Preamble
I approach these monthly newsletters as a kind-of writer’s diary, one that allows me to reflect on what I’ve produced so far, while also previewing what’s to come in the future. Each one should follow the basic template of providing some quick links to my newest articles and essays, then featuring my reflections on their writing, then finally a tentative plan of what you can expect to see before the next newsletter.
This way, I hope to provide some insight into what the writing process is like, while also contextualizing the various works I’ve already prepared.
Quick Links to my long-form Film and TV articles on Medium (all free):
The True Meaning of Home in “Planes, Trains and Automobiles” (1987)
Is Leanne Grayson Actually a Saint? Demystifying M. Night Shyamalan’s Servant
Servant Season 2 Reviews (In Episode-by-Episode publication)
Dear Readers,
Welcome to the first issue of my new online newsletter, Variations!
To avoid potential confusion, I want to begin by clarifying that Variations is the name of the monthly newsletter posts, while TEXTUAL VARIATIONS is the name of the Substack publication, which encompasses the newsletter in addition to the various articles and essays I will be posting.
In this first issue, I want to talk about why I chose to start this publication and de-emphasize my publishing on Medium, where I have been a regular writer since January 2021. For those who might not be familiar with it, Medium is an online publishing platform where anyone can sign up and publish articles that can be read by potentially thousands of other platform members and external audiences. I think it’s been well described as “the YouTube of blogging platforms.”
Early Writing on Medium
In Fall 2020, I decided to open a new Medium account and join the “Medium Partner Program” to start writing monetized articles that I could receive earnings from.
My first post was a retrospective review of an underrated 2019 film, Alita: Battle Angel, which was timed to coincide with the picture’s theatrical reissue around Halloween 2020. The article had gained about 90 reads, but made only 4 cents, as it wasn’t read by almost anyone in the internal Medium audience. I then decided that my next article needed to get into a publication, which would boost its visibility with that audience.
For various reasons, I wasn’t able to get another article written until the end of November. This was my now-famous piece on Tom and Jerry. I initially submitted it to a publication with a high number of subscribers that had an open call for submissions. Though I sent it in on time, I would not hear anything back from the editors until February 2021. It’s generally considered bad practice to submit an article to another publication unless you’ve confirmed its rejection from the first one, so I kept waiting and occasionally sending an email, asking if I could get an update.
While waiting to hear back, I wound up making a minor post in December, where I discussed the ending of the Steve Martin and John Candy Thanksgiving comedy Planes, Trains, and Automobiles (1987). It was in many ways a means to help me test the waters with Medium, to figure out what worked and how. Needless to say, the lack of any response to the Tom and Jerry submission was discouraging, especially as I considered it my best Medium article at the time.
For the rest of December, I mostly tried to experiment with shortform posting, which meant writing articles shorter than 150 words that would stay on my profile page. I was particularly inspired by a piece that promoted such posts as “a monetized alternative to Twitter.” But then, Medium changed things without much notice, reducing the amount of words that could fit into a shortform post to 30, destroying whatever interest I had in the short format. I still hadn’t heard anything from the editors about T&J, even though I had emailed them several times.
Mid-January, my writing picked up steam. I managed to very quickly produce a piece called “How to Write on Medium in Right-to-Left Languages” and get it almost immediately published in a publication called Writter’s Blokke. This was quite encouraging, especially as the editor posted it within hours of my submission.
Two weeks later I completed a long-planned article on the M. Night Shyamalan Apple TV Plus series Servant, the second season of which premiered on January 15. It got published rather quickly in Fanfare, a small but respected publication dedicated to pop culture. Within the same week, I managed to publish three more articles.
I opened up a new publication dedicated to reviewing each episode of a given show, modelling it after the AVClub’s approach to TV reviews, and began reviewing Servant on a regular basis. More importantly, I made the submission deadline at the last-minute to a film-centric publication called Cinemania, resulting in the publishing of my personal essay “Mulholland Drive Inspired Me To Become a Film Scholar.”
None of these submissions received a large amount of attention, but they helped me hone my skills as a Medium writer, encouraged me to keep working, as well as increased my following on the platform. But again, there was no word on Tom and Jerry. By the first week of February, I had grown so frustrated that I decided to just finally submit my languishing article elsewhere without hearing back from the editors.
Fanfare seemed like the right place, since it was dedicated to pop culture and an essay there was essentially guaranteed curation. What happened next was quite surprising.
