Happy anniversary Wood From Eden

Today is exactly one year since the first post was published on Wood From Eden. A summary of our past, present and future careers as Substackers.

12 April 2022 was the day when I published the very first post on the Wood From Eden Substack. It was not very good and in all honesty I do not want you to read it (note the unusual lack of link in the previous sentence). But this was the beginning of the journey that, one year later, has made me write an anniversary post.

A couple of weeks ago, when I started this article, Wood From Eden had just over a hundred subscribers and I was writing this introduction on the theme of slow but steady growth. Then strange things started to happen. Or at least things unfamiliar to us. Rob Henderson linked to one of Tove’s articles on Twitter. That started a chain reaction where several of our old articles were discovered by new readers and shared in a number of places. 

Today our subscriber count stands at 878, an eightfold increase from ten days ago. Which is remarkable. But it is also a testimonial to the value of a long tail. Over the last year Tove and I have written about an article per week (current post count is 66). Without this backlog of articles there would have been no chain reaction. Sometimes hard and steady work really pays off in the end, no matter how futile it seems at the time. 

Ghost of Christmas Past

I have told the story of why we started this Substack so many times by now that I cannot really keep track of them. But just in case someone missed it: Tove and I used to write Swedish language books that hardly anyone read. That was fine until we stumbled upon material that people really should have read (as described in my post Trial by a lying media).

After that failure we (mostly Tove actually) decided not to write anything more in Swedish, instead turning to an international audience. Ideally, we would have liked to write books. But unlocking the English book market is even more difficult than unlocking the Swedish book market. I did mention in another post that our ultimate objective with this Substack is to be discovered by a literary agent or a publishing house that lets us write a real book. That is an exaggeration, it is rewarding just writing a newsletter and the short format of blog posts is kind of liberating. Nevertheless, if any literary agent reads this you know where to find us.

When we started Wood From Eden we thought that our main selling point would be well-written and well-researched articles from new perspectives. This was reflected in our first tagline "Sawn, planed and sanded thinking". That was always quite a high bar to live up to. Especially since there is no lack of well-written and well-researched Substacks out there.

Instead we noted that we had something that most Substacks do not have, namely ideas. Not always new ideas and not always good ideas but at least we try to provide some unique thinking. This is the background to our new and current tagline "Making glulam of the tree of knowledge", showing off the fact that we use old knowledge to produce new ideas. Tove keeps complaining that ordinary people do not know what glulam is. Just in case she is right on this one (unlikely) I can disclose that glulam is large pieces of wood made from glued together small pieces of wood. Which is sort of what we are trying to do intellectually by piecing together small pieces of knowledge into larger ideas. 

Ghost of Christmas Present

When we first started this Substack I made a list with suggestions of articles I could write. It contains about 15 vaguely outlined topics that could be made into articles. To date I have published exactly two of these ideas as Substack posts. One only a week after the start about how nuclear war is less apocalyptic than generally perceived. The other was only a few weeks ago about historical films, an article I have had lying around for a very long time.

The lesson here is that it is not difficult to find things to write about, which was actually one of my main objections when Tove said we should start a blog. In practice I have just written something about whatever interested me at that particular moment and it seems to have worked out good enough. Even though what interests Tove at the moment always seems to be more popular with our readers.

Which brings us to the question of intra-blog rivalry. It is a bit unusual for a Substack to have two, and only two, writers. Am I jealous of Tove for her constantly higher success rate when it comes to readership and bringing in new subscribers? Well, yes, of course I am. On the other hand this is her blog, I was always brought along as an accessory, someone who fills out the gaps between Tove's posts. Evidently, my role is as an assistant to the genius.

She is of course no literary genius. Despite persuading you readers to flatter her by saying that the post she had written all by herself was as good as the numerous posts I have rewritten for her, I know this is not the case. Tove's great strength lies in idea creation. Put anything in front of her and she will produce a new theory about it. Most of the times a worthless theory, but you do not have to read those, since I do it and bin them for you. And surprisingly often her theories are both new and very good.

Tove herself seems rather unconcerned about all her ideas, probably safe in the knowledge that she will always be able to produce more. I am the one who has to do the worrying. Not only do I kill off bad ideas, I also hold back the really good ideas with the excuse that something revolutionary must be written perfectly before publication. This only works for a very limited period of time which is why brilliant ideas like a cure for myopia and a theory of why women have breasts were published in the very infancy when hardly anyone was here to read them.

Ghost of Christmas Yet to Come

Tove might not be very concerned with her ideas going to waste but I am. It might come as a surprise from someone who has not produced anything more creative than a very goofy idea about exporting sunlight to Earth that I, too, am something of an idea person. Not on the scale of Tove, to be sure, but I do have some ideas that might be worth writing down. Even on the subject of human evolution, which is a topic I have otherwise stayed clear of.

Regular readers of Wood From Eden have probably observed that our themes sprawl quite wildly. This is partly by choice but mostly due to the fact that we have two writers, two writers with quite divergent interests. Tove generally writes about anthropology, psychology and, above all, evolutionary biology. While I mostly write about technology, politics and, above all, history.

We might seem an odd mix, but I think we overlap more than is evident at first blush. If nothing else, our articles are not so much individual accomplishments as collaborative efforts. Even though Tove might be doing more of her own writing in the future we have still discussed all ideas extensively before they are put down in text.

The general scenario is that Tove comes up with an idea, most likely about some aspect of human evolution. She proposes a theory based on biological reasoning which it is then my job to place in a historical context (or not place in a historical context, in which case the theory is unceremoniously discarded). This works surprisingly well. Tove is very good at anthropology and human biology while I know a thing or two about history. Together we can draw on knowledge from several disparaging fields and produce new theories that others would have struggled to arrive at.

If Wood From Eden has an overarching theme it is probably this. To explore the borderlands between biological evolution and cultural evolution. Or, phrased differently, to investigate the cultural-biological interplay in human evolution (note to all literary agents: this is also what Tove and I could be writing a book about). This might be a rather small niche, but it is a niche we believe we are quite well-placed to fill.

The tree of knowledge was most probably not an apple tree, as commonly depicted in European art, but rather a fig tree, Ficus carica.