Slowcore and the Inner Genius

Hello and welcome to my new blog. I'm Danica Swanson, a contemplative animist, polytheist, writer, senior editor, and founder of a Pagan monastery-bootstrapping project called Black Stone Sanctuary.

Since 2011 I've been working on the Sanctuary (originally called Black Stone Hermitage) from my studio based in Portland, OR.

Last year I joined forces with Trish Deneen, a fellow writer and friend of the Sanctuary. Together we're building a new instantiation of the Sanctuary and bringing it onchain, including individual blogging sections ("thinkspaces") for each of us.

I'll begin with a personal story.

In January 2023, after two years working in crypto as a senior editor, I joined Farcaster, a social network built on Ethereum. Right from the outset I knew I'd found my happy place. I settled in. I joined Paragraph. I bonded with other nerds. I learned the community lore. I made myself right at home in this cozy digital nest, grateful for the norms of kindness, the warm welcome given to my earnest word-nerd writing style, and the technical excellence on display every day.

Nothing like rubbing virtual shoulders daily with a brilliant and thriving scenius to feed my creativity.

In August 2023, emboldened by the enthusiastic reception of my Web3 Editorial Style Guide and my published work on Paragraph, I decided to go all-in web3 with my full roster of creative work, personal and professional. Toward that end, I shut down all three of the newsletters I'd been publishing on Substack from 2018-2023: Endarkenment, The Anticareerist, and Of Hearth & Shadow: Notes From Black Stone Sanctuary.

For many years I'd been "earning a living" — and self-subsidizing all of my niche off-hours writing projects — through freelance work as a senior copy editor. I'd moved from content farms to corporate gigs to web3/DeFi media agencies.

When I joined Farcaster, I assumed this pattern would continue. In fact, my intention was to keep operating my solo business this way long into the future, even after official retirement. Self-employment suits me well. I genuinely enjoy copy editing, I've worked fruitfully with many happy clients, and there's a great deal of unmet need for good copy editing in web3 (lol).

But something had changed.

It started with a major setback: the back-to-back losses of both of my best DeFi media clients amidst the brutal 2023 crypto winter. (I still miss working with them).

I put out the word on Farcaster about my availability for copy editing and editorial consulting work. Fortunately, I received some tempting proposals to write and provide "conversational liquidity" for various outlets. Offers included an editorial management role, a creative director role for a new publication, and a request to host a Farcaster channel.

Yet there was no sign of the previous level of interest I'd seen in my freelance copy editing services.

Much as I appreciated the offers, I knew I wouldn't have sufficient bandwidth to take a management-level editorial role elsewhere while also juggling newsletter publishing duties for all of my own time-consuming niche projects, none of which were particularly lucrative.

Something had to give.

After discouraging and exhausting side-hustle experiences on Patreon and Substack, I didn't have it in me to chase paid subscribers anymore, web3 or otherwise, and minting my writings as NFTs brought supplemental revenue at best.

So I shut down my "passion projects" and focused on negotiating contract terms that would leave at least some room for me to continue the intrinsically motivated work outside of business hours. I'd continue publishing my own work on Paragraph, I figured, but without a paid tier or any particular cadence. That way I'd keep it as free as possible of side-hustle expectations.

So after putting the public face of the Sanctuary into hibernation, I continued to negotiate with potential clients.

For awhile, the negotiations went well. Then, one by one, each pending offer vanished into the ether (so to speak).

After the umpteenth Mysterious Vanishing Client Offer, I had a hunch that I was knocking on the wrong doors. These doors were now closed to me, for whatever reason or no reason at all. I messaged Trish:

"It's possible that this part of my life [the work-for-hire part] is simply coming to an end."

So I decided to let it go.

I mean, sure, I could have kept up my effort to find new clients. But would that really have been the best use of my time? Things often work out better when I'm able to just write out of intrinsic motivation, get the work out there, and let interested parties find their way to me.

Besides, there's this fledgling monastery project I've been quietly working on for 13 years, and now I'm solidly plugged into the Farcaster scenius, and lots of magic is happening. Maybe instead of sidelining it, it's time to give it my full focus, and see what happens…?

What happened with the client offers? I don't know. I can only speculate, and I'm not here to cast shade. Maybe I'll never know, and maybe that's as it should be.