Transitioning to Substack
On February 4, my article was published and it went VIRAL. Ironically, the editor of that initial publication finally reached out to me about two-three days after my Tom and Jerry article came out and apologized for the silence. I was then accepted as a writer for that publication.
Anyway, though it was chosen for further distribution, it didn’t really generate that many in-house Medium views or reads. (Though, to be fair, it has gotten more internal readings and generated more money than all of my other articles combined.) By contrast, externally it gained several thousand external views and hundreds of reads in the first few days of its posting.
A lot of the traffic, according to the analytics page, came from the article appearing on a news-aggregator website, google search results and emails.
This led me to realize several things.
First, my articles could gain good viewership without necessarily being curated in an established publication. Second, they appealed more to an external audience than to the Medium audience. Finally, even though Medium had many strengths, it was not always a good fit for the sort of content I produced. I realized I needed to take advantage of this and make Medium work for me, rather than try to tailor my work to meet the demands of Medium’s various publications.
After spending much of February reviewing Servant episodes while researching different potential newsletter/content platforms, including Revue and Ghost, I landed on the idea of opening a publication on Substack, which is one of the most popular newsletter platforms currently on the web.
Substack arguably offers a greater degree of creative freedom for individual content writers than Medium, as well as an opportunity to more directly engage an audience. (Not to mention, it is easier to repost Substack content on Medium without penalty than the other way around. Essentially, I can get the best of both platforms.)
Here, I can focus on writing at length about subjects that I would not always be able to find a place for on Medium. In particular, I am interested in analyzing how media texts change over time and what it means for our history and culture. Some of my works will link certain audiovisual practices, such as re-editing, restoration, digital remastering, and censorship to subjects like authorship, technology, and cultural status.
Others will examine how stories transform within and across media. “How and why, for instance, does the continuity or canonicity of a work in a long running series change as new installments are added? How do external events and production circumstances of a serialized television narrative influence the storytelling itself?” These are the sorts of questions I hope to tackle.
That’s not counting all the critical reviews, (re-)evaluations, personal essays, and other types of posts I will make. Ideally, I will be able to present complex critiques in an accessible style. I think my long pieces on Servant, Mulholland Drive, and Tom and Jerry are representative of the type of textual analysis that you can expect to see here.
Coming Soon:
Over the course of March, I hope to publish 5-6 Substack Original posts, the first of which should come out later this week, barring any unforeseen circumstances. The following is a list of articles I plan to release.1
“Justice is Legion: Zack Snyder’s new version(s) and the history of the “director’s cut””
A long article on the multiple iterations of the so-called “Snyder Cut” that also attempts to define and delves into the origin of the “director’s cut” concept, which is widely misunderstood in film culture. This will be my first Substack original.
5 Alternate Cuts HBO Max Should Release Next
A look at the histories of five Warner titles that could potentially receive a director’s cut on Max if the Snyder Cut proves a success.
Review of Zack Snyder’s Justice League
5 Deleted Scenes that Should’ve been in Theaters
A discussion of deleted scenes removed from five different pictures and my argument for why they should’ve made the (theatrical) cut.
Alternate Cut Compendium - The Works of Zack Snyder
A post compiling information on the alternate cuts that are known to exist for the films of Zack Snyder. The first of a series focused around specific filmmakers.
Underseen TV: Krypton
A retrospective article on an underrated Sy-Fy TV series focusing on the home planet of the Superman character, which began life as a spinoff of Man of Steel (2013), the prequel to Justice League.
I want these works to be relevant and often tied together by their subject matter. Because of this, many of these initial posts will be closely tied to the HBO Max release of the new director’s cut of Justice League.
In addition, I plan to resume reviewing the second season of Servant for Medium and posting previews with links here on Substack when they are ready. Given the issues with importing content to Substack and the fact that I’ve reviewed half of the season already specifically for Medium, I don’t think it would make a lot of sense to switch platforms and publish reviews for the remaining episodes on Substack first.2
Conclusion:
Overall, I hope I’ve provided a good idea of what you can expect both within the TEXTUAL VARIATIONS publication and within subsequent issues of the Variations newsletter.
I’ll try to keep things a little shorter next time. Please subscribe if you haven’t yet!
Best,
Mikhail Skoptsov
Please note that this schedule is tentative and could possibly change.
However, I will be switching to a Substack-first approach for my reviews of subsequent seasons of this and other series.