A few weeks ago I went looking for something I wrote.
It was an older essay. I remembered the ending, more or less. I remembered writing it late on a Friday and feeling good about it. What I couldn’t remember was where it lived. Was that just an old Word file? Substack, maybe. Or Medium. I think it started as a note somewhere, grew up into a piece, and settled wherever it landed.
I found it eventually. It took three searches across several platforms and more time than the essay deserved. And somewhere in that little scavenger hunt, a thought showed up and refused to leave.
I didn’t know where my own writing lived.
That’s a strange thing for a writer to admit. I’d bet it’s also more common than any of us wants to say out loud. You start a newsletter and the essays go one place. You build a website and that becomes another place. The short stuff, the two-paragraph observations, the “I have to write this down before it’s gone” moments, those scatter to wherever short thoughts scatter (social media, Google Docs, Apple Notes, etc.). Each decision made sense when I made it. Then one day you go looking for something you made, and you realize the whole body of work is spread across the internet like a family that only sees each other at weddings.
So I fixed it.
If you are reading this on seanmcdevitt.com then you’ve seen the result. Theis site got a full rebuild on a platform called Micro.blog, and everything lives here now. Every Substack essay made the trip. So did a stack of the shorter notes, the ones that never quite earned a full send but still felt worth keeping. One location. One archive. One front porch.
The phrase I kept repeating while I worked on this was “a single source of truth.” It’s a term borrowed from people who manage databases, which is a group I don’t usually take writing advice from, but the idea fits. One place where the final version of everything lives, and one address I can point to when someone asks where to find me. There I am.
I want to be fair to Substack here, because it earned that much. It delivered emails on time, every week, and it made starting a newsletter about as easy as starting one can be. I’m grateful for it. The move comes down to something I learned about how I actually write.
I don’t write in one size. Some weeks the thing I need to say runs a thousand words. Some weeks it runs forty. The old setup only had a lane for the first kind. A newsletter platform wants a Newsletter, capital N, and everything smaller either gets inflated to fit or dies in a drafts folder. I have a drafts folder full of forty-word ideas that deserved better than that.
This new setup has room for all of it. A weekly essay, same as always. And as many short notes as the week hands me. Two sentences about a game that went sideways. A paragraph about a sentence I loved and can’t stop thinking about. They get to exist now, at their natural size, without me dressing them up for a bigger occasion.
Here’s what changes for newsletter subscribers, and I think it’s good news. The Saturday email becomes a Sunday morning digest. One email, once a week, with the essay and whatever notes I posted along the way. Skim it or sit with it. Your call.
I’ll be honest about why Sunday. When I picture you reading the email, and I do picture it, you’re at the kitchen table. There’s coffee going lukewarm beside you because you got pulled into something. Maybe the dog wants out and is being ignored. Sunday morning is built for that kind of reading. Saturday, I’ve come to accept, is built for living (or work.. I’m nodding to my mother-in-law). An email that arrives while you’re out at dinner gets buried by morning. An email that arrives with the coffee gets read. I’d rather meet you at the table.
A little housekeeping, and then I’ll let you go. The old site, saturdaynightfive.com, stays up for a while. Nothing there is disappearing yet. But I’m retiring the name. Names are funny things to retire. Saturday Night Five was a promise, a small one, that I’d show up at the same time every week with five things that earned your attention. I loved keeping that promise. I plan to keep making a version of it, just from a new address and on a new morning. If anything, the promise gets bigger. You’ll see more of the writing now, including the small pieces that used to stay in the notebook.
There’s one more reason for the move, and it’s the one that took me longest to admit. A newsletter that lives on someone else’s platform is a tenant. It follows the landlord’s rules, sits inside the landlord’s app, and gets shuffled around when the landlord redecorates. I wanted the writing to have a home instead. A place with my name on the door, where an essay from last year and a note from last Tuesday sit on the same shelf, and where anyone who wonders what I’ve been thinking about can find out in one stop.
That’s what seanmcdevitt.com is now. The full record, all in one place, growing every week.
So here’s the new deal. I write all week. You get one email on Sunday morning. You make the coffee, I’ll bring the words, and we’ll figure out the rest of it together like we always have.
Be seeing you.