What I do know is that Farcaster changes you. Casters often tell stories of what our lives were like before Farcaster and after Farcaster (BFC/AFC).

One aspect of the Farcaster scenius I appreciate is "local tolerance for novelty," which includes "tolerance of experimentation and failure."

It's true: there's a great deal of experimentation and failure-in-public on Farcaster. It's a fertile environment for learning and creativity. Seeing others boldly venturing forth with imperfect things and learning in public helps give the rest of us courage to pursue uncharted paths of our own.

Thus, this uncharted path — or perhaps more accurately, this new fork of a path I'd already forged — begins with an acknowledgment of failure. The ego would prefer that I spin this into an impressive tale with a feel-good ending, but that's not my real story to tell. Besides, I'm not fooling anyone, myself included.

One way or another, though, part of my real story is deeply intertwined with Farcaster now. There's nowhere else I'd rather be venturing forth with a niche creative project. Legendary stories will be told one day about the far-reaching magic of the Farcaster scenius, and I'm fortunate enough to be here at a pivotal time. Knowing how rare it is to stumble upon a thriving scenius just by following a trail led by my interests and curiosity, I don't take a single minute of it for granted.

Still, as I write this in April 2024, there's not much religious and spiritual content on Farcaster. Furthermore, what Trish and I are doing with Black Stone Sanctuary isn't even widely known in Pagan and polytheist circles, which are minority religious groups as it is. So even talking about this on Farcaster at all is a reach, especially since so much of the discussion centers on crypto and tech topics.

Be that as it may, Farcaster is the center of my online and onchain world, and I wouldn't have it any other way. So let's see where this path leads next.

But first, a few words about slowcore.

Black Stone Sanctuary has long been called slowcore.

Originally I just made that term up to express my distaste for hustle culture, but over time I started using it to describe many aspects of my so-called slowpoke life, and it stuck. (Later I learned that there's an actual genre of music called slowcore, so to avoid confusion, I don't use the term in musical contexts).

My creative flow works best when I'm able to read, write, and process ideas slowly, giving them my full attention. Therefore:

• I take my time with communications for anything non-urgent, and encourage others to do the same with me.

• I keep my Farcaster follows under 250, as that's the upper bound of my ability to give and receive high-quality attention and responses.

• I frequently block off long stretches of time for creative work, shut off all notifications, and let my contacts know I'll be inaccessible at those times except in dire emergencies.

If I compromise my upper-bound-of-quality-attention rules (and temptations to do so are ubiquitous), previously enjoyable things start feeling like a slog. I take that as a sign that I'm overextended and need to recalibrate.

Setting limits like this means I sometimes disappoint people who operate according to different rhythms and expectations. It also means I miss out on a lot of things I'm sure I'd enjoy, and I'll never be a competitive candidate for the sorts of opportunities that reward speed over depth. These are necessary sacrifices if I am to live by my motto (h/t Simon Heath): "only a mile wide, but a thousand miles deep."

For the Sanctuary, the term slowcore is an affirmation of a commitment to cultivating patience, holding space for emergence, protecting our time and attention from extractive forces, and respecting the indwelling intelligence of the creative process.

For example:

• Slow culture is the norm for all Sanctuary endeavors, business endeavors included. As much as possible, we work in ways that allow sufficient time for leisure, rest, play, reflection, and quality attention for everyone involved.

• We prioritize meeting unmet needs (human and non-human; this includes our own) for care, reciprocity, health, service, silence, rest, darkness, deep listening, play, beauty, time spaciousness, incubation, artistic integrity, and collective long-term sustainability.

• We endeavor to shape the emergent entity into what it wants to become, at its own pace, through an iterative process. If we compromise, rush, overcommit ourselves, or cut corners, sooner or later the work will become more like a job than a creative process. "Jobbing" is not the right approach for this project; taking on excessive attention labor will lead us in the wrong direction.

• Our north star is deep refinement, reclaiming, and sovereignty of human attention.

I look forward to unpacking these ideas further in future writings.

Of course, in a culture that normalizes endless micro-dispersals of attention and extractive "creator economy" patterns, all this is far easier said than done.

