Meet The Maniac V Meet the Maniac

Hello listeners, welcome back to Macabre Monday’s Meet The Maniac.
I'm your host, , aka Maya, and today I'm joined by our maniac, Mr. , author of the tech noir series “Duel”, amongst other notable stories. Scoot is a Catholic writer on Substack, boasting several newsletters, namely the Peasant Times Dispatch, Gibberish, Stained Glass Catechism, and Bima Sakti. Did I pronounce that right?
Yeah, that's a collaboration with . It's a, I'm sorry, Michael, if I've mispronounced your name. It's apparently the Indonesian word for the Milky Way.
So Scoot, you are a man shrouded in much mystery—I'd say. So why don't we suspend some of that with a proper introduction from you?
All right. Hi, I'm Scoot. Yeah, I don't know. I don't know what else to say besides what you said. I write a bunch of things. I don't write a lot of things. And I'm kind of new to the Macabre Monday crew. Kind of, I didn't, I didn't feel right kind of putting my name in the hat for the lottery until I started like writing something scary. So, and it's, it's funny because like, I'm afraid of, or I'm not, I don't handle it very well. So I don't know. I don't, I don't know what else to say. I'm a human being. I have a, like an actual face. That's not like a heart in a Betsy Ross flag. And that's, I don't know. I've already figured it. I've already lost words. So there you go.
Don't worry. I'll have enough room, enough of them for the both of us.
All right.
I'm a chatterbox. So how did you get started on Substack?
So the, the Catholic endeavors were really the first ones. I was on WordPress for a while and Substack kept popping up. People kept on talking about it and there it would like, so in such and such writer is talking about this on Substack. And I was like, all right, let me, let me explore it. Let me check it out. Maybe kind of see what kind of trouble I can get into.
So Peasant Times Dispatch was kind of the first venture. And Substack makes it so easy to like go paid to like feel legitimate. Like, I don't know. WordPress feels like a blog and Substack feels like a professional newsletter. So like the idea was that I was going to start professionalizing my writing and you know, try to see what kind of an audience there is for it.
The fiction side of the house actually came. So Gibberish was originally supposed to be a language newsletter. It was because like I was getting into conlanging and like wanted to do more with that. But I just didn't have the time. And I, I started it, you know, I think a couple months after I started the Peasant Times Dispatch did nothing with it. So then January of 23, I rebooted it. I was like, I'm going to post fiction. I was trying to put fiction on Peasant Times Dispatch. And I just, it didn't fit with everything else that was there. So I was like, all right, let's separate it. Let's have fun with it. And the rest is history. It was, it's been a lot of fun to play around with Gibberish and kind of experiment with things.
It's been a lot of fun reading what you have. You mentioned Conlang. Do you use a lot of those skills for the Bima Sakti newsletter?
That one's, that one has just started like a couple weeks ago or maybe a month ago. So eventually, maybe. But I definitely, I, I love what Tolkien did with his languages. And I love the depth that they, that it adds to worlds. I, I think about just the name of things a lot. And like, it doesn't take a lot of effort to go and either like back rationalize words.
So an example of what, of what I've done is last summer, I posted a longer story called Blood or Flood, which is set in Atlantis. And, you know, I didn't think, I wasn't thinking about like inventing a language for it, but afterwards I was just thinking about it and so I posted a couple world-building articles on like how I might approach building a language based on what I've already done without thinking about it for the story. And so I was able to like, you, you back rationalize things and then you could