story.
So, what to do?
That's what March is all about for us. What can we do to make sure nobody (probably Business Daddy) has to come through our over-stuffed room of ideas and take them away, Old Yeller style?
Who else has got the merchies?
If we’re a DMV then this darling came in half-cocked with none of its paperwork.
Around mid-November, Karina and I had a brilliant plan, "Let's get merch ready to go so people can order things for Christmas!"
Since no one reading this just sipped their tea through a nice Chill Subs Mug as they sit there in their comfy Chill Subs T-shirt, I guess you can figure out how well this plan went.
We lament over it a lot:
And we'll do a whole post about our merch journey but this March we're finally getting it done. It turned out that a good friend of mine, Annie, works for a merch company! Yay! They've sourced some great stuff for us.
So we've settled on T-shirt designs!
and…
AND MUUUGS! Finally!
Check out our graveyard of t-shirt darlings:
Advertising SUUUUUUCKS.
This darling just tried to punch an employee, and now we need to call the cops.
Karina and I had an issue a while back where we needed to tell an advertiser to, kindly, fuck off because they'd requested an ad that was hurtful & rude (It's like our one rule: don't be an a-hole).
But since both of us are allergic to conflict, we had a solution...
Sean --> Business Daddy.
Clearly, we thought this was a brilliant idea:
And, he came through!
But further, he created automation so that advertisers can just fill out a form that we approve or reject. We should have had this from the beginning, for sure. And that comes from a naivety we're aware of, but think is more beneficial than not.
We are naive in that we go into every situation believing the other people have the best intentions in mind. This isn't from a lack of experience or stupidity. It's because:
a. We think, in most cases, you get what you give. If you're nice & genuine, others will be too.
b. Business Daddy thinks the exact fucking opposite and it all evens out in the end.
Redesigning our website
Nikita is a darling serial killer.
We use Figma for all of our designs. It's like a digital womb where we can go watch Nikita grow his babies. Occasionally (at least once a day) one of us will wander in on Nikita's works in progress and think, "HOLY SHIT, THAT'S AWESOME."
Then go back to tell each other to go check them out. But, by the time they've gotten there, Nikita has deleted them. Why? Because, unlike us, Nikita won't let any of his darlings out into the world unless he's 100% happy with them.
Here is a glimpse at his current WiP:
Those are the remnants of Nikita's darlings created for the redesign of our landing page. All lined up, on the edge of a cliff, waiting their turn for the rocks below.
(Wow. This all got way more murdery than I intended.)
Point is. Nikita is a genius with all that comes with it.
In other news. Here are our alive-and-well, unmaimed darlings:
We paid our first Tax!
We Made a Scavenger Hunt for this year’s AWP writing conference!
AND…
…we’ll cross 8,000 users soon.
…we were interviewed in Brevity.
…crossed 15,000 Twitter followers.
…launched an Events browse.
and…soon will have 3000 magazine listings (with the most fiction mag listings on the internet. BOOM.)
And we still have darlings walking in the door!
This month we have two MAJOR announcements planned.
We also want to release “Editors Have Issues” so editors can post links to their latest issues.
We want to create a commenting & badge system for people to show love for their favorite mags, and more!
And we’re always getting great ideas from the community.
So give us your darlings.
We promise to keep them alive, albeit starving in the corner of our virtual DMV, while they wait their turn to limp up to the counter and be processed.
Good stuff!