A slowcore philosophy serves as a reminder to keep these ideals top-of-mind as we endeavor to build something we hope will endure beyond our lifetimes.

The Sanctuary's slowcore approach also helps us keep a baseline level of attention at the ready in case of promptings from the inner genius.

Matt Cardin's book A Course in Demonic Creativity: A Writer's Guide to the Inner Genius, which I first read in 2011 and still return to frequently, is one of two sources that helped me understand my responsibility to the writer's genius. (The other is Stephen Buhner's Ensouling Language: On the Art of Non-Fiction and the Writer's Life).

From the introduction:

"Where does creativity come from? Why do ideas and inspiration feel as if they come from 'outside,' from an external source that's separate from us but able to whisper ideas directly into the mind? Why have so many writers throughout history – and also composers, painters, philosophers, mystics, and scientists – spoken of being guided, accompanied, and even haunted by a force or presence that not only serves as the deep source of their creative work but exerts a kind of profound and inexorable gravitational pull on the shape of their lives? […]

"Your unconscious mind is truly your 'genius.' Befriending it as such, and interacting with it as if it really is a separate, collaborating presence, puts you in a position to receive its gifts, and it in the position to give them to you. This book… is my attempt to explain what this really entails for writers and artists, and how you can verify it for yourself."

The author defines the daemon muse as "the spirit that inspires a person to do the work for which he or she is uniquely gifted and intended," noting that the word demon carries a host of meanings that have been largely lost to modern awareness.

Our slowcore approach is, in part, an inquiry into those meanings and how they might shape the future of the Sanctuary.

I appreciate Cardin's take on trusting the flow of the creative process, including alternating stages of active effort and active waiting, as detailed in his critique of unexamined assumptions behind the myth of constant output.

The incubation stages of creative work — what Cardin calls the fallow periods — can be challenging in contexts that normalize always-on behavior, "engagement," and nose-to-the-grindstone approaches to creative work. (I'm looking at you, creator economy).

Yet the creative process is intelligent. It has its own timetable, which may or may not align with outside standards and/or the writer's conscious intent.

If the cadence a work wants to follow is compromised, the genius is likely to beat a hasty retreat. While the writer can keep on writing in that case, and the final result may be technically adequate, to perceptive readers it often comes across as forced, flat, or otherwise lacking.

It takes considerable patience to trust the creative process and preserve space for it to unfold according to its inherent rhythms. But if the work is to be infused with the flavor of the writer's genius or daemon muse, then striving to produce by dint of willful effort will meet with limited success at best.

Thus, slowcore goes against the grain of the creator economy and its expectations of constant output. Slowcore is an acknowledgment that even when work isn't happening in visibly active and measurable ways, the creative process carries on of its own accord, often outside conscious awareness. That's the territory of the daemon muse.*

On the surface, though, it may seem that progress is stalling. It's an understandable concern, especially since the time-consuming realities of creative labor are so often hidden. But some creative processes simply take a great deal of time no matter how you slice it, and for those that happen to be in that category, striving for standards set by productivity gurus is futile.

In an illuminating manifesto, writer Tom Beck recounts some of the hidden personal costs of trying to match the pace of his fiction writing to Substack's norms. Realizing he'd made a "category error" that put him on the fast track to burnout, he bid goodbye-and-good-riddance to the grind, upon which "something strange happened": a manifesto emerged. In Against the Creator Economy, he lays bare the extractive underpinnings of the content creation treadmill:

"There is a Catch-22 in the 'creator economy' and it goes like this: publish consistently at a high velocity (preferably every day) so that you get enough eyeballs so that enough people subscribe so that enough people pay you so that you can create full-time so that you have enough time to publish consistently and at a high velocity (preferably every day)." [...]

"What the 'creator economy' needs is a deeper understanding of the range of work that falls beneath its wide umbrella and the time demands different types of work require. Otherwise, the 'creator economy' feels like little more than a dream peddled by grifters to sensitive artists who don't know any better." [...]

"...what a content creator produces, what they 'do for a living,' and how all the pieces fit together, is usually hidden from their audience under a cloak of sprezzatura. Content creators pretend the work they do is spontaneous, easy, flowing, when it is often meticulously planned, difficult, and expensive..."

