I made a mistake

Consolidating my writing, and looking toward the future

A little over 900 days ago, I started my first Substack Newsletter, Pregnant Pilgrim. I was preparing to walk the Camino Frances in my third trimester of pregnancy and I thought some people in my life might want to hear about it. Four months earlier, Substack had just passed 500,000 paid subscribers. It still felt like the halcyon days of a fledgling platform, as good a place as any to set up camp. 

I returned from Camino, had a baby, and wrote sporadically for the next 18 months, wrestling with where I should be writing and about what. Finally, in November 2024, I decided to use Substack to begin a project I’d long dreamed of but never found the courage and gumption to begin: the story of my grandmother, Marjorie, a former Soviet spy. 

My grandmother was born in 1911. She survived two World Wars and the Great Depression, and died at the ripe age of 92. Since her death, I’d been looking for a pathway to write her story. I called this project Fetch Me Home, a poetic double-entendre: the phrase is both the historic motto of the town where my grandmother lived for many decades through the end of her life, and a phrase that handily summarizes my general feelings about life on planet earth. 

I registered my name (aliciabonner.substack) and aside from a rocky start, for most of nine months, maintained a monthly posting schedule, alternating stories about my grandmother’s history with personal essays about similar periods in my own life. 

And then, I messed up. 

I was recently unemployed and considering applying for an aspirational job I knew I would not get but which listed as one of its criterion “established thought leadership on the new economy.” 

Well shucks, I thought. Might as well try? 

I launched Futureconomics and started publishing whatever I was thinking about from an economic perspective. I didn’t get the job, but I did realize I had a lot to say about a lot of things.

Liberated from the tidy cadence I had created for Fetch Me Home, posts came spilling out of me. This included a general social critique of capitalism, a cutting personal essay about my recent brush with poverty, and several shorter essays about maximizing utility and democratic process.

As the number of subscribers to this new publication grew, I started to worry about dividing my time and my subscribers. What would this ultimately achieve? Instead of having a robust regular publishing schedule, I’d be publishing in a few different places, sporadically. 

After some reflection, I’ve realized separating my thinking and writing into different publications is a folly and a waste of time. I am many things, and they can all live in one place on the internet. Instead of managing separate subscriber lists, you, dear readers, can use the built-in tools of this platform to choose for yourselves what you’d like to read, right here.

This week, I’m excited to roll out an expanded and re-organized Fetch Me Home. You’ll still find my family spy story front and center, alongside a new section, “Essays & Economics,” which will be the new home for Futureconomics, a space to write about more things than just my grandmother and her influence on my life. 

By tomorrow, you’ll receive an email confirming you’ve been added as a subscriber to Fetch Me Home. Over the next few weeks, you’ll hear from me a little more often than usual, but expect a cadence of a post a week by mid-October. You’ll also receive periodic ICYMI roll-ups of several posts, along with instructions on how to customize which topics you receive notifications about, in your inbox or elsewhere. 

If you have any questions, all you need to do is hit reply.

Thank you for being with me on this journey. I am so grateful for your support.