Beck boldly (and rightfully) takes creator economy norms to task for failure to acknowledge or consider — let alone provide for — the huge time demands of some forms of creative labor.

Platforms often attract writers by dangling the carrot of "creator liberation" while glossing over the realities of what's required behind the scenes to make everything look so polished. But the truth is that for every writer who does manage to eke out "a living" on web2 platforms, there are countless other gifted writers with equally valuable work who do not.

Beck continues:

"What matters is... what time and resources you have at your disposal. Only then can you produce an output that isn't a guaranteed road to burnout. These constraints matter a lot."

For writers taking a slowcore approach to creative work, the biggest constraint may be what Michael Ventura calls "the talent of the room."

"Writing is something you do alone in a room," he warns. "Before any issues of style, content, or form can be addressed, the fundamental questions are: How long can you stay in that room? How many hours a day? How do you behave in that room? [...] How many years – how many years – can you remain alone in a room?"

The answer depends in no small measure on the time, quality of attention, and resources at hand for you.

That goes double for a long time horizon project like Black Stone Sanctuary. It's not easy to get years of time alone in a room to write while fending off the ever-encroaching tendrils of the attention economy, and in a world of shrinking pay for writers, even those who succeed may find their resources quickly depleted.

In established religions, monasteries often support their practices through ventures such as retail sales (e.g., gift shops), making craft beer, or hosting retreats. Is there a web3 business model that can sustainably support two writers working on a niche project like Black Stone Sanctuary? I don't know.

"...writers are still some of the most under-appreciated contributors to the internet," Callum Wanderloots points out in Read, Write, Earn, Own. Indeed... and don't even get me started on editors and forum moderators. Ending on a hopeful note, he adds: "for the first time, it feels like we might be able to build it into a reality, together."

I hope so. It's long overdue.

If there is such a business model, the Farcaster ecosystem is likely the best place to find out. Alongside the thriving scenius, we're observing tectonic shifts in the landscape for returning value to contributors of onchain creative work and conversational liquidity pools. A few encouraging developments so far include Zora Protocol Rewards, Paragraph referral rewards, and tipping with $DEGEN on Farcaster and $ENJOY on Zora Mints.

That said, a religious organization is not only a creative project and a business endeavor; it's also, well, religious. As far as I know, there's no precedent for a project like this in web3. So we'll have to think very carefully about our business model.

Even in web3, extractive creator economy norms continue to hold sway, deftly concealed though they may be by the aforementioned cloak of sprezzatura. A slowcore approach might lend itself well to contemplative practice, but it won't keep pace if the metrics are impressive follower/subscriber counts, lucrative influencer deals, or other hallmarks of the crypto-rising-star sort of internet fame.

The Sanctuary's work has never been driven by aspirations of that sort. (OK, OK, I'll admit I do harbor an aspiration to publish top-notch quality work one day, Stripe Press style. But only if it can be done the slowcore way).

Can the Sanctuary pull this off?

It's a reach, for sure. But we'll never know if we don't experiment.

The kind of success I wish for the Sanctuary is the kind that, through its deliberate embrace of not-knowing, might help others successfully navigate emergent paths of service in their own creative and spiritual work, too.

So the Sanctuary plans to iterate until either:

1) we find a sustainable slowcore-friendly business model, or

2) the "runway" (lol) runs out and we must turn the bulk of our attention elsewhere for our livelihood.

We'll keep blogging here on Paragraph. We'll make no promises about cadence, but we'll bring our best to everything we publish, and we'll nix anything that reeks of contrivance (e.g., using filler content to meet quotas).

We'll edit and re-release material from our archives. (N.B.: There's a lot of material in our vaults, published and unpublished. Probably enough to release something new every week for a decade, assuming no resource constraints).

We'll share our process and embrace not-knowing. We'll peek behind the curtain of sprezzatura, and we'll invite interested folks to follow along. We'll observe how it all lands with the inner genius and the Farcaster scenius, and we'll iterate accordingly.

We won't be as frequently active online or as readily accessible as some projects, but hey, this is a monastery we're building. We'll lean into that as a strength.

*I also wonder if a slowcore approach is a prerequisite for work that aspires to embody what the visionary architect Christopher Alexander calls "the quality without a name." The Sanctuary is in that camp, so we plan to experiment.